CRYSIS 3 – Review

WIELD THE POWER OF THE NANOSUIT…

‘Some people are susceptible to epileptic seizures or loss of consciousness when exposed to certain flashing lights or light patters in everyday life. Such people may have a seizure while watching television images or playing certain video games. This may happen even if a person has no medical history of epilepsy or has never had any epileptic seizures.’ – Game Manual.

I don’t mean to start this review with a negative note, but all I wish is to bring to your attention how intense and rich graphics this game produces and the kind of gaming beast you require to enjoy this game. Every aspect of this game, the ruins, rusted rails, swamps, wrecked crafts, sound effects, cinematic brilliance between the various stages, aliens and just every minute detail of this game including the overgrown grass and landscapes bewitches you till completion of this game.

To start with the very basic: Hardware configuration. Before you are tempted to pick this 2 DVD pack which definitely will manage to grab your attention, see if your system configuration will support the high definition breathtaking graphics that the game demands. This game is a true PC crusher and what amount of over clocking and OS tweaking will be required to make your above average PC run this game cannot be told. If it does, go ahead and flaunt your machine, it passed the test.

However, don’t shy away from lowering your graphic setting. The game will still keep you amazed with its details.

This particular website I found pretty helpful in identifying my system’s compatibility with the game(Use at your own risk, of course!!):

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri 

Once you’re sure of the configuration, go ahead, pick that game up. Don’t buy it yet, read further. But before that check out the trailer below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK0YhfKqdaI]

Single Player

This intense first person shooting game, with the spectacular Nano suit loaded up with a Cloak (rendering you invisible to the enemy), energy shield (which absorbs much of the damage) and a lot more will keep your fingers on their toes, LITERALLY!! The much talked about ‘Bow’ with multi-functional arrows lives up to the hype too. With every trigger you feel the recoil, impact, aliens going down and your pounding heart. Nano suit combined with the players accessibility to every visible corner of the battlefield (which is very rare in other games) simulates your senses giving you lot many opportunities to experiment with your strategies and your game plans.

Throughout the game you feel like you’re actually in a suit. With all the zooming, suit’s visor, occasional need to stop for restoring your energy levels,  super jumps, sprints and power kicks; you actually feel powerful and the heat of the game. The game play is good and by that I mean it’s not too simple.

Get a glimpse of what I’m talking about:

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5NNkyDt65w&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dg5NNkyDt65w&has_verified=1]

 Irrespective of the high graphics, futuristic technology used, I found the game too easy (Playing in the Normal mode). Almost no enemy can size up to the kind of weapons you get to carry in the game. Although the aliens carry much better weapons, which you get to use too, they’re sort of dumb when it comes down to them being soldiers. They hardly notice the missed arrows you shoot at them, that land besides them and sometimes unallured to all the noise you make. The combination of cloak and bow makes the game all the more simpler, actually puts you in the God mode, for a while enabling you to pass by the sauntering aliens to the completion of the stage and hacking the turrets makes it EVEN more simpler. The kind of explosive power you carry can bring down helicopters but a patched wooden door seems to be ineffective against them (My problem with every game. Why don’t the developers ever notice that).

Multiplayer

Crysis 3′s multiplayer is way different from what I had experienced before.  Your CS training was in a different world altogether. The game is designed in a way to allow you to run fast, jump high, bring in the stealth and the armour modes on, giving you no reason to complain and why you cannot strategize to be the ultimate killing machine.  Managing and knowing how to effectively use your suit’s abilities means life or death in this battlefield. Not only must you manage three distinctly different suite configurations of mobility, armour and stealth but also your energy consumption along with the enemy team with similar abilities. Fast thinkers and quick decision makers will often find themselves coming out on top.

Apart from the game play various new features are what makes this multiplayer interesting. Number of weapons available are way more than what you get in campaign play, that will be unlocked as you keep levelling up, which is good, as you get something new at each level of your game. The games comes with 8 different multiplayer modes. Although I found some of the modes pretty chaotic, the Crash Site was the one that kept the dynamics on for me. However, no matter which one you play, the key to hack multiplayer is to be able to switch through the Nano suit’s settings on the fly, i.e. switch to the stealth and then to the armour mode and then off the armour mode to run fast or jump higher.

Although there’s a lot of learning and experimenting, it’s a lot of fun once you get in the rhythm of switching between the different modes of the suit (would mostly be like changing the car gears). This is where you feel the heat when running and hiding aliens and passing them by using the stealth feature in the campaign mode ceases to work. You will be found and you will be killed and the only way you can get away from that is by using your killer instincts.

Final verdict:

Throughout the play it feels that the storyline wasn’t given much importance which gives it a very ‘Unreal’ like experience. However, this is a remarkable game which gives you an out of the world experience. With all that technology and the player’s abilities, being a savior of the human race couldn’t get better than this.

The multiplayer mode may seem like just another shooter game, but the best features of Crysis 3 is it’s amazing graphics, the suit’s ability to adapt as per the player’s need and the customizability of the weapons that keeps the adrenal level high and your fingers dancing.