Crysis 3 Review: Amazing Graphics, Still a Benchmark Buster, Boring Gameplay 211
MojoKid writes "Let's get one thing clear up front. Crysis 3's graphics are absolutely stunning. Crytek's latest game doesn't raise the bar — it annihilates it. At the highest settings, Crysis blows Battlefield 3 out of the water, makes mincemeat of Max Payne, and makes the original Crysis — itself a graphics powerhouse — look more like the first Call of Duty. Crysis 3 really is that stunning, provided that you've got the graphics card to handle it. Like the first game, this title is capable of bringing even a high-end card to its knees. Everyone who worked in the artistic departments at Crytek, from character animations to texturing, deserves an award. The people who wrote the game's plot, on the other hand, don't. The game's design and some poor pacing decisions completely undermine what should be its greatest selling point. Crysis 3 could've been a great game but it feels like a science experiment. How much poor gameplay will players suffer through in exchange for utterly amazing graphics?"
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No manual saves (Score:4, Interesting)
I like this. It makes the game more challenging. You can't just safe at your own opportune moment. It changes your playing strategy. If you have a "save anywhere" game, that outright eliminates the need for cautious play.
Re:No manual saves (Score:2, Interesting)
If you want to play like this though, you can already with a game which features manual saves. Impose that restriction on yourself if you want, but having it imposed for everyone is ridiculous.
You still have to be cautious on a save anywhere game, it's just less frustrating if you fuck up. Moreso, a game with only checkpoints discourages experimentation. If it takes a single mistake to ruin 5 minutes of stealth gameplay and you can't save during that time to make a mistake less annoying, you'll end up gravitating towards just giving up and taking a regular assault approach to any situation because odds are you'll survive anyway and it's quicker. Less fun possibly, but it's also less time to get to the next checkpoint.
It's kinda like Apple not allowing side-loading of apps on their iDevices. They might argue it's "better" because of increased security, but some of us prefer the traditional means of installing apps from 3rd-parthy sources. We would like the OPTION at least; let people stick to the App store if they want, but at least enable 3rd-party installs as part of the OS. There's no technical reason why this cannot be done except for knowing what's best apparently. The game goes for these games which don't allow manual saves in my opinion. Having the option allows more freedom, and those who prefer to be constrained can do so themselves rather than being forced artificially.
(Not trying to Apple bash here for cheap points - just seemed like an appropriate comparison at the time).
Re:I feel pathetic (Score:4, Interesting)
When the CGI portion of frames for movies still take hours to render using a render farm, you know that it'd be impossible to get that kind of quality in real time on a small dinky mid tower. This is especially true if you consider that gamers want sustained 60+fps.
I'm always a bit surprised that games haven't moved to more mathematical models of graphics, i.e. NURBS instead of polygons, procedural textures instead of bitmaps, etc. But then again, most video cards are probably so optimized for the old way that going to mathematical models of computer graphics would probably result in worse performance and quality.
Re:I feel pathetic (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This link is applicable (Score:5, Interesting)
Certainly agreed on the original Crysis. I thought it was an absolutely awesome game for the most part, which suffered from having two particularly weak sections. First the "floaty" bit in the alien mothership, which would have been great as a quick diversion but ended up going on for far too long. And second the very final mission, on the aircraft carrier. Both, of course, were sections which discarded the game's usual open level design in favour of more traditional "corridor shooter" gameplay. Warhead was all the awesome stuff from the main game, minus the suck (though it was a bit short).
Crysis 2 wasn't great. I didn't absolutely hate it; I'd rank it above most of the other "Modern Warfare" style shooters out there by quite some way. But it certainly wasn't as groundbreaking as the original.
I beat Crysis 3 over the weekend and I think its quality as a game sits about half way between the first two. Aside from a few short sections, it's much less of a corridor shooter than Crysis 2; it's more a sequence of mid-sized areas strung together in sequence. Within those areas, you get a fair degree of freedom, with much less handholding than we had in Crysis 2. There's certainly much more of a stealth focus than in the last game.
In fact, most of the game's penultimate mission (there are 7 in total) is a single huge wide open outdoors area, with three "main" objectives that can be completed in any order you prefer (there's an obvious "first" one to go for, but it's much more finely balanced where you should go next) and a few optional side-missions to find. In other words, it's right out of the original Crysis. It takes maybe an hour to beat and is supremely good. The game then closes down again for its (fairly weak) final mission, but that penultimate mission gives a glimpse at what could have been.
The big problem with Crysis 3 is length. This is a short game. Probably no longer than Warhead, which was advertised and priced as an expansion. It's certainly quite a bit shorter than Crysis 2. It's really noticable that a huge proportion of the game's weapons only show up right near the end of the game, meaning that there's a lot of stuff in there that you barely get a chance to see. It reminds me of shooters from early in the current console generation, like the first Gears of War, where so much of the development time was going on the technology that there wasn't much resource left over to actually provide a decent length campaign. As the generation's gone on and the tech becomes much better known, games have gotten longer again, on average. If you take a slew of recent cross-platform releases; Resident Evil 6, Black Ops 2, Dead Space 3 - these are all significantly longer than other recent installments in their respective series.
It might be available on current generation console hardware, but the PC version of Crysis 3 makes me suspect that what we have here is the first true "next gen" game. These are the sort of visuals I'd be hoping to see from the PS4 and the 360's successor once people have learned the hardware a bit (shouldn't take long with the PS4 given the architecture, hopefully). And once again, the length of the campaign suffers as the focus goes on making the technological jump.