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"This isn't a war ordinary humans can win! This is the future - death's an inconvenience now, nothing more. We are all dead men walking!"
Jacob Hargreave, Crysis 2

Crysis is an FPS video game series created by Crytek, previously known for Far Cry. The first game was released November 2007.

In the year 2020, an alien structure has been found buried in an island in the South China Sea. The U.S. army sends Raptor Team, a group of Delta Force soldiers equipped with multi-functional Nanosuits, including the Player Character Jake "Nomad" Dunn, to rescue the archaeologists who found it and were subsequently kidnapped by North Korean forces. However, the aliens are not friendly to either side and Nomad must combat both the North Koreans and the aliens.

Crysis features the same open-ended style of meeting objectives that appeared in Far Cry. The game plops you on a fairly wide open map, puts a little dot on your map and says go- how you traverse the land and complete objectives is up to you. The game also introduces the Nanosuit system. Your suit of armor can shift into different forms, each with their own abilities. These include things like cloaking and Super-Speed, but also advanced durability and Super-Strength.

Despite all this, the game's major contribution to popular culture was that it was ridiculously future-proof. Most computers could run it on low or normal settings, but to take it to its graphical maximums required computing power that very few contemporary machines could provide. For several years, "It will run Crysis" was both a Memetic Mutation and a legitimate benchmarking standard. Sequels to the game have carried on with this tradition.

An expansion, Crysis Warhead was released after the first game, putting the player in the role of Major Michael "Psycho" Sykes during the timeline of the original. A touted feature of Warhead, that turned out to be surprisingly true, was improved performance on higher graphics settings.

Bridging the gap between Crysis 1 and 2 is a comic miniseries that follows Raptor Team directly after the end of Crysis. It ties in neatly with both games, and explains quite a bit about the setting and background.

Crysis 2 is set three years after the first game. Written by Richard K. Morgan of Takeshi Kovacs series fame, the game opens up with a plot about an alien virus infecting the citizens of Manhattan, riots breaking out, and eventually cuts to the viewpoint of a man codenamed "Alcatraz" and his Marine squadmates sent to rescue Dr. Nathan Gould, who is trapped somewhere in Manhattan. However, their submarine gets attacked on the way, and Alcatraz himself barely survives before being rescued. From thereon, it's up to Alcatraz to figure out what in the world is happening on Manhattan, and why human paramilitary forces are out to kill him and seemingly everyone else that moves in the name of containing the infection. Unlike the first game, it was developed simultaneously for both consoles and PC, and as a result is a little less free-form and a little more tight and focused compared to the first game.

It's novelized in Crysis: Legion, by Peter Watts, which greatly expands on the story and nature of the Nanosuit, and adds an (un)healthy dose of Watts' hard-science horror.

Crysis 3 was released on February 19, 2013. The story, written by Steven Hall (best known for his novel The Raw Shark Texts), is set in 2047 and involves Prophet/Alcatraz/Prophetcatraz rejoining with Psycho and fighting the now-globally-dominant CELL Corporation and the remnants of the Ceph through the overgrown ruins of New York. There's a city-sized dome and a bow involved. It is a continuation of Crysis 2, with the same engine, graphics, weapons, and enemies (albeit with some new enemies and weapons, most notably the compound bow, added). It also takes back the graphical crown the original once held.

Crysis: Escalation was published in September 2013. Written by Gavin Smith, it is a collection of short stories that take place mostly between Crysis 2 and 3 and detail the fates of Alcatraz and some of the minor characters from Crysis 2, along with two prequel chapters that give some backstory on Prophet and Psycho and how they ended up being recruited into Raptor Team.

A remaster of the original game, entitled Crysis Remastered, was released in July 2020 for the Nintendo Switch, and on September 2020 for the Play Station 4, Xbox One, and on the PC as an Epic Games Store exclusive.

Remasters of Crysis 2 and Crysis 3 were released on October 15th, 2021, also for 8th gen consoles and the Epic Games Store on PC.

A fourth game has been announced, but is in early development and little information is currently avaliable.


