Crysis 3

I liked Crysis 2. It took a lot of the cool enemy tagging and freeform tactical combat fromCrytek's previous games and presented it in a more coherent way. It was an intelligently streamlined experience that, as a person that couldn't get into the first game's wide-open antics, split the difference between the first game and the more guided, rollercoaster-style take on shooter campaign design that was, at one point anyway, all the rage. Crysis 3, on the other hand, feels like a developer attempting to push its luck a little too far. It picks up where the previous game left off and doesn't make dramatic changes. For the most part, it's well-made, and on thePC it's still quite a graphical showpiece, but that doesn't make up for the prosaic nature of the rest of Crysis 3. Crysis 3 reunites Prophet, the nanosuit-wearing super soldier of record, with Psycho, the playable character in the old side-story, Crysis Warhead. In the years since that game, Psycho has been painfully yanked out of his nanosuit, and Prophet--whatever the heck he is at this point--has just been broken loose by Psycho and a ragtag group of rebels who are up against CELL, which is your typically evil corporation-slash-private-military-slash-toying-with-power-it-doesn't-understand. While the rebels are obsessed with CELL, Prophet's worried about the greater threat of the Ceph, the alien race he crippled in Crysis 2. With Prophet being, well, a prophet, it shouldn't surprise you that you'll spend more time in Crysis 3 fighting off the alien menace. The story hinges on your ability to care about Psycho and Prophet as characters, something that the previous games haven't exactly made a priority. As a result, the reasoning behind the action is straight-up bland, skirting dangerously close to the same "only One Man can save us from this Ancient Alien Threat" story that seems to drive so many different sci-fi trilogies these days.The action end of Crysis 3 is totally competent, with the same suit powers you saw in the previous game. The cloak lets you move slowly and quietly to get behind enemies for stealth kills, while the armor mode lets you get out of a jam when you get caught. This time around, Prophet can wield a bow, giving you another way to kill enemies while staying fully cloaked. If you're the patient type, the bow is overpowered, letting you trivialize many of the game's encounters as long as you're willing to back off and let your cloak energy recharge. If you're the gung-ho type, it's useless. The game also has collectable upgrade points that unlock perks across four different categories. The game takes the Call of Duty comparison a step further by offering upgraded versions of those perks that unlock when you complete in-game challenges. So you may have to get 25 stealth kills to make your cloak last even longer than it would normally, or perhaps your ability to tag enemies extends even further when you tag 25 enemies with your spotting scope with the basic version of the upgrade equipped. There are a lot of different options to unlock and use, but I found that the vast majority of them didn't fit at all with my style, so I had already selected and upgraded the optimal perks well before the game was over.