In front of me is a list. It is a non-disclosure agreement I had
to sign to get an early copy of Crysis 3, and outlines story spoilers –
don't mention that Captain Steakbrain dies in the first chapter or
we'll have your house, that kind of thing. But Crysis 3's story is so
terribly forgettable that, re-reading this list a few hours after
finishing the game, I can barely remember most of it happening. Or want
to. There's a lot of competition for awful FPS storylines, but Crysis 3
takes the gold at a canter.
Luckily the real star doesn't have a single line: Crysis 3's
campaign is all about a long-destroyed and now overgrown New York, a
jungle-fied take on Crysis 2's setting. Twenty years after the previous
game the destroyed shells of skyscrapers and shops are slowly being
recovered by nature, with skittish deer ducking in and around the
rusting husks of vehicles. This brings back a key element from the
original Crysis: lots of long, concealing grass and scrubland.
So
Crysis 3 has a bit of both its predecessors; the tightly-scripted
funnelling of Crysis 2's story, but the original's more open and
experimental style of combat. You typically approach fights from a
distance, or at least a vantage point, and a neat tactical visor can be
used to "tag" enemies and objects of interest before moving in. In
combat terms Crysis 3 could fairly be called a Predator simulator, a
point driven home by the new bow weapon which kills silently, can be
fired while cloaked, and has multiple arrow types.
In combination with the Nanosuit, the bow makes main character
Prophet an apex hunter in a world full of prey. The suit's two main
abilities, both dependent on a recharging pool of energy, are armour and
cloaking. The first makes head-on combat possible against even
overwhelming odds, while the second is a multi-purpose delight – letting
you sneak by patrols, escape when cornered, and silently thin out the
opposition. Cloaking drains energy faster when you're moving, a
beautifully-tuned system that forces you to be slow and deliberate or
quick and efficient – with any lapses leaving Prophet exposed in no
man's land.
Stay hidden and take out enemies via the scenic route
and the intricate environments of Crysis 3 come to some kind of life.
There's something deeply sadistic about this kind of play, exploiting
the enemy patrol patterns and, at times, toying with their simple minds –
picking off Cell operatives one-by-one sees their comrades move swiftly
from anger to panic, and de-cloaking right in one's face rewards you
with a delicious backwards stumble and scream of fear. You begin to like
it, a lot.
But there's an elephant in the long grass, and one
Crysis 3's developers know well. Ubisoft's recent Far Cry 3, a
continuation of a series began by Crytek, was a slick mainstream take on
open-world jungle sneaking that is better-tuned and much more
interesting to play. Crysis 3 may not be open-world, but its
environments want so badly to be expansive that it ends up with levels
that are baggy funnels – lots of space but not all that much to do
beyond following checkpoint markers.
Crysis 3: Ross Kemp lookalike Psycho
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Crysis 3 is that, if you opt
to fight head-on, it's one of the poorest straight-up shooters in years.
There are plenty of guns but it's a perfect example of quantity over
quality, and the main problem is that the enemies are dumb as posts;
stealth-kill a soldier's buddy in front of his eyes and he won't notice
anything is amiss until the corpse hits the ground. Crysis 3 is at its
best when you don't touch it much, moving through its clockwork soldiers
silently and watching from a distance – getting into fights always
disappoints. It's not a long game, about five hours, but by the end it
drags and the climax is truly atrocious; a poorly conceived and ugly
mess. To quote Prophet's ridiculous cockney buddy Psycho, "fackin 'ell!"
Redemption
comes in the form of multiplayer, a packed offering with a dozen maps
and smart variants on the usual gametypes. Hunters begins with two
players as invisible bow-wielding aliens, with all other players
spawning as Nanosuit-less marines. The name of the game is for any
marine to survive for two minutes, but each one killed respawns on the
other team. This is quickfire stealth for the hunters, with every second
nearer defeat, and simply scary for the marines; an effect created, in
no small part, by an Alien-style motion tracker.
Games
of Hunters can be sickeningly swift victories or heroic hold-outs, and
those moments when the silence breaks, when a glint in the water makes a
rookie panic, are magic.
Even in standard gametypes such as Team
Deathmatch and the zone-controlling Spears, the Nanosuit gives Crysis 3
its own competitive flavour. A starting perk enables auto-activation of
the suit's armour upon taking fire, which simplifies things in a good
way, and Crysis 3's cornucopia of weaponry feels much more at home.
There's also a slightly ridiculous customisation system that lets you,
during matches, switch out various attachments and dictate how hard
you're pulling the bow-string. No other FPS offers a feature like this,
and there may be a reason why.
But even if that's fussing over
details, Crysis 3's multiplayer goes some way towards making up for its
poor campaign. It's just much more fun. Crysis 3's singleplayer
sometimes forgets that people buy a game starring a man in a
super-powered suit because they want to do ridiculous super-powered
stuff. But multiplayer doesn't, and stuffs its arenas full of poles to
rip from the ground and cars ready to be booted into other players.
From
another angle that says everything about Crysis 3: the best thing in
this game, after who knows how many years of development and millions
spent, is hitting other players with a giant pipe. It is a
gorgeously-rendered pipe, to be sure, and this is technically an
incredible-looking game – but to call it beautiful would be to disregard
aesthetics entirely. Crysis 3 shows how far the series has moved from
the original's fabulous ambition, and makes you wonder exactly when
Crytek stopped trying to make amazing FPS games – ones that pushed the
important boundaries – and settled for pretty average.
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