Reviews from

in the past


This game is iconic, like Halo and Metal Gear had a love child
The openness of the levels and the ability to tackle any situation how you want with also the ability to play the game however you want if your skilled makes replays very new and refreshing
and of course the graphics are timeless, although its my least favorite of the trilogy

(reposting as I reviewed a different version of the game from the one I played)

The graphics are still good I suppose.

The openness of the encounters and the satisfying guns are still fun to this day. You can rush straight in, sneak through the bushes and take the enemy by surprise, circle around with a boat, or my favorite strategy, ram through an enemy roadblock with a truck. And there are even more possibilities than that, thanks to the robust physics and the game's signature feature, the cloak. There's more expression here than in many other shooters.

Though your soldier allies will frequently advise a stealthy approach, stealth is basically nonexistent as enemies can see very long distances and there is no investigation state when enemies get even the tiniest glimpse of your nanosuited ass; they go from completely unaware of your presence straight to full alert. The cloak is more for repositioning than stealth. I notice a lot of fans raving about how you can use stealthy tactics but I found stealth borderline unusable, which really bummed me out. I still had fun thinking up tactics on the fly however.

Unfortunately everyone is correct when they say Crysis drops off quite hard. I didn't hate the final levels as much I thought I would, but it's undeniably a front-loaded game. The zero-G and VTOL sections were the worst parts for me though. Just shooting aliens wasn't too bad. It was still a competent shooter at the end; it just lacked the tactical and expressive gameplay that kept the game on the map when "but can it run Crysis?" wasn't funny anymore.

It's cool but super generic and the ending just kinda happens. I expected another mission or two to end the story and instead I got credits.

I find the history behind Crisis fascinating. I love how the developers just wanted to make a game so ahead of its time and didn't care about hardware limitations. It's interesting now that every game released easily looks like this or better, but the fact it still holds up this well despite coming out in 2007 is insane (I know this is a remaster, but the original still looks great).

The game its divisive among fans because of the (spoiler alert for the 17 year old game) fact it goes full alien in the final third. I personally very much enjoyed the shift. I didn't find the open level gameplay of the start of the game to be very exciting anyway. I hated how stealth was nigh impossible because of how well the enemies can see, and also just the sheer amount of enemies - to the point I still don't know if they were infinitely respawning at points.

I know that the first levels where you fight the humans are definitely more open to experimentation than the final linear sections - I won't argue against that - but I found that how fun and different the aliens were as combatants that it made up for the game cutting back on its more open elements.

This game is quite challenging, and not always in a fair way. I only played on normal difficulty, but I still found myself dying a lot - and usually to something I didn't even know was there. Regardless of my own skill level, something that is quantifiable is how infrequent the checkpoints are in the earlier missions. Dying to a man that was hiding silently in a bush is one thing; it is another to lose 10 minutes of infiltration progress and to have to resupply myself, walk back over to the base and then try again. This problem I have with checkpoints completely vanishes as the game gets more linear so maybe that's also a reason I don't mind the shift.

Overall, Crysis was fun. It was frustrating at times, sure, but honestly this game is very short anyway so having to die and reload a lot at least made it so I couldn't blast through the whole thing in 5 hours. The gameplay is solid and the graphics are lovely, while the story is completely fine as far as video game stories go.