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Crysis Remastered Review

In 2007 Crysis hit the shelves and set a new benchmark for PC gaming visuals. Skip forward 13 years and we see the arrival of Crysis remastered. Remaining true to the original, remastered is still a pretty game and the open world of Lingshan offers lots of scope to plan out your tactics in advance.

Crysis was famous for pushing PC hardware to its limits spawning the good old catchphrase ‘but can it run Crysis’ when discussing PC builds. Remastered maintains this reputation and even features a graphics setting called ‘can it run Crysis’ designed to push your rig to the maximum. Despite all of the hype around graphics I found remastered to be a bit visually underwhelming. Don’t get me wrong, the world still looks nice, there is a long draw distance and high-resolution textures but this was all completely ruined by framerates that insist on ping-ponging all over the place.

Check out the first 20 minutes of gameplay in the video below:

I’m playing on a fairly decent rig but when you hear Crysis Remastered project lead Steffen Halbig saying there isn’t a card available that can hit 30 FPS at 4K with this quality preset (he did say that before the RTX 3090 was announced) I have to wonder what the point is. The only way to get decent performance is to lower settings which makes the graphical improvements for nought.

Set on the island of Lingshan you take on the role of Nomad, a soldier equipped with a state of the art nano suit that gives the player lots of tactical options. Want to play it stealthy, use camo mode, want to go in all guns blazing, use armour mode. You can switch up styles on the fly too meaning you can adapt to any given situation quickly.

Crysis Remastered
Credit Crytek Saber Interactive

Whilst combat can sometimes be incredible it can also be dreadful at moments. Early on in the game, I was using the binoculars to scout out an enemy base with not one enemy to be seen. Upon my approach to the base, I clearly crossed some invisible line that would cause the enemy to spawn resulting in twenty or so enemies knowing my exact location in an instant. Why put an item in the game that should allow you to plan things from a distance if the gameplay is going to completely ignore this fact?

The enemy is also blessed with god-like aiming skills which only served for each combat encounter to degenerate into the same formula once engaged. It’s either a choice of hide and seek or go full-on berserker mode with armour mode and a shotgun, there was never any in between where I felt in control of the situation. Perhaps this is intentional as I’m sure real combat is like that but it did make things become repetitive very quickly.

Crysis Remastered
Credit Crytek Saber Interactive

To sum up, Crysis Remastered is a reasonable FPS game but has most definitely been taken over by more modern shooters. The Ascension chapter from the original is missing for some reason and there are no multiplayer options available. Crysis remastered is OK but no better than that. I’d recommend it if you want to take a trip down memory lane to see the improved visuals but otherwise, I’d leave it alone.

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Crysis Remastered was reviewed using a digital code provided by the publisher

Publisher: Crytek Developer: Crytek Release date: 18th September 2020 Reviewed On: PC Also available on: PS4, Xbox One

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Barry Stevens

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