This video game series provides examples of the following tropes:

  • Ability Depletion Penalty: Running out of ammo in your gun makes the subsequent reload take longer as you chamber a bullet manually. That's not something you'd want to waste time on when you're surrounded by enemies who can kill you in seconds.
  • Abnormal Ammo:
    • The Alien MOAC (Molecular Accelerator) turns water vapors in the air into icicles and launches them at enemies. Yes, it shoots ice. In the sequel, the K-VOLT fired electromagnetically charged pellets, having gone from usually non-lethal far-ranged multi-target riot-suppressing taser to lethal weapon.
    • The SCARAB in the sequel fires 4mm fin-stabilized sabot rounds. Basically a scaled down, somewhat simplified version of an APFDS Anti-Tank cannon round.
    • The Typhoon of Crysis 3 is personal defence sized weapon with a magazine comprised of 10 separate tubes each containing 72 rounds, for a total of 720 rounds in a magazine. It can fire all 720 rounds in just over one second. The trailer that introduces the Typhoon shows that it does not fire bullets, but rather pellets.
    • Playing on a non-cracked illegitimate copy of Warhead will turn all fired bullets into chickens.
  • Action Girl: Tara Strickland has her moments in Crysis 2, but due to being an officer she spends most of her time outside of combat. In Crysis 3, the collectible intel items reveal that there were actually several female Nanosuit soldiers deployed during the Lingshan incident, but most of them were captured and killed by CELL in the years after (although at least one is simply MIA).
    • Subverted and deconstructed by Claire in the third game. Even just ending up in command taxes her.
  • Adapted Out: The "Ascension" mission was not included in the original console ports of Crysis. It was initally missing from Remastered as it was originally based on the ports, but a later patch has brought it back to the PC version and will eventually make it to the console versions.
  • Adaptational Badass: In Crysis: Remastered, General Kyong's A.I. has been improved to make the fight with him more of a dynamic boss fight. He can now jump between levels, allowing him to run around the entire arena instead of being limited to the upper platform, and twice during the battle he can use a combination of Cloak Mode and Speed Mode to vanish for several seconds and reappear in a new location when his health is depleted, reappearing with about 75% of his total health. This is actually a carry-over from the Xbox 360 / Playstation 3 port of the game (on which Crysis: Remastered seems to be based), where the improvements to his A.I. were originally made.
  • Admiring the Abomination: Hargreave is prone to this.
    Hargreave: They wipe us out, they break us down, they reduce the environmental impact almost to zero. Exemplary.
  • Aggressive Categorism: In Legion, Colonel Barclay refers to The War of the Worlds when discussing the Ceph.note  Gould, after getting over the Popcultural Osmosis Failure, is Mind Screwed by this - he's a Properly Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist who has feared The Government and especially the military his entire life, and "lifers who read ancient science fiction don’t fit comfortably into his worldview." This worldview is reinforced a few minutes later, when Barclay dismisses his theory on how the Nanosuit could be used to instantly eliminate the Synthetic Plague, along with all the Ceph. He also gets his satisfaction within the hour when Hargreave instructs Alcatraz on how to use the Nanosuit to destroy a Tower.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
    • Averted. The SECOND AI in the Nanosuit 2 does its job of keeping the operator informed and alive and the suit functions integrated so well that even its creators are dumbstruck. It's stated that, by the end of the events in Crysis 2, the suit and its AI are so deeply connected with Alcatraz, that most of his thought processes happen outside of his skull. Watts adds that it not only made him smarter and gave him new skills, it altered his mind so he enjoyed the process.
    • NAX, CELL's AI in the third game, is also an aversion. She never does anything other than make announcements over the PA system. However, the collectible intel mentions that the complex security algorithms designed to protect NAX from outside hacking also result in her having a somewhat "eccentric" personality.
  • Air Jousting: In the zero-G level during the first game, any aliens not armed with actual weapons would basically fly forward and ram Nomad at high speed, clawing at him in the process. The attacks would do high damage, though it would also put them in range of the instakill jelly grab.
  • A.K.A.-47:
    • Variation in that while "SCAR" is the name of a real gun, it's applied to a futuristic derivative of the Heckler & Koch XM8, not the Fabrique Nationale SCAR. The XM8 was also a contender for the SCAR trials, but was beaten by Fabrique Nationale. Played straight with the FY-71.
