Crysis 3 (2013) (PC) (Crytek)
4A little less than two years ago I bought my current gaming PC and one of the first games I played through on it was Crysis 2 (see earlier videos on this channel). While the community backlash against the supposed console-ification of the series was a little too harsh at the time, I personally never felt that I quite got the hang of how Crysis 2's atypical but clearly stealth-oriented gameplay was "supposed" to be handled. As a result, I more or less stumbled my way through the campaign while enjoying the beautiful scenery and yawning at the utterly forgettable story and dialogue.
Now Crysis 3 is out and my first impression is that it sure is nice to rediscover what high-end PC gaming looks like (in case you're wondering, everything in this video is realtime in-game graphics with no pre-rendered cutscenes whatsoever). In retrospect, most of my two years with this PC have been spent playing technologically unremarkable console ports which often featured good art design but - with the partial exception of Far Cry 3 and Hitman: Absolution - never really showed my (by now decidedly mid-range) GTX 580 what it was truly capable of. Booting up Crysis 3 felt almost like doing a hardware upgrade since everything suddenly looked a whole lot better than what I'm used to.
As for the actual gameplay, the addition of a high-tech bow signals an even stronger focus on stealth (even though it's probably not needed on the lower difficulties), which could get interesting over the course of the singleplayer missions. There's still a lot of silly dialogue and cutscenes, however, and that feels rather unnecessary since no one actually cares about the story in these games. In some ways, Crytek's successive attempts to establish a strong multiplatform franchise has become a bit like the PlayStation flagship shooter series Killzone, which Sony and developer Guerilla *thinks* is a big hit with shooter fans but everyone else is kind of lukewarm about.