Although the original Crysis was launched in 2007 I have never played it until the Crysis Remastered edition on the Nintendo Switch. I have to say I’m quite impressed and delighted with the experience after finished the main game campaign.
The game
The game is comprised of 10 missions. In the first 6 missions you fight against the Korean People’s Army forces in a island. Those are the best missions. The human enemy is intelligent and powerful yet you slowly learn different ways to approach them. There is a sense of progress and experience gained. Each map is fairly large and you can decide many different ways and routes to approach the missions from more stealth to more powerful. Some of these maps like 2:Recovery, 3:Relic and 4:Assault are masterpieces of level design.
On missions 7 to 10 you fight aliens. While the change is welcome after 6 missions against the KPA, the level design becomes much more linear and the game feels hand-holding. The gameplay devolves into the classic FPS campaign cycle of die, reload last checkpoint, advance a little, and repeat. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this cycle but after tasting the excellent level design of the first six levels this change feels like a regression.
Aside from the main campaign there is not a multiplayer mode. Replayability comes from the different difficulty levels (easy, normal, hard and delta). You can also replay specific missions from the campaign with adjusted difficulty.
The game on the Switch
Back in the day Crysis was the benchmark on the graphical capabilities of a computer system. Hence the meme “But Can It Run Crysis?”. You needed a beefy computer in order to run Crysis, a feat that my machine could not pull it off. But can the Nintendo Switch run Crysis? Yes, it can. Actually, surprisingly well given this little handheld tablet console limitations.
To this moment Crysis has the best graphics I have ever seen on this console. The lights in the forests are specially realistic. The excellent graphics combined with a smooth refresh rate, tress and buildings you can destroy, enemy intelligence, and excellent level design makes this a great game. There are frame and resolution drops here and there but these were much more forgivable than I was expecting. The game runs really well in docked mode as well specially because the smaller screen is much more forgivable than the big screen I usually play.
Gyro aiming is there and after a few settings adjustments to make it more sensitive it becomes perfect. You use the analog sticks for aiming and the gyro to fine aiming. Similar to what Splatoon does.
Conclusion
I don’t really care about impressive graphics in a game unless they are bundled with a fun game experience. Crysis Remastered is the whole package.
