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Crysis 3 Review: Amazing Graphics, Still a Benchmark Buster, Boring Gameplay
MojoKid writes "Let's get one thing clear up front. Crysis 3's graphics are absolutely stunning. Crytek's latest game doesn't raise the bar — it annihilates it. At the highest settings, Crysis blows Battlefield 3 out of the water, makes mincemeat of Max Payne, and makes the original Crysis — itself a graphics powerhouse — look more like the first Call of Duty. Crysis 3 really is that stunning, provided that you've got the graphics card to handle it. Like the first game, this title is capable of bringing even a high-end card to its knees. Everyone who worked in the artistic departments at Crytek, from character animations to texturing, deserves an award. The people who wrote the game's plot, on the other hand, don't. The game's design and some poor pacing decisions completely undermine what should be its greatest selling point. Crysis 3 could've been a great game but it feels like a science experiment. How much poor gameplay will players suffer through in exchange for utterly amazing graphics?"
wtf? Now there's no standard to measure games?
-Dave
Looking at the images in the article make me feel pathetic, because they don't look all that much better to me than the previous gen. It makes me feel like I have a deficient art sense or something. Maybe it falls into the uncanny valley, but instead of a valley, it's a plateau, where incremental improvements just don't seem any more realistic.
Here's a link to an actual graphics demo, instead of just screenshots. It is impressive and I like it (I especially like the fractal plants that you can zoom in on), but ultimately it still feels like a cartoon, and in that way not any more immersive than Myst.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
One thing that pisses me off with a lot of modern games such as Crysis 3 (and this also includes Crysis 2) is that they rely entirely on autosaving at checkpoints. No ability to quicksave at any point at all. Autosaves are fine, but the removal of traditional manual save functionality is such a huge step backwards it affects enjoyment for me. This was highly irritating in Crysis 2 because the game likes to highlight various tactics in infiltrating a base (assault, stealth, hybrid approach), but the lack of an ability to make your own saves when desired really screws up the ability to perform stealth properly. Mess it up and you'll find yourself throwing a grenade at your feet in order to force a reload of the last checkpoint, at which point you'll need to start the whole area again. Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dishonored have the ability to create manual saves at any area (and multiple saves too) and this makes performing stealth far more desirable. You can save several times during your progress and if you stuff up, just reload the last point which might be most of the way through a section, as opposed to a checkpoint which would only occur at the beginning and the end.
But I need not ramble, because graphics do not appeal much anymore on their own if the gameplay is boring. Have them together, great, but graphics are nothing without some meat.
Raenex is a dickhead
Meaning you actually could become a glass cannon...
Well, it looks like it's back to tvtropes for me. There goes the rest of the night.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Certainly agreed on the original Crysis. I thought it was an absolutely awesome game for the most part, which suffered from having two particularly weak sections. First the "floaty" bit in the alien mothership, which would have been great as a quick diversion but ended up going on for far too long. And second the very final mission, on the aircraft carrier. Both, of course, were sections which discarded the game's usual open level design in favour of more traditional "corridor shooter" gameplay. Warhead was all the awesome stuff from the main game, minus the suck (though it was a bit short).
Crysis 2 wasn't great. I didn't absolutely hate it; I'd rank it above most of the other "Modern Warfare" style shooters out there by quite some way. But it certainly wasn't as groundbreaking as the original.
I beat Crysis 3 over the weekend and I think its quality as a game sits about half way between the first two. Aside from a few short sections, it's much less of a corridor shooter than Crysis 2; it's more a sequence of mid-sized areas strung together in sequence. Within those areas, you get a fair degree of freedom, with much less handholding than we had in Crysis 2. There's certainly much more of a stealth focus than in the last game.
In fact, most of the game's penultimate mission (there are 7 in total) is a single huge wide open outdoors area, with three "main" objectives that can be completed in any order you prefer (there's an obvious "first" one to go for, but it's much more finely balanced where you should go next) and a few optional side-missions to find. In other words, it's right out of the original Crysis. It takes maybe an hour to beat and is supremely good. The game then closes down again for its (fairly weak) final mission, but that penultimate mission gives a glimpse at what could have been.
The big problem with Crysis 3 is length. This is a short game. Probably no longer than Warhead, which was advertised and priced as an expansion. It's certainly quite a bit shorter than Crysis 2. It's really noticable that a huge proportion of the game's weapons only show up right near the end of the game, meaning that there's a lot of stuff in there that you barely get a chance to see. It reminds me of shooters from early in the current console generation, like the first Gears of War, where so much of the development time was going on the technology that there wasn't much resource left over to actually provide a decent length campaign. As the generation's gone on and the tech becomes much better known, games have gotten longer again, on average. If you take a slew of recent cross-platform releases; Resident Evil 6, Black Ops 2, Dead Space 3 - these are all significantly longer than other recent installments in their respective series.
It might be available on current generation console hardware, but the PC version of Crysis 3 makes me suspect that what we have here is the first true "next gen" game. These are the sort of visuals I'd be hoping to see from the PS4 and the 360's successor once people have learned the hardware a bit (shouldn't take long with the PS4 given the architecture, hopefully). And once again, the length of the campaign suffers as the focus goes on making the technological jump.