      • Although the Crysis SCAR is intended to be a futuristic version of the HK G36. Crytek does originate from Germany and the G36 is the standard-issued rifle for the army or 'Bundeswehr'.
    • Most of the guns in Crysis 2 are futuristic renditions of modern weaponry. The only two that seem to be an "original" mishmash are the SCARAB and Feline.
    • For some reason, C4 Charges in the third game were renamed R.E.X. Charges.
  • Aliens Are Bastards: Whatever the Ceph are doing here on Earth, they sure as hell didn't come in peace. Hargreave suggests that they were on Earth first (supposedly as a colony created millions of years ago), and that they view humans with the contempt humans view an insect infestation.
  • Alien Blood: The Ceph in the first game appear to have clearish blood despite having neon-green veins and a blue organic body. In the second game, some of the aliens splatter pink when you kill them.
  • Alien Invasion: Subverted. The Ceph came here long, long before humans existed, they've just started awakening recently. Also, multiple characters speculate that whatever they're doing, it looks like an invasion only from our perspective. It might be more accurate to think of it as pruning or pest control by an automated gardening system. The other leading theory is that they're the Ceph version of a tribe of lost/regressed cavemen.
  • All There in the Manual: The real names of the strike team are hidden in the editor. Nomad's name is Jake Dunn, Psycho's is Michael Sykes, Prophet's is Major Laurence Barnes, Aztec's is Harold Cortez, and Jester's is Martin Hawker.
    • Goes for the sequel as well. By reading some special entries on the MyCrysis.com site, you'll find out that Hargreave was born in 1896, that he, Karl Rasch and Walter Gould undertook an expedition to Tunguska in 1919, and that Hargreave saved the other two by carrying them across the Siberian wastes in an apparently superhuman feat. You also get to read some of the e-mail conversations that you can discover in-game, which leads to a minor spoiler.
  • Already Done for You: In the last level of the original, Psycho has brought back a disabled Alien Scout intact. In Warhead, we see how it was done.
    • It's a nested case of Already Done for You, since the Alien Scout is already disabled, boxed, and ready for shipping by the time Psycho finds it.
  • Anachronic Order: Crysis: Escalation is told like this. The various stories collected in the book range take place from 2016 to 2034. The first and last chapters are in 2025 and are directly related to each other, telling us exactly how Prophet got captured by CELL in Siberia.
  • Ancient Astronauts: The Ceph first came to Earth millions of years ago, colonizing the planet as a kind of nature preserve, then went into stasis while all of their subterranean structures went dormant. Now, they're awake and are not happy with what humans have done to their 'carefully tended garden' world.
  • And the Adventure Continues: Crysis 1 ends this way, with Nomad, Psycho, and Helena heading back to Lingshan to continue the fight against the Ceph after receiving a distress call from Prophet.
  • An Ice Person: the Ceph in the first game. They can only survive in very low temperatures unless they have biosuits, and all their weapons shoot ice or freeze stuff.
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different: Despite forming a relatively continuous overall narrative, all four games in the seriesnote  feature a different Player Character.
  • Animated Armor: Alcatraz's and Prophet's nanosuit as of Crysis 3. Alcatraz's shattered human body has long since been broken down and reformed into a mass of Nanosuit muscle. We don't even know if the skeleton is still there.
  • Apocalyptic Log: Though it (thankfully) doesn't become one, Nomad narrating his journey through the lithoship in the first game has all the hallmarks of one. Several times it's implied Nomad really does expect to die in there.
    ...some kind of outer shell. It seems organic...
    I'm not alone in here.
    Something just hit me!
    Strickland, if you can hear this, you need to get everyone off this island! They're all waking up!
    • Played straight with the CELL blackboxes in the third game.
  • Armor-Piercing Attack:
    • The K-Volt SMG fires electrostatic pellets that act similar to the plasma weaponry of the Halo series, dissolving your Armor Mode shielding with just a couple of hits. This makes CELL soldiers armed with K-Volts probably the most dangerous CELL units in the games. In the third game the K-Volt also ignores the armor of the new Incinerator Ceph units, but it doesn't actually appear in the levels in which you fight them, so the only way to use it against them is to bring it with you from an earlier level.
    • An examination of the game files shows that the Jackal shotgun completely ignores the armor of Ceph Heavy and Pinger units, making it the most effective non-explosive firearm against them, though their high health still means they can take quite a few shots. The Grendel battle rifle likewise ignores the armor on the Pingers. This is most likely a programming oversight rather than an intended effect.
