Crysis Remastered Trilogy PS4 Review

The year 2007 was a fantastic time for gamers. Valve had released The Orange Box, which included Gordon Freeman’s latest exploits in the Half-Life franchise, as well as the unexpected smash hit Portal. This was also the same year Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (or just Modern Warfare before Modern Warfare) was dropped. Not to be left out of the party was Crytek, who finished work on their beautiful masterpiece known as Crysis. 14 years later, we now have a remastering of not one, but three Crysis titles in one bundle. Have these games aged gracefully? Time to find out in our Crysis Remastered Trilogy PS4 review.

Crysis Remastered Trilogy PS4 Review – Lots of Shooting

For $49.99 USD, players receive all three main entries in the Crysis series – Warhead is not included. At around 10 hours per game for an average, not rushed playthrough, most gamers will feel like this is money well spent for a lot of content. To note, no multiplayer aspects of the later games are included. This means all your time spent with these games will be offline. It’s quite a change from what people may be used to. There’s no push for season passes, or logging into services. It’s just you, a controller, and the game.

I remember when Crysis first came out. I had graduated from high school just a few months prior to the release. I downloaded a pirated copy of the game (I of course do not condone such a thing nowadays), which proceeded to run in choppy spurts on my Pentium 4, XFX GeForce 6800XT-powered home-built computer. Though I never played through the first level, I remember it being a gorgeous game, and I was envious of anyone who had hardware beefy enough to be able to smoothly run Crysis. I mean, it’s where the meme “can it run Crysis?” came from. But such a thing is no longer a concern, and probably hasn’t been since the PS4 generation of consoles.

Crysis Remastered Trilogy PS4 Review – Extra Shiny

While this may be the PS4 version of the game, playing on a PS5 offers up extra fidelity: the Crysis Remastered Trilogy runs at up to 4K resolution and at 60 frames per second on Sony’s latest and greatest; on PS4, it instead runs at 30 frames per second. Even on extended USB storage, each entry loads much more quickly than they did when these games originally launched – we’re talking a dozen or so seconds, not minutes.

Graphically, it does seem Crysis is showing its age, but not by much. A special ray-tracing-like lighting option is available, which enables screen space reflections resulting in more life-like reflections and lighting throughout the game worlds. Enabling the nanosuit’s cloaking ability results in some great transparency effects, and running into enemies that use similar technology results in some nice warping as well.

Crysis Remastered Trilogy PS4 – No Extra Features

While the games may hold up, this remastering kind of feels like a barebones effort. Yes, great attention has been paid to ensure even the first Crysis runs well on today’s hardware. But there’s no real extras that celebrate the achievement that these games represented when they originally released. It has been long enough that something like a commentary track might be hard to put together, but even a basic photo mode would’ve been great to see, since these games were hallmarks of incredible graphics when they originally released. As long as you go into these games knowing to simply expect to be able to play the best console versions of these games, and nothing else, then you won’t be disappointed.

The Crysis Remastered Trilogy is a great blast from the past. Fans of the series will have a great time replaying these classics, or maybe introducing younger gamers to one of the late aught’s can’t-miss franchises. It’s a shame Saber Interactive didn’t have more fun with additional modern features, but this still represents great value. At a launch price of $49.99 USD for all three games, this is a no-brainer for Crysis fans, as well as gamers looking for a lot of first-person shooting action without breaking the bank.

Crysis Remastered Trilogy review code provided by publisher. Version 1.02 reviewed on a PS5. For more information, please see our Review Policy.