Crysis Remastered Review

The first Crysis title I played was Crysis 2 and I loved it. It was an amazing game that I had so much fun playing, and then Crysis 3 came out and I loved that as well. Back in the day I returned to the first Crysis and for the life of me I couldn’t remember why I never finished it. But now starting this again in Remastered form, I remember why!

Crysis is a first person shooter where you play as a special forces soldier codenamed Nomad. A team of American civilian archaeologists, led by Dr. Rosenthal, send out a distress call indicating that they have discovered something that could change the world. A week later, Delta Force’s Raptor Team is dispatched to the islands, with the core mission of evacuating them and securing any valuable information they have. During your journey you will have optional side missions you can take part in that will add to your experience. I actually found myself doing them as I am a completionist at heart but they can be skipped.

The team consists of Nomad, Psycho, Aztec, Jester and team leader Prophet. His team wears a special piece of clothing called Nanosuits. These suits can grant the user special abilities for a limited time. For example, you can set an Armor mode that deflects bullets or cloak mode which renders Nomad almost completely invisible and suppresses movement noise. These are the main two abilities which you will use through your adventure, depending on how you want to approach a situation – stealth or pure aggression. The more fun side is that you can pick up objects and throw them at people, or even better, pick up a human and launch him at someone for a fun double kill. You have an energy bar to indicate if you can use your powers and they will automatically recharge.

You can also customize the weapon you are using without pausing the game, for example, changing the scope on the gun or adding a sound suppressor. There are only 10 different weapons to choose from and you are mainly using the 2 assault rifles, but it’s good to see that you have some customisation options.

You can also hop into vehicles and drive around the island. Some vehicles have turrets that you can use to shoot enemies, but I find it’s more fun just to run them over!

Now comes the fun part, actually discussing playing Crysis! It’s a strange one, as whilst I initially didn’t really enjoy playing it, I found myself wanting to know how it ends, probably because of my attachment to Crysis 2 and 3 (why couldn’t you have remastered them instead?!). I found myself starting to get in to it more and more as I progressed, so I would say if you can get past the semi-slow start you will start to enjoy your journey and become an overpowered soldier.

It feels like Crytek want you to play stealth with the nanosuit ability. I love playing in stealth in most games, but truth be told, I just went in guns blazing as it felt more like a chore than fun in this case due to the randomness of the AI. It is dreadful and often all over the place. They either spot you from 100 meters away and start gunning you down or they won’t notice you when you are right next to them. And even then, when you are gunning them down sometimes they will actually dodge a shotgun blast from 1 meter away. The destructive environment is a nice little touch, but not everything is destructible, mainly only small shacks etc.

Curiously, I found myself just playing on medium so I wouldn’t have too much of a tough time, but if you play on the hardest “Delta” difficulty the enemy soldiers all speak Korean. This is a nice way to immerse yourself in the experience and more realistically not understanding what the enemy is saying.

Graphically it has been shined up nicely. We all know the classic meme “But can it run Crysis” and you can see it’s a beautiful game, with lots of details put into elements like the trees and sky. I imagine on PC you will be able to get more out of it, but it’s pretty great on the Xbox One. I have seen some people having screen tear and it not really working for them on Xbox but I never came across this. Considering it’s a 13 year old game they have done a good job and I have seen a lot worse remastered titles – it even supports a form of next gen’s holy grail, ray tracing on Xbox ONE X!

Conclusion

Crysis Remastered is a strange one. It took me a while to actually start enjoying my journey but the further I got the more I wanted to find out where they were taking the story. They have done a good job on remastering and luckily, I didn’t come across any visual issues. But you can’t overlook that this is still a game from 2007 and the AI is handled poorly with so much randomness that occurs whilst playing.

This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox One console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.