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My Honest Review of Crysis Remastered

Crysis has always been one of my favorite games. I’ve played it countless times since it first came out, and when I saw the remaster, I had to jump back in. So here’s my take after completing Crysis Remastered, once again, on the hardest difficulty — because why not, it’s a tradition at this point.

What I Loved
Let’s start with the good stuff. The graphics in the remaster are absolutely stunning. The updated textures, lighting, reflections, and shadows are on another level. Crytek did an amazing job bringing the visuals into modern standards without losing the original atmosphere. The environments feel more alive, and the nanosuit effects look slick. Even little details like water reflections and vegetation react more naturally.

Optimization is also worth mentioning. It runs smoothly on newer PCs and scales well with modern hardware. Support for high refresh rate monitors and ultra-wide screens is finally here, and trust me, it makes a huge difference. Playing at 144Hz with everything maxed out feels incredibly smooth, and the game holds solid FPS without major drops. DLSS and ray tracing options are available, and while they aren’t perfect (more on that later), they give players more choices in balancing performance and visuals.

In terms of visual fidelity and technical performance, they nailed it. If graphics and smooth gameplay were all that mattered, I’d call it a flawless remaster. But there’s more to the story.

Now, the Not-So-Good Stuff
Unfortunately, there’s a long list of issues that I couldn’t ignore.

First off — gameplay mechanics. They changed a lot of things from the original, and not always in a good way. Some changes just don’t make sense, and it feels like they pulled mechanics from Crysis 2 and 3 without thinking about how different the first game was supposed to be. For example, the nanosuit controls — by default, they switched to the streamlined ability system from the sequels. The first thing I did was switch it back to classic mode, because I’m not a fan of this “auto-swap” system. It removes a lot of the freedom and creativity that made the original nanosuit fun.

One of the most annoying changes is that you can’t switch suit modes while you’re inside a vehicle anymore. That used to allow for some crazy tactics and fun moments, but now it’s just… gone. Feels like an unnecessary limitation.

On the hardest difficulty, enemy AI has become ridiculous. North Korean soldiers can spot you from insane distances, way beyond what makes sense — even in real life, you wouldn’t see an enemy that far away. It makes stealth pretty much impossible unless you stay cloaked all the time. And they’ve increased the number of enemies a lot. At some points, it just feels like wave after wave of troops spawning endlessly. It kills the pacing and atmosphere.

And then there’s the helicopters. They spawn in weird places now — like over water or out of nowhere. On level three, I had two of them hunting me at the same time, which was just excessive. One even spawned practically on top of me in the ocean. Weird choice.

Speaking of enemies: the boss fight against General Kyong (in the cave mission) got changed, too. Now he’s basically a bullet sponge boss. You have to kill him twice before he actually dies, and then again just to be sure. Why? In the original, it was more grounded and fit the tone better.

There’s also this weird thing with NPC faces. A lot of them look blurry or low-res, like there’s some issue with the texture streaming or maybe DLSS messing up. Sometimes entire character models just disappear. This wasn’t a problem in the original, and it breaks immersion hard.

Weapon balance is also off. Regular weapons like the SCAR have more recoil now, which makes them less reliable in combat. But the minigun, somehow, has almost no recoil. It’s laser-accurate, which made some parts way too easy — especially against bosses and in late-game sections with tons of loot lying around.

One more thing — the tranquilizer bolt mechanic. This was kind of my go-to trick back in the day: You could switch fire modes mid-reload to cancel the animation and get back into action faster. Now the game forces you to finish the reload before swapping modes. I guess it’s more realistic, but it removes a neat little trick I liked. Not a huge deal, just something I noticed.

And while I’m at it, I have to mention the bugs. There are still plenty of them: random audio glitches, awkward controls, and some janky movement that wasn’t there in the original. They overhauled things, but didn’t polish the new systems enough, I think.

Final Verdict
At the end of the day, I did enjoy playing Crysis Remastered. I finished it quickly and had a good time revisiting one of my favorite games. The remaster looks gorgeous and performs well — that’s where it shines. And for someone new to the series, this is still a great shooter worth playing.

But as someone who grew up with the original Crysis, I can’t help but feel that they changed too much. Many of the gameplay tweaks and AI changes actually made the experience worse, in my opinion. If they had just updated the graphics, fixed a few old bugs, and left the gameplay untouched, this would’ve been an almost perfect remaster.

For veterans of the series, expect some rough edges and moments where you’ll be asking yourself, “Why did they do this?” But if you can look past that, Crysis Remastered is still Crysis, and that’s enough for me to recommend it — just with a few warnings attached.