Crysis 3 INTERNAL-RELOADED v.1.1 (Deluxe Edition) (4DVD)
There are aliens out there in the chin-high foliage. You
hear the rustling and glimpse a black carapace between blades of grass,
but you can't tell if you're being stalked by a single grotesque beast,
or a horde of them. You sprint through the derelict trainyard,
surrounded by lush overgrowth and rusted railroad cars, then vault to
the top of a car to get a better view of your surroundings. A disgusting
alien leaps upon the car as well--and you gun him down with your
electricity-infused submachine gun. The creature erupts in goo, and you
scan the yard, looking for more telltale signs of crazed attackers.
It's a tense sequence in a great-looking first-person shooter. Crysis 2 left behind the original game's
literal jungle for one of the urban type. Crysis 3 melds the two,
returning you to a New York City where destruction and decay have been
softened by overbearing greenery. The private military company known has
CELL has erected a dome over the city, turning the crumbling metropolis
into a gargantuan greenhouse in which trees take root in building
foundations and rise through their stairwells towards the sky. Like its
predecessors, this sequel aims for realism--or at least, as much realism
as can be expected for a game featuring high-tech nanosuits and
flame-spewing extraterrestrial walkers. This mix of nature and
destruction makes Crysis 3 look striking; you couldn't accuse its makers
of sacrificing artistic creativity in favor of technology.
The visuals may not sing as sweetly on the Xbox 360 as they do on the
PC, but it looks marvelous, regardless. The attention to detail is
laudable, even in the character models, which is just as well,
considering how often you get up close and personal with your co-stars.
Only in a few select cases does the camera pull back and let you see
player-character Prophet from a third-person view. This means that you
always see supporting characters express their anger, fear, and distrust
from Prophet's perspective, which magnifies the tension of various
personal exchanges.
Indeed, Crysis 3 tells a much more personal story than the previous
games, focusing on three main characters: Prophet; former Raptor Team
comrade Psycho; and Claire, Psycho's girlfriend and communications
expert for a group of freedom fighters seeking to take down CELL once
and for all. CELL has ripped Psycho's nanosuit from his body--a painful
process that has only fueled his abhorrence of them, and leaves Prophet
as the sole "post-human warrior" left to fight. Claire doesn't trust
Prophet, who sees him more as hardware than human, and for good reason:
his nanosuit makes him increasingly prone to visions apparently
originating from the grandaddy of ceph aliens known as the Alpha Ceph.
Prophet's connection to this being fuels much of the story, as does
Psycho's seething desire for revenge over those that forced him to be
simply human. There are a number of touching moments that spawn from
rising tensions--a newfound emotional heft that the series never before
portrayed. The final level, unfortunately, is problematic, because it
leaves behind the game's make-your-own-fun structure and requires only a
little stick maneuvering and a button press. But you can at least come
to Crysis 3 with the comfort of knowing that the game brings the series'
continuing story to an apparent close.
Happily,
several hours of entertaining action precede this moment, and it's the
game's futuristic bow that sometimes drives that entertainment. With it,
you zoom in, pull back, and unleash silent fury on the human or alien
grunt of choice. Firing standard arrows has just the right feel: you
sense the weight of the pull and release, and feel the impact when the
arrow reaches its mark.
As before, you can activate your nanosuit's cloak to hide in plain
sight, which amplifies the feeling of being a bow-wielding predator in
the urban wilds of New York. Special explosive arrows and those that
electrify liquid can also be a blast to play with, just for the kick of
finding new ways to make CELL soldiers die horrible deaths. The bow's
downside is that combined with cloaking, it makes the game too easy; you
can annihilate a huge number of foes this way without breaking a sweat
or fearing the consequences of being caught. It doesn't help matters
that Crysis 3's soldiers and aliens are not the intelligent type. While
they're not the dunderheads they could be in Crysis 2, enemies take no
notice of arrows that land right next to them, run into obstacles and
just keep trying to run, and sometimes ignore you even when you're in
plain sight.
You can boost the level of challenge by
choosing higher difficulties, and if you find that the cloak-and-arrow
method is too exploitative, you can go in guns blazing. Even so, Crysis
3's battles lack the grandness of its predecessors'. Crysis Warhead's
raging exosuit battle and Crysis 2's Grand Central Station pinger
encounter were outstanding, and superior to any of Crysis 3's central
battles. Crysis 3's action is still fun, but not as thrilling, and its
two primary boss battles are easily won, requiring little in the way of
tactics. Certain stretches do a great job of drawing you into the world,
flooding your vision with beautiful collages juxtaposing nature's
bucolic touch, the remnants of humanity's metal-and-stone triumphs, and
fearsome alien technology. But the tension such exploration creates is
not always relieved by explosive battle.
