Crysis 3: Not much of this shooter sticks

London: Crysis 3’s campaign is all about a long-destroyed and now overgrown New York, a jungle-fied take on Crysis 2’s setting. Twenty years after the previous game the destroyed shells of skyscrapers and shops are slowly being recovered by nature, with skittish deer ducking in and around the rusting husks of vehicles. This brings back a key element from the original Crysis: lots of long, concealing grass and scrubland.

You typically approach fights from a distance, or at least a vantage point, and a neat tactical visor can be used to “tag” enemies and objects of interest before moving in.

But there’s an elephant in the long grass, and one Crysis 3’s developers know well. Ubisoft’s recent Far Cry 3, a continuation of a series began by Crytek, was a slick mainstream take on open-world jungle sneaking that is better-tuned and much more interesting to play.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Crysis 3 is that, if you opt to fight head-on, it’s one of the poorest straight-up shooters in years. There are plenty of guns but it’s a perfect example of quantity over quality, and the main problem is that the enemies are dumb as posts; stealth-kill a soldier’s buddy in front of his eyes and he won’t notice anything is amiss until the corpse hits the ground.

Crysis 3 is at its best when you don’t touch it much, moving through its clockwork soldiers silently and watching from a distance getting into fights always disappoints.

Redemption comes in the form of multiplayer, a packed offering with a dozen maps and smart variants on the usual gametypes. Hunters begins with two players as invisible bow-wielding aliens, with all other players spawning as Nanosuit-less marines.

Running scared

The name of the game is for any marine to survive for two minutes, but each one killed respawns on the other team. This is quickfire stealth for the hunters, with every second nearer defeat, and simply scary for the marines; an effect created, in no small part, by an Alien-style motion tracker.

Even in standard gametypes such as Team Deathmatch and the zone-controlling Spears, the Nanosuit gives Crysis 3 its own competitive flavour. A starting perk enables auto-activation of the suit’s armour upon taking fire, which simplifies things in a good way, and Crysis 3’s cornucopia of weaponry feels much more at home.

Crysis 3’s multiplayer goes some way towards making up for its poor campaign. It’s just much more fun. Crysis 3’s singleplayer sometimes forgets that people buy a game starring a man in a super-powered suit because they want to do ridiculous super-powered stuff.

Pushing boundaries

But multiplayer doesn’t, and stuffs its arenas full of poles to rip from the ground and cars ready to be booted into other players.

From another angle that says everything about Crysis 3: the best thing in this game, after who knows how many years of development and millions spent, is hitting other players with a giant pipe. Crysis 3 shows how far the series has moved from the original’s fabulous ambition, and makes you wonder exactly when Crytek stopped trying to make amazing FPS games ones that pushed the important boundaries and settled for pretty average.

(Game reviewed on Xbox 360)