The distant future of 2020 is here! We don't have nanosuits, as Crytek predicted, but we do have Crysis Remastered, 13 years after the original release in 2007. Unfortunately, as a big fan of the original game on PC... this is at best, a flawed representation of Crysis, and at worst, straight-up unfaithful to the original.

Story time! Crysis for the PC was the game that got me into custom building PCs for video games. Up until that point, I had a computer and a Wii for games, but the computer was more an issue of economy than anything else. Even a slow rig could play classic old Star Wars games like Knights of the Old Republic, Republic Commando, Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast, and so on. But when Crysis came out, everything from the graphical fidelity, to the wide variety of playstyles in open, sandbox levels got me excited enough to save a lot, a lot of allowance money over the next year or so to build a PC that could run it. It took until 2008, but I did it, and surprisingly, the game completely lived up to even my unreasonable teenage hype. It ran at 1280x1024 at Medium at 30 frames per second (not stably, mind you), but it ran, dammit. And since then, every time I upgrade my PC, Crysis is one of the first games I boot up. As of right now, in 2020, my GTX 1070 and i7-6700k with oodles of ram (64 GB 3200 mhz to be exact, overkill, I know) can run everything at highest settings at 1440p at... 40ish frames per second? (It's the anti-aliasing solution and core utilization. Turning the AA down to 2x doesn't look much worse and makes it run much smoother.) Graphical benchmarking aside, the gameplay holds up as well, offering a playground of opportunities to screw with the AI, one of the rare shooters that's more fun the less actively you pursue the critical path.

So, understand, then, when I talk about Crysis: Remastered, I talk as someone who has played the original dozens of times, and pretty recently, so my impressions are (slightly) less likely to be rose-colored glasses in terms of graphics and gameplay. I'm not super technically savvy about graphical technologies, so I can't get into the weeds about the LOD-popping and volumetric lighting changes other fans noticed about the remaster right away. But I can speak to whether this is faithful, holistically, to Crysis 2007.

Speaking as that uber-fan, it is not faithful. In fact, it's incredibly disappointing. Now, are the changes I'm going to talk about big enough to deter someone who has never played the game before? Of course not. Crysis is still relatively intact here, and someone who hasn't played the original will probably have way more fun than I did. But if the goal of a remaster is to preserve a classic, warts and all, Crysis Remastered falls flat on its face.

One more note before I get into my impressions here -- I've only played the first level so far. I can't speak to how specific levels have been treated, though apparently the mission "Ascension" has been removed, much like every other recent port of the original. I would play more, but (in classic Crysis fashion) I'm in the middle of a full PC rebuild, and I want to see what the remaster has to offer on a beefier machine. So whenever I can get my hands on a 30-series NVIDIA GPU, be it weeks or months from now, I'll check out the rest of the game and let y'all know what I think. So this is very much just talking about the core gameplay and graphics, less about level specifics. Cool? Cool.

Let's start with the good. I think the extra time they took with the PC version paid off, and the graphics are gorgeous. It runs reasonably on mid range PCs, the global illumination and texture work is improved, and the water in particular is just gorgeous. There is raytracing in this as well, and the footage I've seen on PC looks good, but turning it on my home machine turns the game into a slideshow, so... I'm just going to have to take other people's word for it. Folks who played the original might not remember, but a lot of the 2007 game had a weird gray/brown tint over everything, because, you know, 2007. Crysis: Remastered, however, has a much wider color palette, greener greens, bluer blues in the ocean, etc. I dig it, big Far Cry (the original, not this open world crap) vibes. I also enjoy some of the changes they've made to the nanosuit powers -- Speed mode now lasts longer than .5 seconds, cloaking gets you further now, but in return enemies seem much more sensitive to your movement, proximity, and noise while you're cloaked (on Delta difficulty, at least, what I started my playthrough on).

