Crysis Remastered Gameplay Preview

I’ve only played the original Crysis for roughly ten minutes before quitting and the same goes for Crysis 3 as well so my memory of the series is very limited, faint, and foggy. Going into Crysis Remastered with a fresh perspective has yielded some interesting results for me, the game was fun for me!

Now don’t get me wrong, there were definitely parts of the game that were very frustrating, and in my honest opinion, straight up poorly designed, but as a whole the game still holds up under the test of time. There’s a nice ebb and flow to the combat, switching between cloak and shield at the necessary moments, popping in and out of cover to take out enemies, and using the landscape and level design to your advantage. When you clear a level successfully, it felt pretty satisfying to me.

The combat is also very difficult if you have no cover. For a soldier who is supposedly wearing a very high tech suit you sure do die very easily and quickly. It would have been nice to see more tweaks to the difficulty settings so that the easiest mode was much easier and the most difficult even more punishing.

While the game still looks great, the lighting was very flat for the remaster. I know the original game is 14 years old as of this writing and all the tech in the game is certainly impressive considering the original release date but it did break the immersion. The lighting made everything look unnatural.

The enemy AI is also very inconsistent. Sometimes they will spot you across the map and snipe you even when cloaked, and other times they will be shooting into the air even when you are standing right in front of them. I don’t know if this is accurate to the original game but it made it feel very dated and unpolished.

The narrative is pretty par for the course action science fiction and is serviceable. Despite all of these rough edges, the core game play still provides for a fun time. There are definitely games that look, play, and feel better since the past 14 years but Crysis provides an interesting study of what was considered peak game design back then.