Crysis Remastered Trilogy has finally made its way onto to the Epic Games Store and into my hands. Sure, I could have picked up the console editions earlier, but I’m not a masochist. For me, this is a monumental day as the original Crysis is a game that helped push an industry forward on a technical level, even fifteen-years after its original release. It’s a game everyone remembers but hardly anyone actually played, at least not how it was intended. Upon release, Crysis made waves thanks to its graphical fidelity that almost no PC at the time could handle. Remember, this was a title that released in 2007, just at the start of the Xbox 360/PS3 era of gaming and before the age of RGB and the only gaming PC’s that existed, existed only in the advertiser pages of PC magazines.
Crysis looked about a decade ahead of anything else on the market in 2007. The early YouTube gaming landscape was filled with videos of Crysis, not being played (that ten-minute video length was a thing if you’ll recall), but instead showed people showing off their PCs worth thousands simply running the games physics engine. I can still clearly remember a popular video that showed someone blowing up hundreds (maybe even thousands) of stacked barrels to show off what the game could push in terms of power over objects. It was impressive and the game led the popular phrase “But can it run Crysis?” when talking about power and PC builds for years to come. And even today, almost fifteen years removed, mid-range gaming machines have been known to stutter running the game on even medium settings.
But you’ll notice one thing that I never mentioned about the magic that was Crysis in all my initial praise: the game itself. Well, that’s because aside from the amazingly powerful engine running this beast of a game, the game itself was pretty middle of the road with a story that quickly goes off the goddamn rails. It was almost as if the team knew the engine was the star of the show and spent little time fleshing out a compelling or deep story. You are part of a special forces team with a fancy nano-suit that gives you all sorts of powers with no explanation in this very modern setting. On its face, Crysis is an FPS, but only in name only. If you play the original Crysis like a shooter you are going to have a bad time. Focus on long-distance sniping and on moving using your suits cloak to avoid enemies and you are playing the game correctly. In fact, you can run through most of the game not engaging much at all if you want. This is sometimes required as the enemy AI is broken and tends to play dirty, spotting you through trees for what seems like miles.
The main story starts off well enough and has you infiltering an island that’s been taken over by the North Korean military where a research was excavating some ancient artifacts. The team managed to find some ancient alien tech in the ruins they were working and they managed to activate it. As you might imagine, all hell breaks loose pretty quickly. The North Korean send a general and troops to take control of the technology for themselves. It’s a fun enough concept: small Special Forces team with cool super suits against the North Korean army. You are super advanced, but a small team and they are a large force but essentially a third-world force. The story all culminates in a huge battle on an aircraft carrier against a huge alien ship and ends on a massive cliffhanger. Did I mention that aliens show up? Remember how I mentioned it goes off the rails. All of this happens in only a couple of hours of gameplay. Again, it seems like the team kept things short as they were pressed for time or knew most people would never experience the whole game. It’s a short 11 mission experience that never has enough time to breath or explore anything interesting that happens.
Crysis Remastered Trilogy at least finally gives players the chance to experience the original game and see just how gorgeous it still looks, especially since the team future-proofed this remaster on the updated engine. The highest graphics settings will cause even the best machines to work overtime. The graphics are still great and cleaned up enough to make it feel like a modern release, even on medium settings for a machine like mine in my home office. The only negative is the lack of extras that were included in later releases of the game that are missing here, including multiplayer modes which would have helped strengthen the experience, and Warhead, a set of extra missions which helps flesh out the story and lets you play the role of your partner and what he was doing while separated from you. You’ll also notice a number of technical bugs that show just how much the game struggled to run at the time it released. Friends and enemies will often times have their animations break and slide across the map in hilarious fashion.
That said, this is still probably the best way to experience the original Crysis story if you have a decent PC. I managed to run the game just fine on custom medium/high settings on my home machine running an AMD Ryzen 5 series CPU and GTX 1650 Super. Everything looked great and the game played smoothly and without issue. Some people have noted crashes, but my entire time with three games was without a single crash. If you are like many and got your taste of the series on the Xbox 360 with those really degraded graphics, pick this one up for Crysis alone to experience it as it was intended, even if the game itself is short, pretty generic, and sort of boring if played like a traditional FPS. Thankfully, this remaster is of the trilogy so you get quite a lot of bang for your buck with games less graphically demanding but better in terms of gameplay and story.
