Someone should compare it to the unofficial port (also, known as “Brazil project”, which has been out for a while now) and see which is working more smoothly.

I vaguely recall playing one of the two about 20 years ago (looking at the screenshots, I think it was the second game). It was a bonus game on a CD of some computer or gaming magazine. Even two decades ago and this shortly after release, it felt unbelievably dated and clunky already. The PC port was also complete garbage, with lots of bugs, awful visuals even by PS1 port standards and poor controls.

If you’re nostalgic for these games, they might be worth revisiting (although you’re probably remembering them being more impressive than they actually were), but if you’re not, I doubt they are worth picking up, even with the improvements from gog.

Just to compare these two to another dinosaur game from that era that received similarly poor reviews as the PC version of Dino Crisis, Trespasser was far more sophisticated and fun, in my opinion at least - and certainly a technical marvel by comparison. It’s not just that it’s fully 3D, with huge open areas (not possible on PS1, of course), but also the way it pioneered physics interaction. My favorite unscripted moment was a large bipedal dinosaur at the edge of the draw distance stumbling - possible thanks to the procedural animations - and bumping into the roof of a half-destroyed building, resulting in its collapse. That’s outrageous for 1998! I’ve only ever seen this happen once at this spot in the game, so it’s certainly not scripted.

How do people come up with these absurd conspiracy theories?

It’s been out for a long time, just not legally.

Looking at the screenshots, I thought it was a port of a mid-gen PS4 game, but apparently, it’s a one year old former PS5 exclusive. Then again, this might explain the modest hardware requirements. You don’t see the minimum GPU on a AAA open world game being a GTX 1060 6 GB (a card from 2016) very often anymore. Perhaps it’ll run well on the Steam Deck, which is always appreciated. Reviews are solid enough that I might pick it up on sale.

Maxwell came out in 2014, Pascal in 2016 and Volta in 2017. Pretty long run for Maxwell in particular.

I was curious about the AMD side of things: They reduced support for Polaris and Vega (both 2017) in September 2023 already.

Thanks for the PSA, I had kind of forgotten about this wretched DRM.

It’s based on the Xbox 360/PS3 console port of the game. People figured this out pretty quickly, because a VTOL flying mission that these consoles couldn’t handle was missing from the remaster as well (later added back in with a patch). Colors are oversaturated, texture, object and lighting quality are down- or sidegraded (many not worse on a purely technical level, but different without being better for no reason, as if the outsourced Russian devs had a quota of changed assets to fill), lots of smaller and larger physics interactions are gone, because they were never part of that old console port. AI (quite a bit selling factor on the original as well, on top of the graphics and physics) is simplified as well. The added sprinkles of ray-tracing features here and there, as well as some nicer water physics do not make up for the many visual and gameplay deficiencies. On top of that, there are game-breaking glitches that weren’t part of the original.

The biggest overall problem I have with it is that it just doesn’t look and feel like Crysis anymore and instead has the look of a generic tropical Unity Engine survival game. The original had a very distinct visual identity, a muted, realistic look, but with enough intentional artistic flourishes that made it more than just a groundbreaking attempt at photorealism. You can clearly see this if you compare the original hilltop sunrise to the remaster. Crysis also had an almost future-milsim-like approach to its gameplay that is now a shell of its former self.

I will admit that to the casual player, many of these differences are minor to unnoticeable. If you haven’t spent far too much time with the original, you’re unlikely to notice the vast majority of it and might just notice how ridiculously saturated everything looks.

At the very least you can still buy the original on PC. On gog, it’s easy to find, but on Steam, it’s hidden for some reason [insert speculation as to why here]: If you use Steam’s search function, only the remaster appears. You have to go to the store page of the stand-alone add-on Crysis Warhead (the only Crysis game that did not receive the remaster treatment, likely because it was never ported to console), which can be purchased in a bundle with the original as the Maximum Edition (this edition also does not appear in the search results): https://store.steampowered.com/sub/987/

I’m glad it’s based on the original game instead of the hideous remaster.

just bad game in general

You’ve never played anything with a metascore of less than 70, have you?

Are you seriously suggesting that in the age of rage-fueled campaigns against any game that even dares to show a non-male in a positive light or permits the player to change pronouns user scores are reliable?

You yourself are bringing this culture war bullshit up as if it was valid criticism, which means I have a hard time taking anything you’re writing even remotely seriously.

Opencritic average is 79 and Metacritic across all three platforms is 81. How is this a bad game?

In this economy?