Crysis 3 Review

Sandbox gameplay has been reduced and partially replaced with a poor hacking mini game. You won’t be surrounded by light ground vehicles, deciding on whether to destroy, escape or take them over. Despite all the delicious water, there are no boats to seize and pester enemies with. Aircraft are the only vehicle reinforcements and they can’t be expropriated. Instead of the vehicle sandbox, several turrets can be hacked in a similar fashion to the unpopular shooter, Syndicate. These turrets attack enemies but are usually destroyed in seconds. You might need to hack through mine fields as well. The hacking mini game is as fun as putting your hand in an industrial paper shredder. It’s hard to see how this simplistic, 2D mini game made it through the initial design stage. The hacking doesn’t belong in Crysis 3 and fails to make up for the reduced vehicle sandbox freedom.

The bow is overpowered in the campaign but well balanced in the multiplayer

A major change to the stealth gameplay comes via the addition of a powerful compound bow. This ancient weapon of war is capable of taking down nearly all enemies with a single arrow in complete silence. Firing the bow causes no drop in precious Nanosuit energy. It’s limited only by the number of arrows you can carry. Nine arrows are plenty when you can recover them from dead bodies or walls. If you are careful, and use the visor to tag arrows, you will have a constant supply. The bow renders all other weapons superfluous when playing stealth. You’ll rarely have to worry about line of sight or energy with the Bow. Just turn on cloak, stand in the open and unleash arrows with reckless abandon. The bow is satisfying, but its relative power takes some potency from the rest of your arsenal.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still a mixed bag in terms of tactics. They have a general propensity to put themselves at unjustifiable risk. Alien AI is less predictable, although not necessarily smarter, than their human counterparts. If you kill a human enemy silently, guards will proceed to the area one-by-one based on proximity. You can eliminate half a dozen enemies by remaining in the same area and letting them come to you one at a time. If a guard does spot a body, and isn’t instantly killed, additional backup will spawn in the surrounding area. Sometimes the reinforcements come via helicopter, but usually it’s just out of view. The lazy spawning and strange tactics are part of the problem with the AI.

Exceptional visual acuity from AI leads to undesirable combat for stealth focused players. They spot a portion of your uncloaked Nanosuit from 100m while you are crouched in shadow. They see you clearly through the long grass or behind bushes. If enemies are close, and they usually are, they immediately open fire. You aren’t on a covert mission trying to sneak through enemy patrols. You are cloaking through a warzone and enemies will shoot everything on sight, excluding the wildlife. The hide and seek gameplay is limited when the AI states are black and white. Without your x-ray visor, enemies will see you well before you even know they exist. A slower, fairer detection system would have improved gameplay and generated prolonged encounters.

You can be just like the AI and throw grenades at your feet too

The AI is still prone to glitches like its predecessors. They have a tendency to rub against objects they are taking cover behind. Don’t be surprised if you hear enemies gyrating against boxes while you are trying to locate Intel. One enemy rubbed so hard that he propelled himself 30 feet into the air. Enemies don’t care about friendly grenades and they still throw them poorly. One accidentally killed himself and two friends by dropping a grenade at their feet. None of them attempted to escape the imminent explosion on the hardest difficulty. The AI can also shoot you through solid objects and they still stare at walls when inactive. The AI in the franchise has always been problematic, but Crysis 3 makes some issues more obvious.