But considering this is a trilogy remastering, we need to look at the very “interesting” follow-up in Crysis 2. Crysis 2 is a gorgeous looking game with a fantastic remastered look. The team understands technology and this remaster holds its own against any new release. It plays far better than the original, has a more structured design in levels and world, features more varied and dynamic enemies, and has a greater focus on the narrative than the original. This is all high praise, and yet, Crysis 2 is a much worse game because of all of this. Now, don’t get me wrong, I still love Crysis 2 and think it a fantastic FPS, but that’s just it: Crysis 2 is a good FPS. What it makes up for in terms of everything the original lacked, Crysis 2 ends up becoming a far more generic FPS game that loses its soul along the way.
Graphicly, this remaster is stunning and the game can hold its own against most anything being released, even today in 2021. Enemy AI is more improved and the combat gameplay is far more refined than that of the original. So much so that you can actually play Crysis 2 like any other FPS of the era. I found myself shooting a lot more in the first few areas than most of the original game. And that’s just it: Crysis 2 plays like any other shooter on the market, placing far less focus on cool powers and instead on shooting from the hip and running into battles guns blazing. And while the levels themselves look great, they are incredibly linear and feel more like a corridor shooter that is shuffling you from one area to another. This is such a problem that cutscenes happen near the end of most every level before whisking you away to another area. It’s sorely lacking the freedom that helped define the original.
The original Crysis let you explore a huge island world in so many different ways. It was a massive area which meant that if you saw a far off place, chances were that you would eventually get there, much in the same way Far Cry did prior. Not only that, but you could play however you saw fit. If you wanted the traditional FPS experience you could do that. If you wanted to be a sniper in the shadows, you could do that. Wanted to run past everything like a crazy speed-runner, you could do that. Or play using the powers at hand from your nano-suit and experiment with how to beat/avoid enemies. Best of all was that the world around you was also a weapon. You could use the environment to your advantage and even blow up entire villages either loudly or stealthily. Distract enemies, bring down a structure on a group of baddies, steal vehicles, and fight helicopters as you dart in and out of the dense jungle cover. Much of that is gone in the follow-up, almost as if some mandate was issued to make the game more accessible.
Crysis 2 also has a bigger and much grander story, but it also helps hurt the franchise as a whole. The original ended on one of the biggest cliffhangers in video game history at the time, so much so that even in 2021 people are demanding answers. At the games end you have just destroyed a huge alien ship that’s tearing apart an aircraft carrier after the United States military nuked the island and powered up the alien mothership/superstructure under the island to world ending proportions. In the chaos after you, and what was left of your team, head back to the island to backup Prophet, your squad commander who was taken earlier in the game and who just came back from what I thought was certain death to aid you. I figured he was turned evil or, at the very least, his time inside the alien structure made him crazy as he’s gone full lone wolf. Crysis ended strong, even if the game ended just when it was getting interesting. Crysis 2 takes place a couple of years after that event with Prophet blowing his own brains out before handing you his nano-suit that’s be implanted with his conscious/spirt because. Not only that, but the story deals with an alien virus (Prophet was infected which is why he took two to the head) infecting New York by aliens that have nothing to do with the ones from the first game. They actually do, but look so different I figured I was fighting a new threat most of the time. It’s some narrative whiplash that left many, myself included, angry.
What’s interesting is the the game makes no sense without playing the first title, so new players are going to feel lost, but people who played the first game are going to be bummed out that nothing is explained from where the original left off on what was looking to be a huge battle. Imagine watching The Empire Strikes Back and then George Lucas just skipped Empire and made The Force Awakens instead as the follow-up. Playing Crysis 2 leaves you feeling like a huge chunk of the story is missing, helping disconnect you from the experience. Hell, the events of the first game aren’t even mention, at least not overtly. It’s a weird choice that seems more to do with the game now having lots of money to throw around and experiment with, while also needing to make a more accessible FPS for the console market. I can’t imagine this was the story that they wanted to tell as it ties up zero of the loose ends of the original.