Yet even if Crysis 3's action doesn't usually burn with the intensity
of the ceph's home galaxy, it's still good, in part because the series
continues to hew its own path with regard to level design and structural
openness. Crysis 3 is neither a pure linear shooter in the way
popularized by Call of Duty, nor an open-world romp like Far Cry 3.
Instead, its levels are sometimes large but always manageable, giving
you freedom to put as much room between you and your foes as you like.
The nanosuit encourages further experimentation, once again allowing you
to activate the aforementioned cloak mode (which renders you invisible)
and armor mode (which lets you soak up more damage). And once again,
you can leap a good distance should you wish to reach higher ground in a
hurry.
Stirring weapons into this mix makes for some rousing fun. The bow
provides one way to approach battle, but it's not the only notable
method of alien destruction. You can select various weapon attachments
like scopes and silencers to suit your preferred approach. The basic
guns feel just right: their power is properly communicated via plenty of
muzzle flash and recoil animations that give the shooting a kick. A
large battlefield patrolled by giant ceph allows you to pull out all the
stops, firing rockets, manning rumbling battle tanks, and scanning the
environment with your binoculars to mark enemies, ammo stashes, and
available vehicles. But much of this action is optional: you can sprint
right through Crysis 3's most intriguing battlefield, getting only a
taste of what it has to offer.
Prophet isn't just
limited to using human weaponry, though. The plasma-spewing pinch rifle
is the most common alien weapon you stumble upon, but the incinerator is
more gratifying to use, especially when you aim it at the meandering
alien sentries that equip the same flame-spewing behemoth. Watching
these ceph scorchers soak up all that fire before dramatically erupting
is a mean-spirited delight. You equip alien cannons and mortars too, and
they are enjoyable to shoot because they feel so powerful.
Stealth remains unchanged for the most part, though there are reasons
to cloak yourself beyond the gruesome pleasure of a silent takedown. You
can now hack into turrets, minefields, and other systems, which often
means cloaking and sneaking close enough to your electronic target.
Hacking requires you to perform a simple, easy minigame--and while it's
enjoyable to watch a pinger walk into a hacked minefield, hacking isn't a
game-changer. In fact, gaining the assistance of a ceph-murdering
turret only makes the surreptitious route even easier.
Crysis 3's multiplayer modes don't encourage such exploitation,
however, and are an improvement over Crysis 2's. The returning Crash
Site mode provides plenty of entertainment, and is essentially a
king-of-the-hill mode with a moving hill. Teams must capture and retain
pods that are airdropped in, which keeps players moving around the map.
Pods typically drop in open spaces, reducing the possibility of players
finding hidey-holes to camp from--and allowing pingers to get in on the
action. Indeed, a team lucky enough to nab a mech is sure to put it to
good use, gunning down and stomping on their unlucky victims.
The addition of nanosuit powers keeps the flow fast-paced and
unpredictable. One scenario: you rip a riot shield from a dropped pod so
that you can defend yourself while retaining control of the area. An
enemy combatant approached and cloaks, hoping to fill your backside with
bullets. He uncloaks and begins to fire, and you rapidly turn and fling
the shield at him, sending him flying and successfully defending your
life--and the pod. The other modes--Team Deathmatch, Assault, and
Capture the Relay among them--benefit from the same mechanics.
Standing apart is the new Hunter mode, which also features two teams
in conflict, but with much different results. This round-based mode
initially pits CELL operatives against a couple of fully-cloaked
competitors armed only with bows. Your goal as a stealthed hunter is to
eliminate as many operatives as possible; each operative you kill then
joins you as a cloaked hunter. One by one, hunters stalk their fully
armed enemies, whose main purpose is to stay alive long enough for the
timer to run out. Sometimes, the mode results in CELL members camping
out in a small room and running down the clock, which can feel
anticlimactic for both teams. But the mode can also capture a unique
sense of fear as your teammates are felled one by one, and your beeping
monitor betrays the presence of a nearby hunter.
Crysis 3 is fantastic to look at, successfully portraying an uneasy
partnership of the natural and the artificial. As the story presses on,
the conflict deepens and the visuals darken; it's as if you can feel the
evil spreading throughout the city. It's unfortunate that the game
doesn't reach the heights of its predecessors. The campaign is several
hours shorter than Crysis 2's, and doesn't reproduce the thrills that
lit up the previous games. Yet on its own terms, this is a full-featured
sci-fi shooter that makes it a lot of fun to torture extraterrestrial
abominations with the burning rage of their own weapons.