Posted on: October 20, 2025
DudeWilson
Verified ownerGames: Reviews: 4
Great game, mediocre remaster
Crysis is a fantastic single-player game. It's been one of my personal favourite first-person shooters since its original release in 2007, and I've been championing its cause for 18 years, urging others to try it for themselves, and I've always challenged the ridiculous notion that Crysis is just a fancy tech demo for CryEngine. With that being said, it does have some shortcomings. How much those shortcomings affect you is going to largely depend on personal preference and what you're looking for in a first-person shooter. At the very least, I strongly encourage people to play Crysis for themselves and to come to their own conclusions. I still think that Crysis is an objectively good game, no matter which way you cut it, personal preferences be damned. Unfortunately, this remaster has some serious issues, and unless you're here for the latest graphical bells and whistles such as raytracing, then I'd personally recommend to just go with the original PC version instead. Before I get into the problems unique to this remaster, I want to go over some of the core issues Crysis has in general. For one, it's kind of short. If you play through it on easy or normal difficulty, then you could easily breeze through it in about 8-10 hours. This can be stretched out longer by playing the game on its higher difficulty levels, or if you really take your sweet time playing through it. That being said, I am a firm believer that a good and concise game, that doesn't overstay its welcome, is better than an overly long one that starts to feel like a chore. Case in point: Crytek's first game, Far Cry, feels like it could have left a few of its more frustrating levels on the cutting room floor, leaving more room for the levels that focus on what the game does well to shine. It seems that Crytek learned this lesson from Far Cry, and what we have here with Crysis is a much more streamlined game, that ends well before it becomes tiring. If anything, Crysis is almost too short and leaves a little bit to be desired. The second part of the game goes by especially fast, but it's a roller coaster ride from start to finish. Crysis is split into two distinct parts, the first of which roughly comprising the first two thirds of the game's total playtime. It has a semi-open, linear sandbox style structure that gives you clear mission objectives but lets you go about completing them in whatever way you see fit. You'll spend the entirety of this portion of the game fighting against North Korean soldiers throughout a series of tropical islands, not too dissimilar to the original Far Cry, but this time you're equipped with a variety of powers thanks to your state of the art nanosuit, which offers you four unique powers to play with: armor, speed, strength, and cloak. Each of these suit powers helps you out in different ways, depending on the situation. In one playthrough you can go through it picking people off at a distance with sniper rifles, and in another you can run around stealthily punching everyone in the face. You can even sneak up on people and throw chickens and barrels at them, or go into speed mode and tackle soldiers like you're an NFL linebacker. Crysis truly sets you free like a kid in a sandbox and tells you to create your own fun, and the gameplay here is as varied as your own creativity. I'm usually not particularly interested in create your own fun kind of games, but it absolutely works for me here. Two thirds through the game there's a massive shakeup that completely changes the course of the experience until the credits roll across the screen. Gone are the semi-open environments against North Korean soldiers. You'll now find yourself going through a series of significantly more linear environments against a brand new enemy type. This part of the game has generated quite a bit of discussion, with more people seemingly disliking it than appreciating it for what it is. Personally, I've always enjoyed the latter half of Crysis' campaign. It's like a roller coaster ride from start to finish that serves as a nice palate cleanser and throws some pretty beefy guns at you to play around with. The suit powers take a back seat here, and the final part of the campaign is almost entirely focused on straightforward action. There's even a non-combat section at the very end of the game, with some light exploration and character interaction, that makes me wonder if Crytek had originally planned for more immersive character interactions, and environmental exploration, before cutting it out of the final product. Moving on to what's actually wrong with this remaster: to put it simply, Crysis was originally designed exclusively for PC, and this remaster is based on the console port of the original Crysis, rather than the original game. This means that this version of Crysis is based on a fundamentally inferior version of the game at its core. The console port featured vastly downgraded environmental destruction and details. Crytek have done some serious patchwork on this remaster since its original release, to try and bring it more in line with the original; but, honestly, I can only attribute them basing this remaster off the console port as sheer laziness. This version also defaults to a reworked control scheme, that more closely matches Crysis 2 and 3, that's clearly designed for controllers rather than keyboard and mouse; thankfully, the original controls can be restored in the menus. If you migrated to PC from consoles and prefer playing FPS games with a controller, then you'll probably want to stick to this remaster, but for everyone else, I can't help but feel like this version is a massive downgrade. The game was designed around its original control scheme, and I feel like playing it with the new one fundamentally alters the experience to play like something different from what was originally intended. This version also lacks quicksaves, which were present in the original, making it so that you have to solely rely on checkpoints to save your progress. Graphically this remaster looks quite good, but it also seems much blurrier than the original, and the colour palette is significantly more vibrant and oversaturated than the original game's more muted colour palette and photorealistic aesthetic. This doesn't really affect the game other than personal preference, but I wish there was an option to choose between the two colour palettes, as I'm generally not a fan of remasters that completely change the art direction of the original games they're based on. Some of the weapon sound effects have also been changed and they are all noticeably worse. The remaster also lacks customizable difficulty settings, with the North Koreans speaking Korean still being locked to the hardest difficulty. This, along with the other modifiers, should just be a selectable option when starting a new game. These kind of oversights, in what is supposed to be the definitive version of Crysis, simply contribute to the various things that make this remaster feel lazy. I also experienced crashes, game-breaking bugs that locked my progress and forced a reload, as well as the ending credit music bugging out shortly after starting and replacing itself with the default menu theme, which was pretty anti-climatic after finishing the game. If you're just here to play Crysis and this is the only version of the game you have, then by all means have at it. You're still getting Crysis, but if this is the only version of the game you ever play, you may be left wondering what all the fuss was about back in 2007. Personally, I wouldn't have purchased this on its own if it weren't included in the trilogy bundle, and I won't be replaying it again. The original Crysis was the absolute pinnacle of PC gaming and it deserves better than this weird, patchwork console port remaster. Despite the remaster's flaws, they don't completely stop Crysis from being an incredible game, but play the original instead if you can.
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