But it’s not all bad. Picking up Hans Zimmer to help do the score is huge in terms of making the game feel epic with battles feeling huge and impactful with the musical backing. The gameplay is more generic, sure, but it still plays better than the original with weapons actually having impact and a purpose where they once felt limp and sprayed everywhere, something weird for an elite special forces operator. The story is massive and dumb, but less dumb and disjointed than the original, and while the world looks better with more structures than a mostly dense jungle setting of the original, it makes the sacrifice of level design because of this. I understand the reasoning as its hard to make a dense city and let the player do whatever they want. Chances are higher players will get themselves lost, even with waypoints and the like. But Crysis just isn’t suited for having the player run around parking structures and caves of building rubble.
The aliens in this game are also less interesting than the ones in the original game. I’m pretty sure they are the same alien’s (after doing some research after the fact) but their designs are so radically different and more basic that feel like a totally new race, losing the techno-ancient blue look of the first game for what look like cyborgs. In fact, everything feels less interesting than the original, and this is coming from someone who didn’t think the original Crysis had a great story. Crysis 2 just feels like a louder and more action-oriented version of the first, but giving the player less options. And I find it really odd that even with all this action and energy, having a bigger story and and engine that already proved itself, that Crysis 2 is about as short as the original. Clocking in at around 5 or 6 hours makes everything feel so rushed. Thankfully, without the alien twist of the original it feels less rushed than the original. But I will give it to Crytek and say they know how to do a huge and epic ending.
Crysis 2 is a good FPS that still has those fun nano-suit mechanics, only with less options of play around with them. And while it feels a bit more generic that the original, it’s still a lot of fun to play, and seeing it remastered shows the power of the CryEngine and makes this Crysis Remastered Trilogy a pretty solid deal, even if some AI issues and enemy glitching still pop up from time to time. Seems like even the people making the CryEngine have some issues using the CryEngine when making a game. That said, there is still the matter of the third remaster in this package in the form of Crysis 3.
Well, Crysis 3 continues the trend from the past two games in the series: better graphics, tighter gameplay, and worse story. By the time Crysis 3 came out the series was coming to an end, CryTek now clearly focusing on selling their gorgeous engine than creating engaging games with it. Think ID post Quake 3 Arena. They now have an engine that looks fantastic and runs mostly smooth. This makes sense after three games of ironing out most issues. That said, the one thing CryTek has never been all that good with is telling a strong story, something that is on full display in Crysis 3. This time you play the role of Prophet, even though he clearly died in the second game with that pesky bullet in the head. It makes little sense, even in the scope of crazy aliens. Every main character of this series gets sidelined over and over again for no reason. It’s not like Prophet is an interesting character. Players might agree as Crysis 3 sold poorly and EA was done publishing the series.
That’s mistake number one, mistake number two is totally dropping the main hero from the very first game after he jumped into alien hell to save Prophet, a man who in two games has never even mentioned his friend. Hell the main guy from Crysis 2 was taken over by Prophet, which is how he returns, killing him off for no good reason. Sorry heroic Army guy, you served your country and saved the world only to be rewarded to having your consciousness overwritten by some douche. Thankfully, Psycho is back for this adventure which takes place twenty-four years after the second game and sees you back in New York City. This is by design as the team took into account the issues players (myself included) had with the overly linear nature of the second game. This time you have a lot more freedom to tackle objective and gives it more of a well, Crysis, feeling. The story on the other hand is pretty generic science fiction.
You and Psycho caught the idiot aliens’ leader and stick it in some prison. The bad guy human CELL Corporation captures you and your team and try to skin you from your nano-suits, because reasons explained someplace else like a comic or book. Look, I’ve always said if you need to buy other media to get the complete story you’ve really goofed. The CELL Corporation hate you guys for some reason and want the technology of the nano-suits for themselves, even though the North Korean’s had it back in the first game. Pretty sure the biggest corporation that the world thinks saved Earth, could have just bought a suit to work on. Anyways, Psycho is skinned and left like any other solider, but Prophet is too cool for school and is shipped back to New York to be skinned there, because the best place to have your super secret lab is in downtown New York. Actually, there is some alien power source under the city, much like the island in the first. If I sound annoyed it’s probably because I’m playing these three games back-to-back and it’s getting to me. Remember, these are short games and all this comes at you hard and fast.
