Crysis 3: Cloak and Clobber
Impressions after playing the first four missions in Crytek’s upcoming shooter.
Unlike many shooters, Crysis provides a reason for why you can survive getting hammered with bullets from five different enemies at once. Instead of being forced to believe your barely armored war veteran can magically heal all flesh wound by crouching behind a rock for several seconds, in Crysis, you wear a superpowered nanosuit. Granted the suit is a thing of total fantasy – a fusion of advanced technology and, well, aliens – but at least it’s some kind of justification for why you’re able to slay and survive as effectively as you do.
The suit is really the star of the game. It’s almost the only thing any character talks about and it helps differentiate Crysis 3 from other big budget shooters like Call of Duty that tend to focus on rollercoaster ride types of experiences. The functionality of the suit has changed over the course of the Crysis franchise, and Crysis 3’s version is more in line with Crysis 2 than the original game. You get two main active suit powers in Crysis 3’s story mode: armor and cloak. Both can be switched on and off rapidly, but you can’t have both active at the same time. Armor lets you take more damage before dying, so if you’re the type of player who prefers to just charge at enemies while frantically blasting shotguns and assault rifles, then armor should suit your play style.
Cloak is the more interesting ability as it lets you sneak around battlefields unseen. You can’t simply run through an entire stage with the power enabled and stealth stab every enemy, though. Maintaining cloak and actions like walking, running and jumping while cloaked consume suit energy, so it helps if there’s a spot nearby to take cover and regenerate energy between kills. In combination with Crysis 3’s new modifiable bow, it can be an especially lethal approach to battle.
Before entering any fight it’s a good idea to activate the suit’s visor. By scanning around every combat zone you’ll be able to highlight ammunition pickups, enemy positions and other potential threats such as automated turrets and land mines. Highlighting enemy positions is especially important because they remain visible through walls and you can see their state of alertness. If you’re spotted while shooting arrows and silenced weapons from afar, enemies will start to search around for you. The artificial intelligence also seemed better than in Crysis 2. Though enemies did occasionally take cover in odd locations as I cloaked around them, they at least never bunched up into jittering clumps of confusion as groups of enemies tended to do in Crysis 2 when it first launched.
In addition to scanning, hacking can also help make each fight a little easier. In some cases enemies will be clustered around automated turrets. With the visor up you can hack into the turret from a distance, take part in a simple twitchy mini-game and flip the allegiance of the gun. It’ll then spin around and start firing at enemies. Maybe it’ll take out a few enemies, maybe they’ll manage to run away. At the very least, it gives you a window of opportunity to charge in with armor up and take out any foes the turret doesn’t. You can pull the same long distance hacking trick with land mines. Complete the mini-game and they’ll no longer detonate under your feet and instead only burst when an enemy wanders nearby.
Depending on how you want to play, you can also modify your suit to emphasize particular aspects. You’ll find upgrade packs around Crysis 3’s levels that allow you to boost the suit’s statistics and learn new abilities, such as an air stomp. Though there are a number of different abilities, only four can be active at a time, so you need to decide which suit powers best complement how you want to attack in a given combat zone.
It seems you’ll have plenty of opportunities to use the abilities as well. Though Crysis has never been an open world shooter like Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2 and 3, it doesn’t confine you to a rigid straightforward path like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. It’s a blend, more akin to Halo, where there’s a definite exit and entrance to each battle area, but inside there’s room to move around and attack enemies from multiple angles. The combat zones of the first Crysis were vast enough to get lost in. For the second game in the series Crytek shrank down the explorable area so there wasn’t nearly as much room to explore and experiment. The same feeling of relative confinement isn’t as present in Crysis 3, where the size of the zones and number of enemies you encounter at a time are much larger. Environments still aren’t as big as the first Crysis, but seem large enough to allow for a fleeting sense of freedom and opportunity to make meaningful use of the suit’s powers.
As tends to be the case with Crytek games, Crysis 3 looks gorgeous on PC in story mode. As you run around in the nanosuit punting cars and high jumping and grabbing enemies by the throat before launching them off ledges, there’s also a tremendous sense of strength and weight in each action. Movement in Crysis 3 is not slippery and floaty, but heavy and fierce, which adds an extra amount of excitement when sprinting across a field filled with hostiles, hopping up onto a ledge, lobbing down explosives at enemies clustered beneath and then tearing a turret off its base to saw through any foes that remain. It takes a certain amount of skill to string all the suit powers together quickly and effectively, so that after some practice you’ll feel noticeably more powerful.
Set after the events of Crysis 2 in a forested version of New York City, Crysis 3 seems to be a blend of aspects of the first and second games in Crytek’s franchise. In many ways, it seems to shed some of Crysis 2’s weaknesses in favor of looking to the original Crysis for inspiration. If that holds true for the whole way through and Crysis 3 can stir up the same sense of awe-inspiriting spectacle that so strongly defined the first game, Crysis 3 may be yet another excellent though familiar shooter from Crytek.
