Undercooked and With Misplaced Priorities
In Crysis 3, there's grass and bushes everywhere, but you can't hide in them. It doesn't work; enemies see through the vegetation. That's how stupid Crysis 3 is.
Your enjoyment of Crysis 3 will hinge on whether you care about the Crysis series's characters and transhumanist philosophizing. That's how stupid Crysis 3 is.
The game spends a lot of its energy on the plot and on drama. Remember that part in Crysis Warhead where Psycho finds some random soldier dead and then sits on a rock and weeps into his hands and you were like 'what the fuck is this'? That was a preview for Crysis 3.
I'd talk about the plot more, but I'm not even sure what the fuck happened. Ceph alpha ceph you need to move cell theyre sapping the alpha ceph oi they took me bloody suit im right focked mate. Whatever. It's junk.
Gameplay-wise it's basically Crysis 2 but more linear and with less to do. It's kind of a semi-open-sandbox-thing like the second game was, but that game did a somewhat decent job carting you from gameplay sandbox to gameplay sandbox, with each one having a lot of designed ways for you to reach your objective and alternate routes specifically mapped in. In Crysis 3 there are sandboxes dotted throughout, but you spend a lot of time just running through empty areas while some lady I can't remember the name of (Carol?) rambles on about 'comms chatter' and 'LZ's. The sandbox missions seem to not have nearly as many routes built directly into them... you see some air ducts to bypass obstacles early on, but most simply offer binary choices with little difference. Whether you're approaching the target from the left or the right, you're doing the same thing and seeing very similar sights on both. There's only one level, near the end, that rivals the size of a Crysis 1 map, but it is mostly barren and empty.
My biggest complaint is that the controls are incredibly clumsy. Prophet constantly gets stuck on rocks, which is not fun when you've got a rapidly depleting cloak meter. For Crysis 2 they took out the leaning mechanic from the first game, but replaced it with a pop-out cover system. In Crysis 3 even that is gone. In Crysis 2 you could climb up on ledges-- virtually any ledge, in fact. That feature returns in Crysis 3, but it is incredibly inconsistent which ledges are climbable. Many that look deceptively climb-able are not.
The equipment selection system on the PC is asinine. BOTH of your standard weapons are mapped to the 1 key. The 2 key does... nothing, I think, and the bow is on 3. That's ridiculous, and it means selecting the weapon you want quickly is impossible. There are powerful alien weapons available, but those are all 'temporary' in that you pick them up, expend their ammo, and then you ditch them. If you want to swap from an alien weapon to something else you have to toss the alien weapon onto the ground, use the other weapon, then pick the alien weapon back up. The "ditch weapon" key is also the interact key, so if you need to press a button or collect an ammo cache while holding the alien weapon Prophet will probably throw it on the ground. Then you have to pick it back up. This routine gets tiresome quickly once you realize that the entire last half of the game all but requires alien weapons. In fact the very last level has nothing but alien weapons. You're forced to constantly throw them on the ground and pick them back up, usually under duress. This is made worse when the weapons you drop bounce into pits and clip through the environment. Furthermore, in a baffling throwback to 1997, the game lacks a dedicated grenade-throwing key. You must equip the grenades independently of a weapon and throw them. More busywork while under fire.
And perhaps most damning of all: the game is very short. I don't binge-game and I beat it in three sittings. There are like 6 levels. The earliest levels are pretty short and tutorial-y with you being led by the nose by Scripted Psycho, and the final level is a dumb epilogue leading up to a boss fight... so there's maybe 3 or 4 maps worth of "Crysis"-style gameplay. Even those are pretty sub-par compared to Crysis 2, a game I wouldn't have called amazing to begin with.
With the length, the shoddy implementation of basic FPS features, the way the missions don't have many alternate paths, the fact that the early missions play pretty well but the later missions are sloppy, the inconsistency with stuff like ledge-climbing... I think this is a big ol case of Rushed-itis. There's a little bit of good gameplay in here. Very, very little of it. I would not recommend this game, even to fans of Crysis 2, and especially not to fans of Crysis 1 and/or Warhead. I don't think Crytek's made a big secret about the fact that they don't give a crap about Far Cry/Crysis 1 fans anymore. That much is clear from the fact that you can't hide in the bushes!
