I like games where one of the main enemies are the North Koreans. I don’t know why, I think it all started with Homefront because it was different. It was unusual to see a version of America that wasn’t an ungodly superpower. Yeah, it was as unbelievable then as it is now, but that never stopped Crytek back in 2007 when they released the first Crysis game. They created a series about secret super soldiers and one dim bloke controlled by me, punching walls with my newfound super strength. There are two things that Crysis is known for: Punching trees long enough means you can throw a whole tree at soldiers, and it was impossible to run on anything but a supercomputer back in 2007.

Anyway, 2020, they got that spot on, didn’t they? The first game came following the successful launch of a small series you might have heard of, Far Cry. A series where you go about a tropical island and shoot guns that are uninteresting, but that’s enough about what you are supposed to be doing with Crysis. Instead, the main mechanics of the game focus on your super-suit and the abilities it gives you such as super-strength, invincibility, armor, super-speed, and the last one that no one seems to be talking about. The main character has the ability to be spotted by a little Korean man with a gun bought from a Cold War Surplus store from three miles away.

The first game is nothing but an all-out war breaking out between the Koreans and the Americans. You are part of a small special unit that is (unsurprisingly) picked off one by one. Each side is trying to take advantage of the new sci-fi McGuffin, alien tech that’s millions of years old. Meanwhile, you are caught in the middle having to (at least in my experience) employ new-fangled guerilla tactics with your super-suit. You may use the suit’s invisibility to move behind enemy lines, tank the hits the best you can with armor, or the most fun option, literally running head-first into the enemy and throwing them at each other like cruel executive toys.

When you think of sandbox games that feature some kind of war, you probably think of Just Cause or the gang wars from GTA: San Andreas. This would be the first-person equivalent of that, and it is as shaky as you’d expect it to be. On both console generation ports of all three games remastered, there is no FOV slider and while a keyboard will allow you to move with WASD, the tilde key (which usually brings up console commands) won’t show up allowing you to alter it that way. A mouse also doesn’t work at all. In fact, the entire options menus for all three games are rather dire.

Much like the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition remasters, the options across the board are similar enough to previous console ports. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they are almost exactly the same. I do like the option to turn off head-bob and motion blur, two things I can’t understand being turned on by default in any game. Head-bob is like being able to stand stock still in a front-loading washing machine while there is an earthquake outside, it makes no sense whatsoever. While the game visually may have been remastered, no one thought to give the first game a good listen. Untouched since 2007, you can destroy a KPA hut to the point it is best described as a pancake, and still, you’ll find Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 hit as deafening as ever.

In the gameplay, you can see the first game aging. Gunplay (in particular) is rigid and emotionless, only made better by other mechanics or the ability to switch up your tactical outfits on the fly such as using suppressors, scopes, and other components. By far, it is not the most creative or fun take on offense even within the game itself, never mind how others have improved on the feeling of guns. Where Crysis (the series) shines is in its visuals, though of course, we’ve seen better than the remastered graphics through modern games. I don’t think anyone with a sane mind is going to complain about the looks of Crysis Remastered. 

Moving on to the second game, set in 2023, it feels like night and day. While the first game had level design that was as wide and open as you could imagine, Crysis 2 does what every game with guns has done for over a decade now. It is not as restrictive as Call of Duty or any of the quick hack jobs that are the corridor shooters filled with brown people or Russians, though it is a city. Specifically, you are in New York, the stock “I need to blow up a city with aliens” option of largely populated areas within the US.

To go from the wide luscious green and open island to quickly turn to a concrete jungle is jarring. Yes, with your new suit as a new character, you are told of options available to you throughout the city. The first felt like a sandbox, the second does not. However, a lot of the direction suggests all-out assault, and with the not-so-new-fangled cover system, it feels like something trying to fall in line with the typical shooters of the day (2011). Despite this bit of criticism, I do enjoy Crysis 2 and I am trying to work out if it is more or just more of the same.