Unlike many shooters, Crysis provides a reason for why you can survive getting hammered with bullets from five different enemies at once. Instead of being forced to believe your barely armored war veteran can magically heal all flesh wound by crouching behind a rock for several seconds, in Crysis, you wear a superpowered nanosuit. Granted the suit is a thing of total fantasy – a fusion of advanced technology and, well, aliens – but at least it’s some kind of justification for why you’re able to slay and survive as effectively as you do.
The suit is really the star of the game. It’s almost the only thing any character talks about and it helps differentiate Crysis 3 from other big budget shooters like Call of Duty that tend to focus on rollercoaster ride types of experiences. The functionality of the suit has changed over the course of the Crysis franchise, and Crysis 3’s version is more in line with Crysis 2 than the original game. You get two main active suit powers in Crysis 3’s story mode: armor and cloak. Both can be switched on and off rapidly, but you can’t have both active at the same time. Armor lets you take more damage before dying, so if you’re the type of player who prefers to just charge at enemies while frantically blasting shotguns and assault rifles, then armor should suit your play style.
Cloak is the more interesting ability as it lets you sneak around battlefields unseen. You can’t simply run through an entire stage with the power enabled and stealth stab every enemy, though. Maintaining cloak and actions like walking, running and jumping while cloaked consume suit energy, so it helps if there’s a spot nearby to take cover and regenerate energy between kills. In combination with Crysis 3’s new modifiable bow, it can be an especially lethal approach to battle.
Before entering any fight it’s a good idea to activate the suit’s visor. By scanning around every combat zone you’ll be able to highlight ammunition pickups, enemy positions and other potential threats such as automated turrets and land mines. Highlighting enemy positions is especially important because they remain visible through walls and you can see their state of alertness. If you’re spotted while shooting arrows and silenced weapons from afar, enemies will start to search around for you. The artificial intelligence also seemed better than in Crysis 2. Though enemies did occasionally take cover in odd locations as I cloaked around them, they at least never bunched up into jittering clumps of confusion as groups of enemies tended to do in Crysis 2 when it first launched.
In addition to scanning, hacking can also help make each fight a little easier. In some cases enemies will be clustered around automated turrets. With the visor up you can hack into the turret from a distance, take part in a simple twitchy mini-game and flip the allegiance of the gun. It’ll then spin around and start firing at enemies. Maybe it’ll take out a few enemies, maybe they’ll manage to run away. At the very least, it gives you a window of opportunity to charge in with armor up and take out any foes the turret doesn’t. You can pull the same long distance hacking trick with land mines. Complete the mini-game and they’ll no longer detonate under your feet and instead only burst when an enemy wanders nearby.
Depending on how you want to play, you can also modify your suit to emphasize particular aspects. You’ll find upgrade packs around Crysis 3’s levels that allow you to boost the suit’s statistics and learn new abilities, such as an air stomp. Though there are a number of different abilities, only four can be active at a time, so you need to decide which suit powers best complement how you want to attack in a given combat zone.
It seems you’ll have plenty of opportunities to use the abilities as well. Though Crysis has never been an open world shooter like Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2 and 3, it doesn’t confine you to a rigid straightforward path like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. It’s a blend, more akin to Halo, where there’s a definite exit and entrance to each battle area, but inside there’s room to move around and attack enemies from multiple angles. The combat zones of the first Crysis were vast enough to get lost in. For the second game in the series Crytek shrank down the explorable area so there wasn’t nearly as much room to explore and experiment. The same feeling of relative confinement isn’t as present in Crysis 3, where the size of the zones and number of enemies you encounter at a time are much larger. Environments still aren’t as big as the first Crysis, but seem large enough to allow for a fleeting sense of freedom and opportunity to make meaningful use of the suit’s powers.
As tends to be the case with Crytek games, Crysis 3 looks gorgeous on PC in story mode. As you run around in the nanosuit punting cars and high jumping and grabbing enemies by the throat before launching them off ledges, there’s also a tremendous sense of strength and weight in each action. Movement in Crysis 3 is not slippery and floaty, but heavy and fierce, which adds an extra amount of excitement when sprinting across a field filled with hostiles, hopping up onto a ledge, lobbing down explosives at enemies clustered beneath and then tearing a turret off its base to saw through any foes that remain. It takes a certain amount of skill to string all the suit powers together quickly and effectively, so that after some practice you’ll feel noticeably more powerful.
Set after the events of Crysis 2 in a forested version of New York City, Crysis 3 seems to be a blend of aspects of the first and second games in Crytek’s franchise. In many ways, it seems to shed some of Crysis 2’s weaknesses in favor of looking to the original Crysis for inspiration. If that holds true for the whole way through and Crysis 3 can stir up the same sense of awe-inspiriting spectacle that so strongly defined the first game, Crysis 3 may be yet another excellent though familiar shooter from Crytek.
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