I had a bit of a hard time deciding how I was going to do the write-up for this. Should I have done three individual stories for each individual game? Or contain it all into one article, since it’s technically the remasterd “trilogy?” In the end, the decision was made for me. While the first Crysis Remastered was released as a standalone title, and thus had its own box art, the other two were only released digitally, with the physical box copy being the trilogy as a whole. Thus, there was no physical box art for the remastered versions of Crysis 2 and 3. Again, technically I could have used the box art for the original games, but those aren’t the versions I played, now, are they?
If that doesn’t make any sense, you’ll feel right at home, since the story for the Crysis…es (Cryses?) doesn’t make a lick of sense either. The overall story is simple enough to comprehend. Humanity is at war with an alien race and are, well, losing. It’s up to one guy in a special suit of armor to fight back the aliens and save the day. Sound familiar? Of course it does, because it’s Halo. But where Halo’s story is bloated and complex in a good way, Crysis isn’t as lucky. It’s chock full of side characters that are so forgettable you’ll be asking yourself who’s who until the credits roll on the final game, still scratching your head trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
And that’s okay, because for the most part, the games are enjoyable. For the most part.
But while I would love to sit here and just yack about the games in general, I feel like I should at least give my thoughts on the individual games themselves, because for as similar as they are, they’re actually pretty unique in their own right.
Crysis Remastered
I had to wait a long time to play Crysis. I’ve never been much of a PC gamer, so I never really had a rig beefy enough to play the latest and greatest, and I certainly didn’t have a machine capable of running Crysis. So my first taste of Crysis was the Xbox 360 Live Arcade version, which was a far cry (no pun intended) from what the original game was intended to be.
So Crysis Remastered was really my first experience playing the game as it was intended. Or at least close to what was intended. Honestly at this point who even knows what they intended?
That aside, my experience with Crysis 360 was… okay. I thought it was fine. I played it through from beginning to end, and honestly remembered very little other than the fact that it seemed to be a bit underwhelming. After playing the Remastered (i.e. way prettier) version on my Series X, I felt a lot of the same feelings that I had years ago on that much weaker system. In other words, my problems with the game weren’t with the graphics.
Crysis, to me, is a tale of two games. The first half of the game takes place in a semi-open world, where Nomad can approach enemy encampments and patrols in various ways, using stealth or a full-frontal assualt, whichever the player chooses. But about halfway through the game, the player is introduced to the Ceph, the alien race that (in my opinion) takes all the fun out of the combat. Once the Ceph show up, it’s a linear shooter through and through, and the player has little else to do but run ‘n gun until everything is dead. Just as Halo (again, in my opinion) devolved into a mindless blast-a-thon with The Flood, I feel like Crysis changes for the worse once the Ceph enter the picture. The result is a game that feels front-heavy, as the earlier parts of the game are slower and more methodical and thus take a bit longer to get through, and the latter stages of the game practically push you forward.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the game. I enjoyed parts of it. There were definitely some aggravating moments, and one hell of an annoying boss (more on that in a bit) but for the most part, it was an average shooter, even for the time, albeit a very pretty one.
Graphically the game holds up, but the shooting mechanics are fairly weak, and the game really does show its age from a design perspective. There really isn’t a whole lot to say that hasn’t been said about Crysis already; the game has been analyzed to death for over a decade now. What I can say is holy fucksticks the final boss is annoying.
It’s not even really that difficult, but I died a lot. Many of those deaths were a real headscratcher too, as I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing but the damn thing JUST WASN’T DYING. I launched every rocket I could find, I spent every bullet I had in both my guns, and I kept dying. Over and over and over. Until, during one of the attempts, I stumbled across a light machine gun. Thinking “why the hell not,” I picked it up and just held down the trigger. In less than a minute, I was on to stage two of the battle. It’s like the game wanted me to use that weapon, and that weapon only. No amount of rockets on the planet was going to take that thing down, but 100 rounds from an LMG worked like a charm. Whatever.
Then came round two, which I’ll be honest, at least had some visual clues as to what to do. Again, though, came the dying. Repeatedly. Not because I was challenged to complete the task, but because the boss was looming over me, forcing me to look UP while avoiding debris and rubble on the ground. This isn’t the only game that has done this, and it bugs the shit out of me every time. Control, a game I recently completed, did the same thing, and it was aggravating to no end. I died repeatedly from getting hung up on shit on the ground because I couldn’t see where I was going.
I eventually got through it and killed the damn thing, but it was a situation where the final boss overstayed its welcome and rather than a sense of accomplishment, I was left with the sense of ‘about fuckin time.’ And I don’t like that sense. To top it all off, you get a cliff-hanger ending. Because we all love those in video games.