  • Artificial Gravity: Or, rather, an artificial lack of it. It's one of the best sequences in recent gaming and very well done; just be really careful. It's easy to get confused and lost.
  • Artificial Brilliance:
    • The KPA troops will flank you, flush you out with grenades, and blast through walls to try to kill you. The Elite KPA will switch between armor modes to survive as long as possible, while making your life miserable as they flank you.
    • Both the KPA soldiers and the alien Troopers in Warhead will use lasers (laser pointers for the KPA and a small LIDAR for the aliens) to check places where you're likely to be cloaked. Since the Nanosuit isn't really transparent and can't reproduce a laser, it will put you in trouble quite a bit.
    • The Ceph soldiers in Crysis 2 have practically unreadable body language, and once in a while they might spontaneously decide to release an EMP burst that drains all of your suit energy; it's the most annoying thing when you're trying to sneak around them. When fighting them, they use the terrain to their advantage, doing things like wall running or jumping onto elevated positions to get a better angle on you.
    • CELL troops took pages from the KPA playbook and carry laser sights when they know you're in the area. They can spot you even while cloaked if close enough. CELL troops will fire off flares that summon reinforcements and realistically flank and canvas an area for you if cloaked. They're actually smart enough that you can realistically trick out and confuse them; for example, if you're being shot at and run toward cover, and cloak midway then change directions, the AI will initially think you're taking cover behind that object but quickly realize the ruse and start hunting for you normally.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • Youtube is filled with funny videos showing flaws in enemy soldier A.I. in the first game. Thankfully, the more blatant bugs have been patched out, although the KPA are still happy to do stuff like chase you into the water and drown, or simply stare into space when you enter cloak mode.
    • The pathfinding system for Crysis 2 was reportedly unchanged from the original. Basically, the AI thinks they're in a jungle when they're actually fighting in the city. You end up with AI who occasionally gets stuck running into a wall or can't decide which side of a hedge they want to be on.
  • Artistic License:
    • The writers seem to think that the Special Forces are part of the Marines throughout the entire series. While its not uncommon for Special Forces to work along side Marines, the SF are a branch of the U.S. Army. It can be forgiven in Crysis 1/Warhead when it could be argued that the Special Forces are just in an operation along side the Marines, but in Crysis 3's multiplayer, the ammo pouches on the Marine nanosuits blatantly say "U.S. Special Forces" and have the Marine emblem on them
    • The Nanosuited Teams' logos are all modeled after the British SAS Emblem, not anything from U.S. Special Forces. Possibly justified, since one of their members is on loan from the SAS (Psycho).
    • In Crysis 2, the excuse to have CELL patrolling New York city, instead of the U.S. Army National Guard, is that its cheaper. Private Military Contractors, on average, cost $500-$750 a day in wages alone. Compared to the average National Guard soldier, whose wage is about 1/4th - 1/3rd of that. It would have made more sense if they simply stated that, since the CELL mercenaries were already there and the military needed every asset it could get, it just commandeered them as support troops out of convenience (it's not like money is any object when the world is ending).
  • Artistic License – Military: The Aircraft Carrier level in Crysis is incredibly groan inducing to anyone who has ever served in the US Navy or knows anything about Naval Ranks. The fact that none of the ranks or uniforms make any sense points to a blatant case of not even bothering to skim the wikipedia article. The Carrier CVN-80 being named the USS Constitution is also unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, being that the original ship bearing that name is still in commission.
    • The actual name for CVN-80 will be the Gerald R. Ford class carrier USS Enterprise taking over the name from the decommissioned CVN-65.
  • Ascended Extra: Psycho, your squadmate in the original, is the player character of Warhead.
  • Ascended Meme:
    • "Can it run Crysis?" is the first achievement/trophy unlocked in the console versions of Crysis 2.
    • A number of memes pop up during Alcatraz's interviews in Crysis: Legion, including the "NOM" system on the N2 suit that consumes and converts biomass for energy, and references to Ceiling Cat and the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Alcatraz himself.
    • The MAXIMUM (NOUN) from the second game gets played with in the third. Suit modules can be unlocked, and each suit can be upgraded to MAXIMUM by doing enough things relating to that upgrade, i.e. taking enough damage with armor modules or killing enough enemies with a stealth killing module.
