REVIEW: ‘Crysis Remastered Trilogy’ Feels Better Left in the 2000s (PS5)

The Crysis games were famous for their inability to work on lower-end computers when they came out. The “can it run Crysis” meme is extremely popular, and so the goal for the Crysis Remastered Trilogy was for developer Crytek to get it working well on all current platforms. The problem is, the games still feel like they are over a decade old and might not have been worth the effort.

The Crysis Trilogy takes place over the span of 27 years, from 2020 in the first game to 2047 in the third. All three are first-person shooters from the perspective of different soldiers fighting for the United States. They feature enemies like North Korea, a private military contractor group known as CELL, and aliens known as the Ceph. The entire story told throughout the three games honestly felt generic, but part of that is likely because of how old the games are (the first Crysis released in 2007). Still, nothing story-wise excited me, so be aware of that if you’re looking for anything more than generic sci-fi.

The gameplay for Crysis has a reputation for being fast-paced and fun. That may have been the case when the games were initially released, but to call the gameplay unenjoyable would honestly be an understatement. The mechanics can be interesting, but enemy AI was finicky at best, and there were constant stuttering issues with the aim. I even had moments where shots that should have been direct hits from almost right next to the enemy went straight past them without doing any damage. There are also way too many stealth sections, and the enemy detection feels like it hasn’t been updated since 2007. In fact, I’d say none of the gameplay feels like it was touched up at all. Remastering a game can’t just be a visual endeavor; it’s imperative that gameplay also feels like a current-gen game if a remaster is going to work.

The biggest reason the outdated gameplay felt so frustrating is because the game keeps urging you to use your nanosuit abilities and engage with enemies while simultaneously forcing you to hide behind walls and move as slowly as possible. If I’m going to have a cool suit with lots of abilities, I need to be able to rush into combat and actually have fun with it. Instead, I felt forced to play at a snail’s pace, and combat was absolutely awful. I dreaded every encounter with enemies, and no amount of changing tactics made it feel anything other than terrible.

Not everything about the Crysis Remaster Trilogy is bad, though. The original games had trouble running on most PCs because of the incredible visuals, and on that note, Crytek really hit a home run. Every single second of the game looks immaculate, and I was amazed at the detail in every location. It might not be the most detailed or beautiful game, compared to games that have been released over the last few years, but considering the age of the games again, it felt like the remaster does an excellent job of making the visuals feel modern. The visuals weren’t enough to make me overlook the bad gameplay, but it was nice to enjoy at least looking at the environments around me while struggling to get through some of the more tedious sections.

My biggest issue with the Crysis Remaster Trilogy is that it only feels halfway remastered. Nothing was updated to modern standards except for the visuals, and that is a huge problem. Remasters like the Spyro and Tony Hawk ones work so well because the gameplay is smoothed out and plays like a modern game. Unfortunately, that oversight (or failure, if they really did try to update it from the originals) makes it impossible to recommend the beautiful-looking collection to anyone other than hardcore fans of the original games. I really wanted to enjoy these games that were so positively talked about when I was younger, but sadly they didn’t come anywhere close to living up to the hype with this remaster attempt.

Crysis Remaster Trilogy releases on October 15th  on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S\X.