Crysis 2
I remember being really excited for Crysis 2. This time around, rather than getting a stripped down port, the game was designed more with consoles in mind, and was a bit more comparable in terms of level design and layout. Performance still kinda sucked, but we console peons didn’t know any better back then. It was a big deal at the time, and I’m pretty sure I played it through from start to finish. Seeing it again remastered for the new(er) consoles, especially on Series X and PS5, Crysis 2 is a damn fine looking game. The textures are crisp, the lighting is nice, and the frame rate is rock solid.
The gameplay here is fun, but it didn’t come with its gripes. Trying to stealth is practice in futility, as the A.I. is pretty much broken. It’s hit or miss at best whether an enemy will spot you or not, and sometimes it happens when you are quite a distance away. It’s annoying at least, and it’s a better idea to just go with the run ‘n gun approach. For the most part the game is fairly balanced, but there was a weird difficulty spike in some areas where the Ceph enemies, even the regular ones, suddenly became heavy bullet sponges, and would take ridiculous amounts of ammo to take down. It didn’t seem to have any rhyme or reason other than to make some encounters more intense. It didn’t really work, it just frustrating after a while.
The game did take a little while to really get started, and I’ll admit it didn’t really grab me at first. By the time I hit the mid-way point though, I was feelin’ it. Those aforementioned difficulty spikes really kill the buzz though, as Prophet (or Alcatraz, or whoever the fuck), who is supposed to be this badass in a super-suit, suddenly starts getting punked like a bitch by some random enemy. My recommendation is to play through this game on Easy, blast the shit out of everything that moves, and enjoy the game for what it is. That will, at least, make the horrible, horrible final battle tolerable.
Crysis 3
Something happened with Crysis 3. The final entry in the trilogy should have been the best. It got off to a really cool start on a cargo ship in the middle of a torrential downpour. Really cool shit. And then you head into this crazy, jungle-like post-apocalyptic version of New York, which somehow has completely overgrown in only twenty years. At first, it’s exciting, and they introduce some interesting ideas, like a fight against the Ceph in a field of tall grass, very reminiscent of the raptor scene in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The similarities there can’t be a coincidence.
After that though, the game devolves into series of objectives, running around the same ruined city the entire time. Without much of a change of scenery, and without the complete and utter chaos of Crysis 2’s collapsing skyscrapers and group combat, the game just kinda got boring for me. I really expected more.
The graphics really didn’t hold up to Crysis 2, either. The second entry featured brightly lit cityscapes, detailed interiors, ruined highways and lots of traversal. While the scenery in Crysis 3 is interesting, it is all very similar, and traversing Crumbling Building A starts to look and feel a lot like Crumbling Building C, and so forth. There’s no real sense of place, and thus it just kinda feels like you’re running around in circles, not really making any progress. On top of that, the entire city is locked under a dome, so there’s not dynamic lighting, no sunsets, nothing. It’s very flat, like there’s a perpetual cloud-cover over the city that just diffuses everything. It’s… ugly.
The game really just didn’t stand out for me. I thought for sure the final entry in the trilogy would turn things up to eleven, but instead it feels like it turned it down to six or seven. I really didn’t care about anything that I was doing, and I gotta be honest, I really don’t like Prophet as a character. I just don’t. I don’t understand why I’m supposed to care about this guy. In Crysis, I played as Nomad. In Crysis 2 I played as Alactraz (though I’m 99.9% sure he was dead the entire time, and the suit was just running around with a rotting meatsack in it). At the end of Crysis 2, somehow the Prophet neuro-something-something takes over Alcatraz’s consciousness and he turns him into Prophet? I guess? That just reinforces my idea that he actually died at the beginning.
My point is, you only really play as Prophet in the third game, and yet he is treated like a Master Chief, and he’s running around trying to convince everyone about visions and whatnot. His old buddy, Psycho, never mentions or asks how, ya know, he died and then took over another dude’s body and mind without his permission. Really trustworthy fella, that guy.
The entire game he’s ranting and raving about the Alpha Ceph, something that has never been mentioned before (but is now suddenly a huge threat) and at the end you get to fight… at tentacle. That’s it. Just a big ol’ mechanical tentacle. And it follows the same bullshit mechanic that the boss in the first game did, where the tentacle is up in the air, with a whole bunch of shit on the ground to avoid at the same time. I explained above why that annoys me, so I won’t repeat it again here, but that battle was rage-inducing, complete with a checkpoint that is reached a few seconds before Prophet yells some shit at the enemy. So every time you die and reload, you get to hear him shout that same thing. Over, and over, and over. I was so fuggin’ glad to finally kill that damn thing. Again, no sense of accomplishment, just relief that it was finally over.
In Closing…
The trilogy as a whole is fun enough, I guess, but it doesn’t really hold up to current day game design. Not that it’s bad, it’s just dated. Some things that got by back then wouldn’t fly today. I recommend, again, setting it to Easy mode and just blasting the shit out of everything in sight. In my opinion the trilogy will be more enjoyable that way.
