Crytek was able to pass the awkward learning phase that some felt showed in Crysis 2.

Crysis 3 hits shelves in February 2013.

Levels feel a tad more sandboxy in Crysis 3, but it's their overall design than creates a sense of tactical freedom. Contrary to its enclosed nature, the warehouse evoked a great sense of verticality, and I appreciated lack of obvious routes screaming “pick me for stealth” or “take me to blow stuff up” as made infamous in Crysis 2.

To encourage players to think strategically, Prophet can fire a standard bolt while cloaked, a first for the series. If you fire explosive or stun bolts, you’ll decloak, just like with standard weapons.

The introduction and improvement of more “hunter-ish” skills—like how marking enemies now includes a more detailed description of the type of enemy and the weapon they’re carrying or the new ability to remotely hack turrets and electronics

In addition to the still-cool standbys of armor, speed, and stealth suit enhancements, Prophet can now tinker with certain electronic objects from afar, starting from simple turrets and door switches before scaling to “epic proportions” at end-game, Hojengaard said.

For human weapons, the HUD also gives a nice breakdown of wapon properties, covering accuracy, fire rate, mobility, damage, range and recoil. The Ceph weapons that you can use are unrecognized and get no such analysis but from what we saw, you can assume they are pretty gosh-darn devastating.

as the game progresses your hacking powers will increase, letting you exploit ever more powerful equipment.

What you will essentially be able to do is create various combinations of these (perks) and not just pick one from each group (Stealth, Visor, Armour, etc…) to customise the way you want to approach situations. In addition, you can create pre-set loadouts which you can switch between on the fly. Providing yet another way you will be able to customise your experience in Crysis 3.

There are now separate energy bars for sprinting, camouflage, armour boosting and other nanosuit superpowers...

Well, Prophet can hack turrets and other devices turning them against his foes. He just has to get close enough so that it activates a simple minigame where players have to hit a button at the right time as a node swings left to right.

Players no longer have to hunt Ceph and get nanocatalyst. There will be certain upgrades scattered throughout the world and players will have to find them. They unlock a slew of abilities that players can freely choose from. There’s no skill tree.

The rub is that they can only use five upgrades at a time.

To make the switch-out easier, there’s three ability loadout slots that players can build so they can change it up depending on the combat situation.

So in terms of the suit upgrades and things, there’s literally like hundreds of combinations. You’ll pick up these Nanosuit upgrade kits, and then apply them to these different perks and unlocks. You spend the Nanosuit upgrade kits on creating various different combinations of the way you can play through.

Hojengaard went on to explain that Prophet’s transformation from hunted to hunter goes beyond simple mechanics. Prophet is also on the hunt to find out more about his dark and sordid past...

We're playing in to the mix of Ceph and human DNA and how that effects the suit," says Hojengaard. "It's very important that everything ties in, organically, so the nanosuit has an arc of its own that develops alongside Prophet. And in some ways the suit is his enemy - Prophet wants to be human, but he becomes more alien as the game goes on, because the suit is such a useful tool kit. He's really conflicted. We're wrapping up all that stuff in the game. And there's a big revelation at the end..."

And what about Nomad - the main character of the first game who was mysteriously absent throughout Crysis 2?

"He won't be returning as a character, but you'll be seeing some part of him. I'll let you figure out what the means."

One of the major changes made to Prophet is his attitude and affiliation. He’s not working for anyone, or running from anyone.

What we do know at this point is that he (Prophet) has had flash-forwards to the future in seeing the end of the world and the destruction of mankind.

So what has happened in the 20+ years since Crysis 2 is that C.E.L.L. has become the world superpower, and part of them achieving this is harnessing the worlds power resources. What they have done is built these massive domes over the top of every major city worldwide.

Eventually, players will run into Psycho, one of Prophet’s old buddies from the original Crysis. He’s without his nanosuit after C.E.L.L. ripped it away from his body. He helps Prophet escape both the Ceph and C.E.L.L via a cinematic roller coaster ride involving a train and old subway tracks.

In the distance, a massive red tower, which stands atop an underground prison where series vet Psycho awaits rescue, stretched to the sky, and the floodlights atop it drenched the vegetation-rife streets with artificial light, casting hard shadows across every inch of the dense, lush setting.

Prophet begins the game in a CELL facility, escapes, and ends up in New York's Liberty Dome,

Prophet, who has spent the last two decades in prison, breaks free from captivity and heads back to the city to investigate.

According to producer Mike Read, players once again take on the role of Prophet who is freed by rebels inside the dome.

At one point, two Scorchers, a new enemy, appeared in all their lizard-inspired, quadrupedal glory. These fire-spewing mechs are even more impressive than they sound as they are the first four-legged creations Crytek has built.

There is also a drone-like aerial remote, which is capable of sensing Prophet while he's cloaked and counter-acting his suit's technology, making him visible to Ceph forces.

The Scorcher has a defensive state in which it’s hard to apply damage, and then an open state, where he uses his fire weapon to apply area-of-effect stuff. He can swipe you out of cover, and there’s also some limited fire propagation.”

Crytek is hoping to build more advanced artificial intelligence into its enemies to make encounters more sophisticated. According to Read, “Typically in Crysis, especially in Crysis 2 it was noticeable, either the AI was green or they were red. What we’re working on right now are a bunch of systems that are in-between.” Read says enemies will taunt and tease, panic and hide, and do far more than wander or attack.

