I really like the Crysis games. I dipped in with the second and, while I still haven't gone back to the first, the third is an improvement and a thoroughly entertaining first-person shooter experience.
This franchise is renowned for its amazingly beautiful graphics, and this is immediately noticeable as you fire up Crysis 3. It looks stunning. The textures are just right, the foliage is lush and rich, the lighting looks natural, and the particle effects make things like water and fire look very real.
Players reprise the role of nanosuited Prophet and enter into a battle against the evil CELL corporation and the Ceph aliens. The game is largely set under a huge 'nanodome'-covered New York City, which has become a jungle.
This means that the areas of play include much more vegetation than the largely urban Crysis 2. Gun battles take place with huge strands of grass blowing in the wind, obstructing your vision and making skirmishes against scurrying aliens very interesting.
The areas of play within the nanodome are nicely varied, too. They all look amazing, don't become samey and make sure you change up your battle strategy regularly. There's almost no level made up of several corridors like several shooters force you to play in. That's not to say that it's not linear - you're always going from point A to point B on each level - but it's nice to be able to do so in wide open areas.
Using the cloak and armour abilities of your nanosuit forms the bulk of the combat gameplay. Sneaking up behind and stealth-killing enemies is just as satisfying as ever, and the upgrades you can enhance the nanosuit's powers with gradually increase your battle options.
Using nanosuit upgrade kits you find lying about the place, the upgrade menu consists of four columns and four rows with upgrades costing one, two, or three upgrade points. Each one upgrades the suit’s stealth, armour, power, speed, or system. You can use up to four at any one time, choosing one from each column, and save up to three sets of four at a time.
The guns in Crysis 3 are extremely cool. The standard firearms look and sound great, and are animated in an exciting way that I dig a lot. Then there are the alien weapons, which are on a whole other level of cool. There's also a great weapon modding system which allows you to change the scope, under-barrel attachment and so on of a weapon on-the-fly and with ease.
The bow makes perfect sense in the Crysis world and is thankfully added into the combat mix extremely well. Taking enemies down silently with a standard arrow is fun, but firing arrows with that shoot out a small amount of electricity into areas of water that multiple enemies are walking through is even more fun. Ammo for the bow is scarce, however, which is good as it kept me from overusing it.
Another particularly cool new weapon is the Typhoon. It's a sub-machinegun with a huge rate-of-fire and 720-round magazines. When a bunch of Ceph are up in your grill, the Typhoon can take down a lot of them in a very short space of time.
There are some things I don't like about the game, of course. The most persistent is the voice-acting. The acting itself is fine, but Prophet's voice is annoying in a Michael Bay Transformers kind of way. His companion Psycho, as well as having a stupid name, has an over-the-top silly British soldier voice similar to the sniper in Rambo 4.
And despite how pretty the game is, some of the animations are a little crappy. In addition to using firearms to waste your enemies, you can also kick or throw large objects at them. When this happens it looks kind of weak and just not right.
Multiplayer-wise, Crysis 3 is fun but won't be replacing Call of Duty, Battlefield or Halo any time soon. There are some well-designed, open maps, some very cool weapons and so on, but the nanosuit-driven combat works better in single-player mode, for me at least.
Hunter mode is the unique multiplayer format here. It pits two nanosuited up hunters against a team of soldiers. The nanosuits are set to invisibility-mode and those players are equipped with deadly bows and must kill all the soldiers within two minutes. Once a soldier is killed, they'll respawn as a hunter themselves.
It's great how different this mode feels among the more popular first-person shooter multiplayer games out there. Playing as a hunter can be very empowering, while taking on the role of the hunted is at times terrifying. The game mode can be a little boring though, with a lot of running around the place and not a lot of shooting.
A lot of work has gone into making Crysis 3 multiplayer fun and not feel tacked-on like it does in so many shooters, including Crysis 2. This has been largely successful and if you aren't stuck playing one particular franchise year after year, it's definitely worth your time.
For me, however, it's the single-player campaign that make Crysis 3 worth owning. It's a step up from Crysis 2 with gorgeous graphics, a nice variety in strategy, mature storytelling, epic set pieces and truckloads of fun. It's not very innovative but it doesn't need to be and I look forward to a next-gen sequel.
Four stars.
3 News
Crysis 3
:: Publisher: Electronic Arts
:: Developer: Crytek Studios
:: Format: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
:: Rating: R16
source: newshub archive
