What traits make a shooter worthy of playing? Graphics? Storyline? Vast amounts of weapons? Tactics? AI? Multiplayer? Crysis 3 can’t give you all of these, but what it can give you is an amazing story delivered in beautifully rendered glory.
The storyline behind Crysis 3 can be very complex to follow, especially if you haven’t played any of the previous titles. You start the game out as Lawrence “Prophet” Barnes, one of the original nanosuit soldiers from the first Crysis game who’s taken it upon himself to wipe out the very large threat of the Ceph while toppling a greedy and dangerous corporation called CELL that has taken over much of the world. Initially CELL soldiers will be your main enemy, but as you progress into the beautiful landscapes you’ll start to see why they call Barnes, “Prophet” and your greater role in the game.
The landscape from the start is pretty bleak and dark looking as you move through the stormy port on your way into the nanodome. With the help of your partner you acquire one of the coolest weapons in the game (which we’ll get to later) and make your way into the dome. There your eyes are immediately greeted with a beautiful view of New York—a New York that’s gone from a concrete jungle to a literal jungle, filled with those pesky aliens known as the Ceph. The Ceph, however, are just one enemy at the moment; the Cell are a bigger issue. The beautiful landscape is being obliterated by massive defensive missile towers blowing up the Ceph and you have to make your way through it. As is the standard with Crysis every footstep you can hear the gravel beneath your feet, every footstep in a puddle or water sends ripples everywhere, and every blade of grass moves with the breeze.
If you’ve ever seen The Lost World: Jurassic Park, you might remember the part in the movie where Ajay says, “don’t go into the long grass!” Well, the Ceph Stalkers were like the raptors from Jurassic Park; as they sprinted through the grass in all directions to attack me. They didn’t just gravitate towards me like most standard AI, either; they would coordinate, run off and then attack when I tried to move around. I had to climb up on a rusted out box car just so I could save myself long enough to blow them up, and even with aiming down my sights it was rough to track them. Thank goodness for nanovision.
Your nanosuit comes with some of the same features from the previous games, including nanovision, battle armor, stealth, as well as a new feature for hacking electronics. I played through the campaign on “Super Soldier”difficulty, which is the fourth hardest of the five. On that difficulty there were many times where I’d be getting beaten down by enemies, and being able to stealth and hack a turret to fight for me while I maneuvered around was nothing short of a lifesaver. Using your visor also is incredibly useful as it has one neat feature that makes it almost the most useful feature of the suit: tracking. Whenever I would move into a new area, I would immediately go into stealth mode, pull up my visor and tag every single target in the area.
Tracking the amount of enemies meant I could customize my weapons to each specific encounter, and that’s one of the handful of ways Crysis shines. The weapons in the game are very customizable and can be changed on the fly. One of the few things that bothered me in the game was that even on one of the hardest difficulties for the game, I could simply stealth and change out weapon perks. Throw on a holographic sight for those up close encounters, or throw on a silencer and a long range scope to pick off enemies. Another new feature is saving loadouts for your nanosuit. The perks are along the lines of lengthened stealth, quicker energy regen, or better armor, and can be changed out readily with other perks.
Even though you have a myriad of weapons to choose from, most of your encounters can be dealt with using the awesome Predator Bow. This weapon will not break stealth when used and has three different draw speeds (though I don’t see why you wouldn’t use the strongest pull all the time). The bow also comes with an array of arrowheads, ranging from standard composite, to lightning, thermite, and air burst tips. All of the tips are incredibly strong, and perhaps to combat overuse of them the game developers only give you a small supply of them—a max of nine being the main ammo supply. None of that really matters, though, as you can stealth, take a shot, get the kill, then simply pull the arrow out and reuse it. Crysis 3 also lets you use alien technology with a slight drawback in mobility. Alien weapons range from plasma mortars, incinerators, and plasma assault rifles, to the all-powerful Ceph sniper rifle; a beastly weapon that can take down even the massive armored Ceph Devastators.
The two places this game shines are the graphics and the storyline. Graphically speaking, this is probably one of the most beautiful and well-made games I think I’ve ever played. The game is very crisp; from each individual leaf and blade of grass moving, to beautiful sunsets and lush jungles. I only wish I was able to spend more time topside where the landscapes were amazing than in the deep dark caves and destroyed landscapes that followed. The main attractor for me was coming back to a game where I knew the storyline. The gameplay itself may be a bit weak in terms of AI with the exception of the Ceph in the beginning of the game, but the emotion in the game is definitely there; especially during the ending.
When you first encounter the Ceph they’re a scattered group mentally as they communicate via hive mindset. This changes fairly quickly, and from there I think detracts a bit from the overall game. The unpredictability of the Ceph made for great encounters and skirmishes, but unfortunately beyond those initial encounters, the AI proves to be pretty weak. The CELL troops were easy to destroy through the use of stealth mode and were very predictable. I remember the enemies being a lot more challenging in the original Crysis title, while this one barely gave me any real difficult situations until the end.
The AI isn’t very aggressive and will just stay behind cover until you annihilate or stealth kill them, which I did most every time. In terms of shooters this game is fairly average, with a wide array of unlocks for your weapons adding a bit of fun to it. The Predator Bow is a blast to use, but where Crysis really shines is its amazing graphics and epic storyline. The final battle itself was nothing short of awesome as you battled the final boss and tore it apart, shouting lines such as, “Anything you can take, I can take double!” Hell of a battlecry.