New York is now much different than before. In order to capture the look and feel of the first game, the team turned New York into a number of domed areas, each with a mostly unique look and feel. This gives you a city overtaken by jungle and so on. It is a cheap way to fix a problem, but it gets the job done and not only allows for more freedom but also a more varied look than only jungle or only buildings. Crysis 3 isn’t as open as the first game since its broken up into the domes, but it is larger that both games. This means there are only seven stages in the game, far less then both other entries, but they take much longer and make for a more engaging experience with the added freedom that gameplay allows for.
Gameplay wise things feel more like Predator than a traditional FPS. The main gimmick of the third entry is the hunting system, something the team pushed heavily before release, even putting the main character using a compound bow on the cover of the game. And this mechanic works well for the world Crysis 3 sets up. The urban jungle feels both familiar and foreign at the same time. Where as Crysis 2 was linear shooter in a big city, Crysis 3 feels a lot more like the original game in how you approach gameplay. Getting lost in the jungle, not knowing where you enemy is coming from, shooting at nothing and anything that even so much as moves. It’s a much more tense affair closer to the original game.
The new hunt mechanic is based around three main point: access, adapt, and attack. Instead of going in guns blazing like Crysis 2, or on a nano-suit induced slam-down like in the first game, Crysis 3 works in stages, with the game’s weapons reflecting that. You stealthily search and spot enemies in an area, then understand and learn their patterns, and the finally attack from the shadows, probably with your compound bow as you can fire it and not lose your cloak. This system allows for a much more varied approach to combat and makes the game for fast-paced than the original in terms of combat, and less like you are moving from set-piece to set-piece like in the second. And big battles can feel tense as enemies can easily get lost in the dense jungle turning encounters into car-and-mouse affairs when they get away from you.
Still, while Crysis 3 is gorgeous and tries to go back to its roots, the story kills a lot of the fun. The team looked to District 9 for the feel of the story, and while a nice idea, it feels more like a cheap copy than any sort of homage to the film. Plot twits with little impact, forced emotional scenes only there to give you the feels, and overall just not being that interesting. All it does is leave me annoyed considering Prohpet is the bad guy in my eyes, having taken over the body of an actual hero. And considering the game clocks in at sound six hours, there doesn’t feel like there is enough time to flesh out the more serious story the game wants to tell. Look, Crysis 3 is still a lot of fun, but sales weren’t great and the series was axed pretty quickly, which is a shame, but I can understand why.
That’s a big problem with the entire Crysis series if you think about it. Amazing technology to work with, but no one around to telling a compelling story using it. Each sequel in the series feels more like an expansion pack, and sort of DLC to the original if you will. I know jumping decades in the third game and leaving players who got invested in a lurch for two games didn’t help the matter much either. Seriously, go back and play Crysis and tell him if you think Prophet would be the one to lead and carry the series forward and not Nomad, the dude actually doing the fighting and trying to figure out what’s going on. We never had any connection to Prophet and making him the lead helped kill the series.
All that said I still think the Crysis Remastered Trilogy is the best way to experience these technically impressive games as a complete whole. I think it’s important to see how technology sometimes outweighs good narrative design. This can be seen with most people knowing about Crysis but not being able to tell you the first thing about the game outside of the groundbreaking visuals. At least with the Crysis Remastered Trilogy you have options and it is better developed to work with modern systems. This means it looks great on mid-range gaming machines on medium settings, but will look amazing if you ever get a high-end machine later down the line once the current parts crisis end.
I will say that if you are more concerned about the original Crysis and seeing how it holds up today as a piece of technology and don’t are about the story or follow-up games, I say buy the original on GOG and benchmark your fancy new gaming system with a title from 2007. You might be surprised at how it makes it chug to keep up at times. And if you do go that route there are tons of mods available that push the game to even high levels. But if you just want to casually experience the Crysis games without fiddling around, or if you are trying the series for the first time, picking up the Crysis Remastered Trilogy is still a solid choice that gives you lots of hours of content in one affordable package.
Final Score:
*Review code provided by the publisher*
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