Crysis 3: Laugh now…Cry-sis later?

Crysis (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Written by: James VanGorden

When I got Crysis 3 in my hands I have to say I was excited. Not for the story but for the gameplay and graphics. The characters in Crysis 2 didn’t seem fleshed out to the point where you could care about what happened to them. So naturally I thought that Crytek would do the same here. They surprised me and went all in on the conclusion to this awesome game.

You play as Laurence Barnes aka prophet, a bad ass soldier in a bad ass nano suit. The game starts with you getting broken out of a shipping container on its way to a skinning lab(a place where you get your nano suit skinned off your body). The guy breaking you out is Micheal “psycho” Stypes. He is part of a resistance trying to take down a group called C.E.L.L. and an old buddy of yours that got his nano suit skinned off, but survives. I like that they made him your AI partner because throughout the game you see him struggle with the fact that he doesn’t have his suit anymore. He tries to break down doors when he can’t and after a fight or a long drop you’ll see that he’s in pain or hurt. That’s just one of the things that shows Crytek put more into the characters. Unfortunately they seemed to focus more on Psycho then the rest of the cast. Maybe because he is with you for most of the game. Overall I have to say they stepped it up greatly.

If your into video games you know Crytek pushes the boundaries of their graphics with every Crysis game they put out. The same goes here. Crysis 3 looks amazing and I’m playing it on Xbox 360. I also had the chance to play it in 3-D which was awesome ( I would recommend playing it that way with some turtle beaches). The New York jungle is a beautiful fun playground for you to stalk, hunt, and take down your prey.

Now there is a couple different ways to play. You can stealth around with your cloak on and predator bow silently picking off the enemy one by one or you can go ballistic and just run up in there with your armor on blasting away with a 50. cal machine gun you ripped of a turret stand. You can also us a mix of both (which is what I did). I also like the user interface they’ve got in this game. Your able to just hold the back button (360) and it turns your gun on its side, then from there its a simple button push to put different attachments and scopes on your gun. Also it’s all happening in real-time so you don’t have to go to a menu to customize your gun, it makes it so you can easily adapt to any combat situation you find yourself in. If I would get detected taking someone out up close by an enemy far away, all I’d have to do is hold back real quick and equip. a powerful sniper scope then BAM! guy is down within a matter of seconds. When stuff worked out like that it made me feel like a total Billy Badass. Its times like these when Crysis is at its best.

As far as the multiplayer goes you’ve got your team death match and other modes you’d expect from a competitive online shooter, but one mode stood out to me. Predator mode was what I mostly played in multiplayer. I look at it almost like a deadly game of hide and seek. One person starts as a guy with the nano suit on with a bow and the other players are C.E.L.L. operatives. The guy with the suit has to hunt the other team and as you take them down they become hunters with you so if your C.E.L.L. it starts to get intense when you see everyone slowly disappearing. Beside the hunter mode I found the rest of multiplayer to be a mix of Call of Duty and Halo but not as good as either of them. So don’t buy this if you expect to play multiplayer only. The meat of the game is still the single player story.

Closing comments:

Crysis 3 is an awesome game. It makes you feel like a badass and has some of the most badass visuals. If you’ve got a high-powered enough PC then that’s where you should play it to get the most out of it. Even though some of the characters weren’t as fleshed out as Psycho the story was 10x better than the second game. If you enjoy these first person sandbox shooters then you defiantly need to play Crysis 3 now.