You, of course, have access to a suite of nanosuit abilities that allow to you tank, sneak, punch, and flank your way through each battle with superhuman aplomb. The result is a positively mesmerizing juxtaposition of natural growth and man-made decay, and developer Crytek’s unrivaled technical prowess means that every last inch of it looks positively breathtaking.Īs is par for the course, the game offers a tremendous amount of variety in how you progress through these environments and the combat encounters contained within. The areas you’ll explore, set in ruins of New York City decades after the events of the second entry, offer the perfect hybrid of the previous games’ urban and jungle settings. That’s quite literally true from a visual standpoint. Remarkably, Crysis 3 manages to find a happy medium between its predecessors, capitalizing on what each of them did right while still forging its own unique identity. Within the first 30, the game drops you into wide-open outdoor environments that manage to recapture some of the impressive scope of the original game.
I’m happy to say that they never came. Within the first 15 minutes, Crysis 3‘s story harmonizes all of the series’ contradictory elements into a larger arc that’s plausible, if a tad bit forced. To me, it was the gaming equivalent of The Matrix Reloaded, and I steeled myself for the disappointment, anticlimax, and unnecessary religious metaphors that would inevitably accompany the threequel. Was it still drop-dead gorgeous and fun to play? You bet, but the sprawling sandboxes had been sacrificed in favor of smaller, more directed arenas, and the plot seemed more than happy to willfully disregard everything that came before it with little or no explanation. See, I’m a big fan of the first Crysis and its standalone expansion, Warhead, but I feel like something special was lost when the franchise made the leap to consoles with Crysis 2. To be blunter, every time I thought about hopping back into Prophet’s nanoshoes for another round with the alien Ceph, my stomach would knot up with apprehension. To be blunt, I wasn’t exactly excited for Crysis 3.