Crysis Remastered Trilogy Review

Release Date: October 15, 2021

Players: 1 player

Genre: First-Person Shooter

Publisher: Crytek

"Review Copy Provided By Crytek"

There was one franchise that came out in the late 2000s to early 2010s that blew every other game away graphically and had a presentation like nothing else that had been done before; and that was none other than the Crysis trilogy. The first Crysis game was revolutionary for it’s time with graphics that had not been seen to that caliber before and gameplay that melded together a FPS with an openish world sandbox environment and destructible environments. It was a game that had many PC gamers asking, “can your rig even run Crysis?” as even the most high-end computers of the day could barely run it smoothly and even many computers in modern day struggle to run the game. The sequels went on to have console ports as they were more optimized for consoles to reach a wider audience and even then, they continued to improve upon the formula. After a decade of dormancy, the Crysis series is back with a remastered trilogy looking to give you an optimized experience regardless of if you are playing this on PC or console (or even the Nintendo Switch), improved and sustained framerates, and upgraded visuals and audio. Is this remaster worth you time and money? Let’s find out!

Story

The Crysis series follows the exploits of a soldier named Prophet as he attempts to stop a hostile invasion of Earth from an alien species known as the Ceph and a takeover from the CELL corporation. Crysis Remastered sees Prophet and his squad of Nomad, Psycho, and the rest of their team investigating strange unearthly occurrences on Lingshan Islands. Crysis Remastered 2 picks up roughly 3 years later following an alien invasion in New York City and has you step into the role of Alcatraz as he dons Prophet’s suit after Prohet is infected by the alien virus. Crysis 3 Remastered follows 24 years after the events of Crysis 2 and has you back in the suit as Prophet seeking to take down the villainous CELL corporation and uncover the revelations of the visions from the Ceph.

Gameplay

The gameplay across the 3 titles all hold up rather well as they are for the most part traditional FPS games. You have your standard FPS controls with some added flair of being able to utilize the suit’s abilities to active a stealth cloak, hardened armor, speed sprinting, and more. The customization options for the guns is insane and is something that you’d wonder why modern shooters don’t incorporate that functionality to this degree.

The sandbox nature of the gameplay allows you to approach each and every situation however you’d want. Want to go into a situation guns blazing? Feel free to do so. Want to approach situations utilizing stealth and the environment to go undetected? There’s nothing to stop you from cloaking yourself and performing some sneaky sneaky and utilize some hacking to turn the tides in your favor. The options are only limited by your creativity (or lack thereof). All 3 games are roughly 8 hours long and with the exception of the first game are fairly linear. Crysis 1 will have you in a tropical jungle while Crysis 2 will have you in a concrete jungle/cities and Crysis 3 offers to mix it all together.

Graphics

Given that these are remasters, you can expect some visual and performance upgrades to give you the best experience. When these originally came out on consoles, they ran rather poorly with muddy low resolution graphics and choppy framerates. This remaster fixes a lot of that (although not entirely) with Crysis 2 and 3 running buttery smooth with you having the choice of 3 modes to choose from being Quality, Performance, and Raytracing (PC for RT only).

Crysis 1 is the headscratcher of this collection as it has the least amount of upgrades and optimization ad is probably why we didn’t get it’s expansion Crysis: Warhead. Crysis 2 is from the ground up redone with new assets and made all the more beautiful for it with its 4K HDR presentation across the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X and PS5/XSX and PC. On PS5 and XSX the game runs at 4K 60fps while on all PS4 and Xbox One consoles you get 4K stable 30fps. Crysis 3 carries over all the enhancements from Crysis 2 Remastered along with some additional enhancements to the gameplay such as hacking, better stealth options, smarter AI, and the bow.

Downsides

The main downside is the lack of improvement to the terrible AI in the game. It’s very reflective of the era’s these titles came out in which really stand out in 2021.

The lack of raytracing on PS5 and XSX is baffling along with the lack of faster loading times considering those consoles have such fast internal storages.

If you’re expecting a whole new experience with this remaster then you will be let down as this is not more than an asset upgrade with some performance tweaks.

The Wrapup

The Crysis series was always a franchise that clearly was meant for PC and struggled heavily to run on consoles. Now that we have the Remastered Trilogy, we are able to experience these epic games with a fresh coat of paint and optimized performances giving you some of the most fun and functional shooters. If you’ve always wanted to dive into the world of Crysis, then now is the time to dive headfirst into it with the Crysis Remastered Trilogy!