Just last year, Crytek released a remaster of a Crysis that turned 13. In its original version, a game that would make any hardware geek hallucinate about how challenging it was and how good it looked. A graphic experience that quickly established itself in the history books and coined the now classic phrase “Can Crysis move?”. Players flocked for the graphics and stayed for the freedom, challenging enemies, atmosphere, and powerful action scenes. So many years later, the opportunity was perfect for another generation of gamers to hallucinate with a remake that would cement the studio once and for all as a pioneer of the genre.
As we already know, it didn’t end up like that. Not at all. Instead, the makers released a remastering that hardly differed from the original game. Granted, it had better textures, finer colors, and a better frame-per-second rate, but with a low introductory price, it ended up being more of a quick buck than anything really substantial. A whole year later, the trilogy was completely remastered.
In my opinion, Crysis 2 is the best game of the trilogy, and that feeling lingers even after the re-deal on the occasion of this relaunch. 11 years after its premiere, it remains an incomparable dystopian graphics festival that I claim was ahead of its time. The contrast couldn’t be greater, from the warm tropical latitudes to cold New York, ruined and full of shattered monuments. Sneaking through salt-soaked beaches here is an adrenaline-pumping battle for roofs, and the nanosuit very often makes the difference between life and death. The story is much more present and is about treason, conspiracy and corruption. At its core, the origins of the nanosuit and human survival.
The script would of course fit perfectly for that of a Hollywood movie, full of action, with lots of clichés, but perfect for the format. The only problem this time, like last year, is that there are hardly any differences to the original game.
We’re jumping two years into the future and have even sharper graphics. When the Crysis 3 trailer was released, people, including me, were impressed. Would Crytek be successful again for the third year in a row? The answer was clear: yes. Graphically, it was another great game, even if its production values were so high that the differences were less noticeable. Crysis 3 was good. I liked it almost as much as the second one, but it’s what weighed down the most over the years.
At the gameplay level, Crysis 2 was better. The story in Crysis 3 consisted mostly of duels of simple and bad jokes in the company of a rather annoying ally, Psycho, and the number of cinematic sequences was considerably larger than in the second. It was still a highly polished first-person shooter game and able to sweep the floor with most of its competitors, but it didn’t quite reach the same heights as the previous ones.
The remastering of Crysis 3 is, for logical reasons, the best-viewed of the three games. It’s clear that details have been fine-tuned here too, but I still have serious problems seeing what has actually been remastered here. It’s like going back to Crysis 3 again. The same game was released again. However, these are three really good games with around thirty hours of entertainment for the price of a single game.
However, these are titles that are already ten years old and of course this has to be included in the calculations. There aren’t any new expansions or anything new to add to the story in this trilogy, so they’re exactly the same games in terms of content as before, and while I like all three, it seems like a vague attempt to even make money if there are improvements, techniques with 4K graphics and HDR support. With this in mind, it is not easy to evaluate the set. If you’ve never played this series before, what better way to do it than with the Crysis Remastered Trilogy.
On the other hand, if you already have all three of the Crysis, there isn’t much reason to leave the cash on something that ends up being equal with a resolution update. Even so, as is often the case with a remaster, it’s a tough choice. What I really wished for was a head-to-toe remake of the first game with the latest technology. Or a Crysis 4, on request.
