Beautiful tech demo with very little actual gameplay.
Once again we have brilliant graphics with tons of detail. I did not notice any low-res textures like in Crysis 2. The shadows, the lens flare, the surfaces, the water... Oh, my god! This is a game where you *FEEL* the humid air in the, quite literary, urban jungle.
What is more important this time around, however, is that the game is excellently optimised and runs smooth on weak computers, too, without sacrificing much of its beauty. On medium settings, Crysis 3 would probably still be the most beautiful thing you ever played and the game flew on GTX660 on these settings.
Alas, if I wanted to marvel at nature's beauty, I would have probably taken a walk in the park. With that said, there isn't much gameplay here. The developers throw in a bunch of ideas but the game is too short to embrace them properly, even though the mechanics work. The nanosuit is more user-friendly than ever and switching between powers on the fly just comes natural but at the same time this makes the game dead easy and on veteran difficulty I was deliberately getting in the line of fire of enemies so I can absorb enough damage for a specific upgrade.
Speaking of upgrades, this is one of the few novelties to the series. You collect nanosuit upgrade points hidden (more often than not) in levels and use them to unlock powers. Some powers keep you cloaked longer, some make your armour thicker... You can never benefit from more than four powers and you can further improve them by actually using them. The problem is (apart from some powers being utterly useless) that if you just play through the game, you will only get to upgrade naturally 2 or 3 powers by the end of the game. In order to upgrade the rest, the game had me intentionally absorbing damage, as described above, or swimming back and forth for 10 minutes in one of the very few puddles in the game so I can actually upgrade my sprint power.
The game is average at best in some other areas as well, like level design. While open levels tend to work for the most part, the eagle eye players will probably notice that at the end of the day, they all boil down to large squares with some objects where you do your "sandbox". This is most obvious if you happen to accidentally look at the minimap (because there are no reasons to look at the minimap). You may notice that on screen there is a field with grass and beautiful sun rays coming from the sky, some distant buildings, maybe... But on the minimap it is a narrow corridor that always bends at 90-degree angles and you have to traverse it. Speaking of narrow corridors, while open levels leave a good overall impression, don't even get me started on indoor levels. The opening level is probably the worst one I have seen in a high calibre game for years! Furthermore, there are driving sections where everyone will feel they are there "because you must have a driving section in nowadays shooters".
There are problems, too, most notably the enemy AI which is ridiculously bad. In pretty much every battle, you will have enemies on which you try to sneak, but they miraculously turn around and shoot you in the face when you get near. Others that run behind cover, then get out, turn their backs on you and start advancing in your direction. Enemies can spot you from more than 100 meters distance with their backs towards you when you are crouching in high grass, if you are not cloaked, and aliens seem to have no AI whatsoever. They are slow and usually only go forward. They just take more hits to go down and pack a bigger punch. Sometimes enemies clip into walls, sometimes they teleport in and out as their spawning points restart for some reason.
Truth is, all the problems in this game are minor and they won't break your fun if you enjoy slipping into the nanoskin of this ultimate killing machine. The real problem is, this machine is too ultimate, there is no challenge in this game and the story is getting way too absurd, with shallow characters, trying to justify the existence of previous installments of this tech demo. So unless you just want to gasp at the beauty of the New York rainforest, there is no real reason to waste time with this game.