According to the developers' idea, Crysis 3 was supposed to combine the wild jungles and open world of the first game with the "vertical gameplay" of the second. Admittedly, the concept was great, but the result turned out to be far from what the series' fans had hoped for.
Crysis 3 blew up computers
In some ways, the promises made by Crytek's head, Cevat Yerli, turned out to be true. The graphics in the game are truly stunning. Soft shadows, high-quality textures, highly detailed models, excellent lighting and shadow effects, and superb character animation—all of this creates the same "wow" effect as the original Crysis. Moreover, in Crysis 3, the graphics took another step closer to photorealism and are much better than in Battlefield 3.
Of course, all this magnificence comes at a price for your PC. Even the latest generation graphics cards and processors struggle to handle the load of CryEngine 3. For a comfortable frame rate at maximum settings, you'll need something like a "Titan" paired with an overclocked quad-core processor. If your computer is far from top-tier, you'll have to lower the graphics settings, and the visual impression will be completely different.
The level design doesn't disappoint either. While the early levels in the game can still be called linear, from the middle of the game onwards, the locations become simply huge. To encourage players to actively explore, the developers filled them not only with additional quests, but also with various text and audio information about the events of Crysis 3 and the previous games. In hidden corners, you’ll also find upgrade kits that let you improve your nanosuit. Yes, now you don’t have to run between Ceph corpses collecting nanites—everything is in a box, although the upgrades themselves haven’t changed since the second game.
The developers also did a great job on the sound design. This is especially noticeable in stealth mode, when you sneak between enemies, trying to avoid their gaze and not run into them face-to-face. In such moments, the sound environment really helps you navigate the space and choose the right direction. But when things heat up, the game transforms and fills with the sounds of explosions, enemy chatter, and relentless gunfire.
A dream game
At first, Crysis 3 seems like a "dream game." But it feels like a dead world rather than a living one. Yes, the locations in the game are beautiful, but aside from a couple of quests, they don’t offer the player anything special. So why create such wonderful worlds? It would have been better to leave straightforward corridors, because all the designers' work goes to waste if the player just wants to shoot instead of running around the location looking for something interesting.
The developers even found time to include references to other games and add small animals and rodents. So, they had time for hallucinogenic mushrooms, but not to diversify the gameplay in an already short game. Five hours, which is how long it takes to complete the single-player campaign, won't be enough for anyone. Yes, if you spend time searching for information or upgrade crates, you’ll squeeze out a couple more hours, but it’s still not enough. And the game costs 1,200 rubles.
The developers didn’t even have time to change the weapons. They simply repainted what we’ve already seen in previous games with new textures and added four alien guns. Apparently, the C.E.L.L. corporation hasn’t come up with anything new in the 23 years since the events of the second game. Wait, the developers did add the nano-bow, which was constantly shown in trailers and advertised as a true weapon of destruction. In reality, it’s a pretty overpowered device that makes stealth gameplay so easy it becomes uninteresting. If you decide to kill everyone around you, then any other powerful weapon will be your reliable companion.
As for the story, Crytek didn’t bother much and just stitched together the content of all three games with white threads. Yes, you’ll find answers to the main questions—if you make the effort to look for them—but a whole bunch of details slipped past the writers, and after finishing the game, you’re left with more questions than answers. Many will say that Crysis never had a story, but if the first game still had some human logic in its narrative, starting with the second, it just went crazy. In the third installment, the story is even more disconnected from the previous games and can’t explain why things turned out the way they did.
All in all, if the game were twice as long and filled with more events, then it would be worth the asking price. As it is, the only outlet is the multiplayer, which also isn’t particularly well-thought-out or balanced.
High-level players are almost invulnerable to newcomers, so the first 15–20 hours, until you reach the right level, will feel like constant hell. On the plus side, the map size now matches the number of players, so there’s plenty of space and it’s hard to die right at the spawn point. The new multiplayer maps are full of secret paths that speed up hunting enemies, and attentive players will easily find optimal spots for sniping or providing fire support.
Overall, Crysis 3’s multiplayer mode hasn’t moved far from the second game and doesn’t offer anything fundamentally new. You can only fight against opponents in nanosuits, sometimes making use of Ceph weapons scattered around the map. Yet Crytek could have made a "Humans vs. Ceph" mode or even implemented a cooperative campaign mode.
The quality of the localization also let the game down, specifically the translation from English to Russian. Sometimes the characters come out with such "gems" that even an automatic translator would be jealous.
***
Crysis 3 leaves a rather mixed impression. On the one hand, it has excellent graphics, expansive locations, and plenty of enemies. On the other hand, the world of Crysis 3 isn’t as memorable as the first and second games, and it doesn’t offer anything new. It can’t boast much gameplay variety either. After all, this is a shooter, and a shooter should be fun. Crysis 3 doesn’t always deliver on that.