This is also a small thing, but Crytek kept the HUD options from the original PC game. You can still change the HUD color from Green, to Blue, to Orange, to White. You can also change the reticle from a few different options. It's small, but it's these tiny details I liked so much back when I first played Crysis, and I'm glad to see them back. Unfortunately, at least as of when the game first launched, changing the HUD colors wasn't affecting the in-game UI, just the pause menu and main menu.

Ugh. And this brings me to my many complaints with Crysis: Remastered. This is a game that gets about 80% of the way there, and then throws the last 20% in the air for seemingly little reason. It's buggy -- in the first level alone, I saw a boat stuck on a rock revving infinitely with its nose tilted up in the air, a Korean soldier crouching and uncrouching infinitely (though if I recall that bug may have been in the original as well, and at that exact same spot in the map -- LEGACY!), guys clumped up stuck in walls, guys voluntarily leaving boats in the middle of water despite enemies instantly dying in water -- it's just not a polished experience. This is not mentioning some of the issues on Xbox Series X and PS4. But, bugs aside, it makes lots of tiny changes that seem insignificant, but add up to an experience that doesn't feel like the original for a returning player.

Take for example, the nanosuit powers. It defaults to Crysis 2 style console-friendly "press a button to Armor mode and constantly deplete power" nanosuit controls, as opposed to the original, which lets you use Armor at all times with no depletion unless you're actually taking damage, kinda like the shields in Halo. Fortunately, you can go to the original setup, which also enables the MMB power wheel like the original (yay)! Unfortunately, even if you do, enabling Armor mode puts this garish Crysis 2-style hexagon UI over 2/3 of the screen, covering most of the gorgeous scenery. So I found myself, even in just 45 minutes, changing my playstyle to avoid Armor mode as much as possible. Also, you can no longer change Nanosuit modes while in a vehicle, which doesn't seem like a big deal, but this breaks a lot of sandbox-y shenanigans (my favorite being getting into a truck, ramming it into an enemy base, but jumping out at the last second in Cloak).

The new Speed duration, which is nice in regular gameplay, also breaks certain scripted events. SPOILERS for a 13 year old game, I guess, but there are aliens, and your first glimpses of them are intentionally brief in the original. As of Remastered, however, with the new, more powerful Speed mode, you can see the aliens head on in the first level (plus some Koreans awkwardly falling over and dying, as this scene clearly wasn't meant to be seen this close up), or you can even run past them entirely and not realize you missed anything.

Another seemingly aesthetic change that really bums me out is the new weapon sound effects. Again, not a big deal, but I've played the game for a while, and the FY71 in particular has a very distinctive clanky weapon report when you shoot it. This, and all weapon sound effects (with the exception of the shotgun, it seems) have been changed. Boo.

At this point, I was really confused as to why these changes were made. And then I remembered something Digital Foundry reported while discussing the Switch version... this whole thing is based off the console port of Crysis in 2011. (Which made these UI changes, nanosuit changes, and sound effect changes.)

Why?

Being in development myself, I know why, or at least an educated guess. Crysis Remastered is targeting every platform known to humankind (PC, Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch) and the console versions will definitely take the optimizations from the 360 and PS3 versions. So why double your work (probably more than double) by building off the PC version on just one version of the game? Makes sense, economically.

It's also totally antithetical to the spirit of the original game.

And that's the entire experience of Crysis: Remastered, for a fan of the original. It's 80% of the way there, but the last 20% is unavoidable. I really hope this game is moddable, as one or two tiny changes here would get rid of most of my problems. This might sound like a lot of nitpicking, but I'm only nitpicking so much because so little is different. In an era of Resident Evil 2, Final Fantasy 7 -- ambitious remakes that do a lot of work to bring classics onto modern hardware, Crysis does too little, and what it does, it messes up. I like the graphical improvements, and I'll still check it out when I finish upgrading my computer, but honestly? After playing Remastered, I booted up the original... and now I kind of want to just play that.