Where Crysis 3 fails

With so many first-person shooters on the market today developers have to create new content to capture the audience while maintaing an original identity. Littered throughout the internet are fans constantly waging war against one another, explaining why one game dominates another for some non-existent title or prize. Call of Duty wages war with Battlefield and other titles, like Uncharted and Halo, are forced to join in by dedicated consumers. Now Crysis 3 has finally been released and I wonder, will it also be forced to compete in these flame wars? In the time I’ve spent with Crysis 3’s multiplayer I can soundly say no.

Before I continue I should mention that I absolutely loved Crysis 2 and Crysis 3’s multiplayer. If you’ve seen my Youtube channel you’ll notice that I have several videos showcasing that I’ve dedicated a reasonable amount of time within this competitive landscape. However after unlocking many new weapons and customizable options I found myself more agitated that satisfied. This is due to a moderate amount of taxing glitches and imbalances.

When first starting a match in Crysis 3’s multiplayer my first plight was hoping that the annoying graphic issues of the previous game were fixed. Surprisingly new oddities took the place of old ones. In Crysis 2 I would be constantly worried whether my gun would reload, during certain matches the animation that would cause the removal of my current ammo clip with another one would either be frozen or would perform the proper function without the animation leaving me expose while I wondered if I even reloaded.  Fortunately I never went through this in Crysis 3, instead when attempting to swap a weapon or abandon my Swarmer missile launcher my current gun would appear in my hand and I would have to manuel hit the swap button to take out a weapon, leaving me exposed.

These issues don’t stop. It’s clear that Crysis 3 was meant for the most dedicated computer setup, especially in the multiplayer. Matches in Crysis 3 can become hectic, especially around smaller maps, and can cause graphically hiccups. During certain portions of very intense battles I would find the environment unable to load quickly enough or character animations behaving erratically. Within a competitive environment performance means everything and if a game cannot keep up using the hardware available to it than the experience drops immensely.

When I mentioned balance I’m not talking about one weapon being too powerful or a map favoring one side over another but the perk auto-armor. It seems trivial but the biggest difference between Crysis and other first-person shooters was the requirement of maintaining your nanosuit energy for clocking, sprint, power, and armor. Without proper management your death was ensured, and leads to a lot of micromanaging in Crysis 2 since engaging armor was essential to staying alive in a firefight. With auto-armor players don’t need to worry about manually turning on armor, this makes things a lot more annoying since armor and stealth are two separate meters in multiplayer. Players would use other perks to supplement this function, making one on one fight between those who use this vexing perk more of a chore to kill than an actual fight. From my perspective this perk should be available, but only for the recruit option. Allowing it outside that selection only leads to tawdry kills and annoyed players.

It’s disappointing to have to list these faults but Crysis cannot compete with other legendary titles on the competitive multiplayer field. The single-player is still a fantastic experience, full of promising battles and an engaging set of characters. Perhaps this issue will be fixed in the upcoming patch but I doubt I’ll stick around for that long. With Halo and Call of Duty available returning to Crysis 3 in the future is gloomy. 

Adam Siddiqui, NoobFeed
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