Crysis 3 (2013)

Well, I've played through the cyberspace tutorial and hopefully remembered most of the myriad controls. I've put all the settings to high and it seems to be running fine, but it still seems to have weird visuals, where you get bright white pixels on the edges of surfaces. I'm hoping it because I'm out in the rain and once I get indoors it'll go away...
Anyway, the game isn't particularly fun so far! I don't feel like I'm getting a chance to sneak around and come up with tactics. I'm in an action bubble of sorts but it's not the open spaces of Crysis 1 or Far Cry 1, it's all walls and stairs, so it feels like I may as well be in a corridor shooter anyway. This is just the first level, hopefully it'll get to some nice daytime post-apocalyptic open spaces soon.

I had to put it down to the easiest setting because it really does not give you an inch on the very first level. Really bad way to start the game, especially as I tended to coast through the rest of it. Anyway, generally it's fairly terrible. The white pixels thing went away after that first level, and the visuals are technically impressive (especially in the outside bits) but rather soulless - I got more of a thrill from the setting of Far Cry 1 in a recent replay because it's so well directed. The gameplay doesn't help either, because as with Crysis 2 they've basically abandoned the original loop of staking out an area, tagging the enemies and oh-so-slowly creeping your way around the place taking them out one by one (then maniacally rushing the last few and blowing a bunch of stuff up), so you don't get to sit there enjoying your surroundings, you're basically just sprinting past them the whole time. You can tag enemies and all that, but you're basically just play-acting as you just get a group of three enemies or so to take out from behind a crate before you trundle down the one path you need to take to get to the next glowy thing and watch as your control is taken away and some more stuff blows up. That's if you're not following Psycho through another five minutes of actual corridors as he bleats on about some plot point. (The story, incidentally, is absolutely abominable - clunkily told, interminably long and utterly boring.)

And the weird thing is it keeps getting worse as it goes. They just keep throwing more turret sections and boss battles and confusing cave sections and stuff at you. It's really bizarre how much this franchise misunderstands its own original strengths. I gave it six hours or so but gave up once I got to a boss battle with no checkpoints, just endlessly shooting a bit metal thing.

Rating: technically impressive visuals but no fun