Players can no longer be spotted and then hide. C.E.L.L soldiers will talk to each other and flush Prophet out with EMP grenades.

One of the more devastating Ceph weapons at your disposal is the heavy mortar, which can fire either plasma grenades or missiles, both of which are capable of causing massive amounts of damage to anyone and anything in the area.

Halo players will feel right at home here — like the Covenant, every Ceph gun has a finite power cell before draining completely.

Various arrow types are available, including incendiary options, and long distance kills are celebrated with an arrow cam that follows the shaft through the air to its victim.

Other weapons include those high-tech heavy weapons pinched from alien enemies, such as a heavy mortar called the highpoly.

The longer you hold down the trigger, the farther your bolt will go.

A regular arrow won’t kill instantly unless it hits specific points on the enemies’ bodies.

Shooting mechanics were smooth and precise but most of them felt pretty standard for a shooter.

Timing and accuracy are important with the Typhoon thanks to its fire rate, which happens to be 500 rounds per second.

My only complaint about the Typhoon was the lack of scope to let me zoom in

Air-bursting explosive arrows allowed me to take out enemy soldiers cowering behind cover with impunity, and the super-thermite HE-tipped ones made short work of any armored sentry turrets. Even if you stick to standard impact arrows, being able to adjust the draw strength on the bow allows you to tailor your approach for different types of encounters.

And best of all, it [the bow] doesn't take up a weapon slot, so you'll never have to be without it.

You also have four different bow tips that are available in single-player, with an extra one called the recon arrow in multiplayer. So there’s the thermite tip, or the explosive tip. Then we have the airburst, which is like a proximity fragmentation arrow. There’s also an electrical one, so if you fire that in water puddles or at turrets it will deactivate them, and then you have the standard arrows. With the standard arrows, you can actually go round and pick those back up again.

In terms of customising the bow, the draw-weights can be changed depending on how far you’re going to be able to fire arrows, which also effects how much suit energy you use in pinning guys to walls and so on

Taking a cue from the Battlefield series, Crysis 3 will feature a high level of environmental destruction. Shootouts will lead to untold levels of devastation, adding a whole new layer of strategy to the combat as you won’t be able to hide safely in one spot too long since at any moment it could be reduced to rubble atop you.

Hunter mode pits two players equipped with nanosuits and a bow and arrow against up to 14 heavily armed Cell soldier players. Each time a Cell player is killed, they respawn as another hunter, gradually shifting the team balance as the match goes on.

Crash Site’s newest selling point is the ability to actually drive the Pingers – alien mechs, basically. Alien weapons can be found around the place, too, on strategically-hidden dead Ceph aliens in corners of the map

Crysis 3 will have 12 maps and 8 different game modes altogether when it launches in February next year. It’ll support 16 players on PC and 12 on consoles, and Crytek is dedicating its resources to making sure its servers will be totally stable by that time.

The remaining 10 players (or 14 on PCs) can choose from three pre-set loadouts, and then must survive for two minutes. With the hunters more or less out of sight, they have to rely on proximity sensors to alert them of their impending doom.

In either case, when playing the Hunter, time is not on your side. You can be killed, but your main concern is the scattering or hiding of your prey. They're all on your radar, you just need to find a stealthy enough approach to off them without being spotted or killed yourself

(Hunter mode) you get a survival bonus if you can make it to the end of the round alive, and points for each kill, all of which are tallied across five rounds.

They (players) can sprint, power jump, ledge grab, rip up signs, kick cars, all that stuff, without using suit energy. But then you have the stealth abilities, which is more the support abilities where they can use that energy bar. But after they’ve used all that, they can then go into a firefight on a level playing field.

So they can turn up to a firefight with the same amount of health and armor as a guy who was waiting. So one thing we noticed with Crysis 2 was anyone who sprinted to a firefight would die, because they were essentially eating into their armor so we’ve decoupled that to prevent that and create a cleaner, crisper and more user friendly experience.

We are front loading a lot of the unlocks this time. So new players in the first couple of hours will have unlocked an infinitely wider variety of weapons and modules.

We’ve also taken a look at some of the modules that were favoured in Crysis 2 and thought to ourselves, “hey, everyone’s using this stealth enhancement, which makes the suit last longer when cloaking.” So the energy consumption of stealth is now less so you can use it for longer. And then the same with mobility where you had people making sprint energy last longer. We’ve now integrated that into the suit.

You have three perk slots available to you that can be used for things like an auto armour module, or reducing recoil.

I think there’s like 20 or 21 perks in total, but those can be created and used in any combination.

Obviously with twelve multiplayer maps, there may be some Wonders featured multiple times and others that are unique to multiplayer.

The levels have been designed, like Museum where there are gaps you can jump across

Because we made the decision early on to decouple sprinting and suit energy, it allows us to create bigger running environments. So it was no longer a case of, you know, all jumps must be able to be made by sprint power jump and also normal jumps. You could actually just make these vast expansive environments where free running became a big part of it. You’ve got your vault mechanic as well. It’s not just the ledge grab from Crysis 2, which allowed you to get higher up; this also just allows you to interact with the environment.

You could also shoot a bullet in the previous without being decloaked as long as the silencer was attached. If you kept firing, though, the suit would decloak.

Lol psycho's the princess waiting to be saved.
Well, let's hope he can fight when we free him.