The landscape has changed pretty significantly for first-person shooters since the first Crysis demolished PCs in 2007. That year also saw the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a game which undeniably shaped the future of the genre, for better or worse, in its image. And with the continued success of games like it came dozens of also-rans and sequels. It's not enough for a first-person shooter to just have interesting ideas anymore; it has to execute on those ideas with confidence, crackerjack pacing and, most importantly, silky smooth gameplay. While Crysis 3 has some neat ideas at its core that might be enough to sustain hardcore genre fans, it's lacking in the confident and smooth execution that separates the wheat from the chaff in this competitive genre. 

That's due in large part to the game's aiming controls, which feel sluggish and slow compared to those of its peers. Even with the sensitivity hiked up, there's a weird sensation of sloth inherent to the gun movement, like aiming through syrup. Aiming down iron sights is painfully slow, too, and it takes a full second after you let off the trigger for the gun to exit the iron sights view. Responsive and quick, the gunplay is not.

You'll undoubtedly find yourself gravitating towards stealth, then, which is a more satisfying way to play anyway. Cloaking and sneaking through the New York City BioDome's tall marsh grasses and flooded streets is the element which most threatens to set Crysis 3 apart from its numerous peers; the sights and sounds of an overgrown metropolis are ones that are almost exclusive to this game, and the haunting atmosphere of a city taken back by nature can be truly humbling in the game's best moments. It's great stuff that I wish was pushed just a little more by the game's listless plot, which instead focuses to its detriment on cheesy dialogue and heavily telegraphed twists.

Sneaking past enemy patrols is most easily compared to last year's Dishonored thanks to the first-person perspective and the emphasis on manipulating environmental pieces to attain your goals. In Crysis, there are mines, turrets and laser trip wires lying about the environments which can be hacked to either disable them or turn them against your enemies. Hacking a turret to mow down a group of enemies is satisfying, if a bit overused by the end of the game's campaign. Of course, the option to go through the levels guns blazing is always there, but I always found the less straightforward paths to be the most rewarding, and the shooting's deficiencies were less noticeable when playing stealthily.

So while the sneaking is easily the most fulfilling part of the game, it's still not up to snuff with new genre standard's like the aforementioned Dishonored. There aren't enough visual cues built in to the environments for warning you when enemies are looking your way. Instead, the game relies on a Threat meter in the bottom left corner which fills gradually as enemies detect you. Since there aren't any arrows or onscreen indicators when enemies look your way, it can be hard to tell from which direction you're being spotted.

Crysis 3 is also a noticeably more linear game than its predecessors. While Crysis 2 was significantly reigned in from the large island of its predecessor, there was still a sense of openness to how you completed your objectives. That feeling is still present in about half of Crysis 3's scenarios, but the rest are heavily scripted and directed. I found myself accidentally deviating from the game's scripting on a few occasions without even realizing it, at which point I found myself at a loss for getting to the next area.

Your first encounter with the alien Ceph, for example, takes place in a small room filled with high grasses. Since I had been playing primarily stealthily up to this point, I immediately cloaked and used the grasses to hide myself, making my way across the room and to the door on the other side without being spotted. When I arrived at the door, however, I was surprised to find that it wouldn't budge. I then had to wander around the small room looking for another way out, only to realize five minutes later that the game expected me to enter into open conflict with the Ceph and kill them, and only then would it allow me to open the door. In this case, the game was actively restricting me from playing the way I liked to facilitate a sense of suspense, and it backfired.

Choosing your own path through the world may not be as big a deal in Crysis 3 as it was in the last two games, but a new skill tree allows for a greater breadth of character customization than ever before. It's a neat idea that you can actively upgrade your nanosuit with mods throughout the game, and each of the upgrades made a noticeable difference to my killing prowess. Unfortunately, the layout of the skill tree is a total mess. Mods aren't organized by type or effect, so if you want to play sneaky, for example, you'll have to sift through all of the available mods using the D-Pad to make sure you're not missing anything. The tree's sloppy grid-based layout looks like someone sneezed icons all over it, making upgrading a more annoying task than necessary. 

That process is a lot more streamlined in the game's multiplayer, which lays customization options out in what has become the standard "carrot-on-a-stick" method popularized by the aforementioned Modern Warfare. There's some surprisingly good fun to be had in the game's online arenas, which are all modeled after ruined sections of New York, and in the end I actually found myself wanting to go back to the multiplayer more than I did the campaign. That's thanks to some fun, Crysis-flavored twists on classic game modes that see players competing using the powers of the nanosuit.

My favotie mode is Hunter, which sees one player begin the round as an invisible, nanosuit-enabled soldier with a bow tasked with hunting down the other players, who embody regular C.E.L.L. soldiers. The feeling of being the Hunter is an empowering one, while facing off against a nanosuit with regular guns and body armor is appropriately nerve-wracking. Once a C.E.L.L. soldier is downed, he returns as a Hunter. The C.E.L.L. players win when the game timer times out, and the Hunters win when all C.E.L.L. players have been converted to Hunters. It's more or less Infection from the Halo or TimeSplitters games, but the fun of the silenced nanosuit breathes some new life into it.

Other modes include Crash Site, which is a battle over multiple control points, and the standard Team Deathmatch and Deathmatch stuff that's all but mandatory in a first-person shooter these days. Crash Site offered some fun moments, most specifically Ground Pounding a group of soldiers attempting to capture a point, but these three modes were largely standard in nature and deviated from the usual shooter path only in their use of nanosuit abilities, which adds a little bit of spice to fighting the other players.

It'd be folly to write a Crysis review without mention of the graphics, and the third entry in the visually intensive series reminds us why with stunning texture, shadow and modelling work. On a high-end PC, it's no hyperbole to say that Crysis 3 might just be the best-looking game ever made, from a technical standpoint. In an early-game cutscene, the camera zooms in on a soldier's face and you can see the individual pores in his sweaty skin. The grander details are all there, too, with foliage and crumbling stone impressively rendered and textured. New York's swampy wilds are impressively detailed, with ambient life such as deer and frogs bounding about as you creep through them. This might not be the best-playing game ever, but it's a visual tour-de-force that paints an exciting picture of the future of gaming.

In the end, most of my complaints with Crysis 3 are nitpicks. If you haven't burned out on first-person shooters just yet, this is most certainly another one of those for your collection, and one with a surprisingly strong multiplayer suite to boot. But sluggish shooting and shallow sneaking mean that there's always the stink of wasted potential hanging over the game's gorgeous swamps and streams. It may be conceptually ambitious, but the fact remains that Crysis 3 is just an average game with above-average looks.

Score: 7/10

This game was reviewed on the PC