Crysis 3

Being enormous fans of the Crysis series to this point, we came at this wanting to love it. But repetitive scenarios and a lack of challenge steadily dried our fan shorts. [May 2013, p.81]

If you are a fan of the Crysis franchise, though, you may still find elements to enjoy about the game, but if you seek to find a totally new FPS experience or even just a breath of fresh air, you will be very disappointed with Crysis 3. It may not be the best in the series or live up to its full potential, but it remains an enjoyable game nonetheless.

After the plot falls over dead, the wonderful action stands up and carries it home, bearing the weight of the game's many failures on its back.

I’ve had fun with Crysis 3, but not as much fun as I had with the two games that came before it. This is not a bad game by any means, but it is the least good in the series so far.

The excellent multiplayer deserves to be the focus here, rather than the repetitive, humourless, and largely artless first person shooting of the single-player campaign.

Crysis 3 might be a victim of this love-blindness. You'll never be bored during the campaign, and certainly not during the excellent multiplayer. But Crysis 3 feels like a retread of entertaining ground, with a frustrating glimpse of how good it could actually be.

A gratifying shooter experience. Even though the campaign is on the shorter side, there are a few visual hiccups, and some of the enemy AI is unbalanced, those small gripes get overshadowed by Crysis 3's tactical gameplay, beautiful environments, and superb online multiplayer. While not treading new ground for the FPS genre, Crysis 3 is a solid shooter.

That true panoramic freedom is still missing in action, the campaign's rather undernourished as it rushes you into the final act and the fiction feels increasingly forgettable. There are charms here, though, if you boot up the tactical display and stick to the shadows. There's the silent kill in glorious surroundings; there's the swish of an arrow, the creak of a bow.

As for the game itself, it lives and dies with the multiplayer for me. I loved the new Hunter mode, and I still enjoy the core online game more than most other shooters. The campaign on the other hand just felt like a mess. The enemy AI is atrocious, and the sheer execution is just boring at times. Despite its brevity, I found myself wanting it to end long before it actually did.

Crysis 3 has neither direction nor freedom, though it does have human weapons, alien weapons, a cloaking device, an Armour mode, and a bow. And with this many options at your disposal, Crysis 3 insists, surely you must be having fun.

The Xbox 360 version is grungy, by comparison [to the PC], with lower texture quality and a lower framerate. That's unsurprising, but when taken against the other games on the platform, the 360 version still looks OK. It's certainly playable, anyway, though a weird audio bug made one of the early open-area segments practically unplayable, since it's hard to know when to take cover and hide from incoming rockets if the audio isn't playing back at all.

By the end of the game I was bored silly, and considering the scope of what was going on that shouldn't have been the case. Sadly, bar a few exceptions – a Jurassic Park-style hunting section in long grass, an open-ended assault on Ceph AA emplacements – I'd rinsed and repeated the same thing so much that I couldn't care less.