Crysis Remastered - Switch Review, Gameplay, and Xbox 360 Comparison.

Crysis is a 2007 first person shooter, that first came out on the PC, and it soon became known for being such a tremendous leap in graphics at the time, that even the most powerful computers struggled to keep up. Crytek developed a game so far ahead of its time, it became a meme.

"Can it run Crysis?" the internet asked every time a new piece of hardware hit the market. For the Nintendo Switch, the answer to "Can it run Crysis?" is now yes. I've been really excited to get into this game. At the time the original came out, all I had was one of those old, white MacBooks.

So Crysis definitely wasn't in the cards for me. By the time the console versions came out for the Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2011, I was already having a lot of fun with Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Crysis just wasn't on my radar anymore. The story begins far into the future...

2020? Wow. The U.S. Army gets a distress call from a team of archeologists on an island off the coast of the Philippines that's been taken over by North Korea. You play as a Delta Force operator named Nomad. And you and your team are sent out on a rescue mission.

You're all equipped with these nanosuits that give you special abilities. On your way down to the island, something interrupts your landing and you get separated from your team. It's not the most gripping story, and it feels like it mostly exists to set up the action.

I didn't feel any emotional connects to the characters, and can barely remember most of their names. There's some really gorgeous backdrops in this game. You'll spend most of your time in the jungle, but there's a little bit of variation as you get further into the game.

It all looks great. The sun coming up over the water, really impressive. The textures can get pretty low-res at times, but it doesn't feel distracting. It still feels like you're playing a beautiful-looking game. It's also so cool, driving one of the trucks around, trying to get to cover, and seeing the trees coming down around you.

To this day, I still don't see a lot of games with destructible environments. On the other hand, the character models haven't aged quite as well as the environments. They've got this cartoony look to them that doesn't look particularly great. Here's a comparison of the Switch version running against the Xbox 360 version.

It should come as no surprise that the Switch version looks better. Keep in mind I'm playing this on the Xbox One X, and while it doesn't enhance the graphics at all, it smooths out any framerate dips that might have happened on the original 360 hardware.

In the 360 version, there were these little one second stutters every time you hit a checkpoint. And sadly, that's still the case on the Switch version. The game runs well, it targets 30 frames per second and any drops were very infrequent in my playthrough.

For the most part, the sound design in this game is excellent. The weapons have a satisfying punch, and the ambient sounds of the jungle do a great job of putting you into the environment. The cinematic, orchestral soundtrack really suits the action well.

Nothing that made me want to look it up on Spotify, but it works. The robotic voice of your suit is an iconic part of the game, but it's a little corny and gets repetitive. It sounds like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 80s. Suit: "Cloak engaged" Chris: "Cloak engaged" And the fact that it says this every single time you power up one of your abilities, which happens often in battle, means it gets exhausting to listen to.

So the game looks and runs reasonably well. The big question is, how does it feel to play, nearly 13 years later? After all, games have changed a lot since then. The game is pretty linear, usually giving you a primary objective and an optional one along the way.

The developers do a great job of making the island feel massive, even though it's not an open-world game. It does give you the freedom to approach things in a variety of ways. You can flip your invisibility cloak on and approach things stealthily, or you can harden up with some armor and go in guns blazing.

I love that using these abilities is really simple. One shoulder button for armor, one for cloak. You can do a super jump by holding the jump button, and a speed sprint by clicking in the left stick. There's quite a few games that do things like this now, like the Far Cry series, but this was fairly unique to first-person shooters in 2007.

And often times, using abilities like these gets so complicated in other games. I really appreciate how simple they are in Crysis. There are definitely a couple moments of clunkiness. One example is if you sprint up to a cliff. You run out of energy too quickly, and you don't have enough momentum to clear the jump.

So you need to stand there and wait for a couple seconds for your energy to recharge, and it slows down the momentum of the game a little bit. In other clunkiness news, you have to tap a button to pick up ammo. It doesn't get picked up automatically like almost every other game since 1992.

The aiming and shooting feel great, and there's a slick way of holding a button down to quickly add and remove weapon attachments. This game does have gyro aiming, so you can wave those Joy-Cons around to your heart's content. Just don't punch things you're trying to destroy.

I learned that the hard way. It's worth mentioning, the original PC release had a multiplayer mode, but the earlier console ports, as well as the Switch version and the upcoming Xbox One and PS4 remasters are single-player only. I usually hesitate to spend 30 dollars on a remaster of a relatively short single-player experience, especially one like this that doesn't have much replay value after you finish it.

If you're looking for a solid adventure, a piece of gaming history, on a tablet smaller than a graphics card that struggled to run the game back in the day, this is a decent game. And when it eventually goes on sale, it becomes a much better deal. If you're looking for other first-person shooters on the Switch, check out my review of Warface, which uses the same engine as Crysis.