Crysis Remastered is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Crysis starts by quite literally throwing you onto a North Korean island in which you are sent for a seemingly simple rescue mission. Unfortunately, not all is quite what it seems. You and your team are equipped with nano suits that give you almost superhuman powers to take down the enemy and complete the mission, sadly the alien menace isn’t going to make it easy for you. The story is unchanged obviously from the first release and it’s still interesting the alien presence and being deep into jungles at certain points gives it that predator movie feel, like where are they? Am I being watched? The story and set pieces still hold up today and it was fun revisiting it. I never thought the narrative was anything majorly special at the time but it is one that ticks all the boxes in the right place.
The gameplay remains mostly the same though on the PC version for some odd reason the shortcut to suit modes has been removed and now the suit reacts to actions you take if you sprint it instantly goes into the speed setting, remain still it’s set to strength, Q is armour and E is invisibility. I didn’t mind this really at all, if anything it made everything stream much faster so I could quickly sprint, do a superhero jump and landing and cause complete chaos with the destructible environments. Nothing more fun than picking the enemy soldiers up and throwing them at a house. The FPS gameplay hasn’t been changed and I do feel it could use a tweak or two to feel just a little heavier, combat feels good but not great, it feels a bit off and unimpactful and I just wish it was that much more DOOM like. The suit powers are where Crysis shines and lives up to its sandbox feel, this suit encourages you to take missions in the way you want, you can do it stealthfully and the stealth works well, you can play tricks with the invisibility options it’s great fun, or go in full Rambo mode with armour on and weapons firing. If you fancy throwing objects at everyone to kill them or blowing everything up, go for it, Crysis encourages experimentation, it will either work or it won’t. Top tip, driving into buildings works. Fighting the aliens is also still as fun as it was before.
Sadly graphics is where the Crysis Remaster falls, my PC should be able to handle this on at least very high 1080p RTX off with a 2060 RTX graphics card, sadly my PC struggled and I had to mess around with the settings quite a bit. It doesn’t make sense to me even with the upgrades but it seems to have taken the CPU issues over into this game and I can’t tell whether it was to restore the age-old will it run Crysis thing or this is a very simple port job. It’s really sad because I remember Crysis looking like the bee’s knees and now it feels like not enough love was put in. I did enjoy exploring again and the graphics and design do hold up enough to warrant a purchase, it just felt like this was going to be much more than a simple reskin and sadly it just doesn’t work overly well right now. Luckily though the team are fixing it so it won’t be left like this at all. I have to give them points for at least acknowledging the issues and committing to fixing them. The sound design is great in some areas, the music sends you back in time to when we first put this game on our rigs all those years ago and its nice to hear, unfortunately I did suffer a few sound bugs but nothing really that interrupted the flow of the game.
Verdict
Crysis Remastered isn’t overly expensive and I feel it is worth the purchase due to this, it’s a simple fun game that lets you take on missions how you want. Unfortunately, though the graphics are where it is let down, it should not require a monster PC even with the graphics upgrades, luckily this issue has been acknowledged and will be fixed but sadly I was quite disappointed with the way the graphics ran on a fairly decent graphics card. I give a 7/10 reason being that the game itself is still fun to revisit, I hope we get more Crysis down the line, it could have used more upgrades in certain areas but I think that it’s good enough for a remaster status, it just needs some tweaks and fixes.
7/10
Nerdy Bird Games 