The first game shows charm and naivety to what is yet to come. There is no cover shooting and if you try to take cover you’ll soon find out everything folds like a soggy digestive biscuit. The second game falls lock-step in line with the trends, concrete conflicts, and crawling through sewers while fighting bipedal super-soldiers. The second game improves on the gunplay because everything that the first game was doing so well has been ripped out. For example, you can’t rip a tree out by the roots and throw it at a helicopter when trudging along the FDR. It honestly feels like an entirely different game while retaining the super-suit, aliens, and some of the story.

To bang on a bit more about it, the first game felt alien when you finally get to that point of seeing them up-close. A little bit like War of the Worlds, but that’s fine. It fell into the theme of the cephalopod and the virus, their long tendril appendages will always be creepy. Then Crysis 2 makes the aliens nothing more than large blobs entangled in Huey’s Walker Gear, running around and jumping off the walls like a 5-year-old on sugar. While I believe this feeds better into the gameplay, as each one you kill gives you points to upgrade the Nano-Suit, it is a rather dull and drab design for what was so large and imposing before.

In itself, the second game is better in quality, while the first showed what could be done with the Cry-Engine. Crysis gave you an idea of being fragile, the whole world could crumble around you at any point. Every bit of cover you could find in the first game didn’t help much when Cruise Missile Koreans had perfect eyesight and Soviet guns with infinite range. A few years on, Crysis 2 somewhat early on makes you feel overpowered unless you just try to tank hits like a champ and test if Alcatraz really is a leaking bag of blood in that Nano-suit. On quality alone the second game found its groove amongst everything else doing the same thing, but the first had the ideas for something more interesting.

The third, set in the 2040s, returns a character previously and unequivocally dead to the starring role. I want to genuinely hold off that kind of a spoiler. However, I never found him that interesting in the first game or the second, and I don’t care for him here either. That’s all I’ll say about that. Crysis 3 was always the ugly unwanted step-child of the games: It is the one with the compound bow because they wanted to return to a game of Alien Vs Predator. That or someone saw Far Cry 3 on the horizon and quickly wanted to make lots and lots of money from everyone enjoying that much better game.

Piece together what you will from that paragraph, but something tells me I don’t like Crysis 3. I’ve just said it, but the first game felt like the world could crumble like a depressive on a Tuesday and it is always a Tuesday. Meanwhile, the second game makes clear that Alcatraz is held together by nothing more than American hope and optimism. I’m reminded of the line from Doctor Who‘s 50th Anniversary, “Americans with the ability to rewrite history? You’ve seen their movies.” Yeah, I’ve seen them depicted in games too, and this might spoiler what I said earlier, messianic super-soldiers who fought underpowered Koreans in the first game going from strength to strength. Only for the third game to return with the phrase perfect soldier, which is a Dalek: Encased in a tank of armor that evolves to the situation and kills indiscriminately.

It’s the usual PMC/Weyland Yutani/Umbrella Corp ideas of soldiers and tech being something they and they alone can harness. Meanwhile, one person can prophesize the upcoming threat. This is the ever clunky and always annoying way of doing a story. An issue accentuated by ham-fisted and uncomfortable dialogue with a bloke that is what you’d get if you put Danny Dyer and Jason Statham in a blender. The third game may try to hit the peak of the mountain when it comes to the threats from all sides, but with gameplay that doesn’t excite and ideas that are running dry, it lands with all the satisfying thud of a wet bag of vomit on concrete.

Nevertheless, I’ve got a feeling none of that really matters, you just want to know if the Remastered Trilogy is worth it. Yes, there is an improvement across generations with enhanced texture work, lighting, and overall ways of running the games. On 8th generation consoles, you might find minor blips of performance when it comes to loading or saving in chaotic areas. However, overall performance, as you’d expect with better hardware to utilize, is improved too. All this makes the Crysis Remastered Trilogy a must-have for those looking to return to two great games and whatever that third was supposed to be.

An Xbox One copy of the Crysis Remastered Trilogy was provided by Crytek for the purposes of this review.

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Crysis Remastered Trilogy

$49.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Crysis (1)'s collection of ideas to shake up combat.
• Improvements to gunplay in Crysis 2.
• Overall graphical improvements

Cons

• A lack of an FOV slider in all three games.
• What feels like steps backward to normal shooters with each game.