    • The highest graphics setting in the PC version of Crysis Remastered is called "Can it Run Crysis?" which according to Crytek, "is designed to demand every last bit of your hardware with unlimited settings". As of February 2021, even the most advanced setup available to consumers can't break 30 FPS at this setting.
  • A Space Marine Is You: Hits most of the checklist — except, of course, the "Space" bit, until you get into space in Crysis 3 to fire a Kill Sat.. Also, Nomad, who is actually in the U.S. Army, actually has some lines during gameplay in addition to cutscenes. Crysis 2 makes Alcatraz, a U.S. Marine, mute, sticks him in levels that are considerably more linear, gives him increasingly unstable and untrustworthy Mission Controls, and includes a third act twist on his situation.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: Vehicles in the first game can typically be destroyed with only a few bullets if you shoot a key weak spot. For humvees and trucks this is the fuel tank, while attack helicopters can be destroyed by shooting out the tail rotor. Armored vehicles like tanks and APCs don't have a major weak point, however.
  • Author Avatar: Take a look at Commander Lockhart's face. Now, take a look at Cevat Yerli's face.
  • Authority Equals Asskicking: Downplayed with the North Korean general - he's the last and toughest human opponent in the game, but overall he's not that tough. The North Korean colonel in Crysis Warhead doesn't even get that, being a completely Cutscene Boss.
    • Ceph commanders from Crysis 2 are significantly more resistant and powerful than the others as well.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • The air stomp move in Crysis 2. It's difficult to set up, tricky to hit with (although there is a modest amount of splash damage to make it less frustrating), and doesn't really do that much damage when you consider how hard it is to actually set it up and use it.
    • There's also the powered melee attack. It can kill a standard CELL trooper or Ceph in one hit, but it uses up your entire energy meter, leaving you vulnerable to attack from all the other enemies nearby. Not to mention you can kill humans with two uncharged melee attacks in less time. It also doesn't do enough damage to kill a Commander or really hurt a Heavy.
    • Playing the game on the highest graphics settings. Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation summed it up by saying something to the effect of "Crysis was designed to be played on some kind of futuristic supercomputer from space." Even computers made in 2011, four years later, had difficulty running it unless you sunk a few hundred dollars worth of extra hardware into them.
    • The Sandbox editor officially does not work on 32-bit XP and Vista systems due to the unGodly amounts of memory needed in order to create a map at a speed more than "slideshow".
    • The Grenade Launcher in the second and third games is pretty powerful, but can't be refilled at ammo caches, meaning you have little ammo to go around, and bringing it around in the hope that you'll encounter a fight big enough for it to be worth using on means you're missing out on a potentially more Boring, but Practical weapon instead.
    • "Can It Run Crysis?" graphical settings on the 2020 Remaster of the original Crysis. These settings mostly do insane things like allowing unlimited draw distance which have minimum effect on visible graphical fidelity while severely tanking the game's performance. Crytek have admitted this graphics setting was made with poor judgement and consider it more of a stupidly future proof benchmarking feature rather than a practical game setting.
  • Back for the Dead:
    • In the comic interquel, Helena Rosenthal is shot by the C.I.A. in an attempt to steal nanosuit technology, and her body is left on Lingsham Island. Nomad dies under torture because the C.I.A. believes Prophet is jerking them around with stories about aliens. Makes the first game something of a Shoot the Shaggy Dog.
    • Prophet in Crysis 2 is a more obvious example. Subverted at the end of the game, though, and he is part of the main protagonist of Crysis 3.
  • Badass Boast:
    Major Strickland: "I'm a Marine, son! I'll walk on water if I have to."
    • Hargreave gets an epic one in Crysis 2 after Lockhart promises to kill him after he's done with Alcatraz:
    Hargreave: Better men than you have tried, son. Better men than you, and things so far beyond men you can't even begin to imagine them.
    • Everything Prophet says to the Alpha Ceph in the last level of Crysis 3.
    Prophet: I'm nothing like you. I'm better than you!
    • Let me show you, what I can do!!
  • Beat Them at Their Own Game: Legion speculates and 3 confirms that this is what the NYC Ceph tried to do. It worked well... until Alcatraz did it to them.
  • Beehive Barrier:
    • Non-forcefield version: When activating your armor mode in Crysis 2, translucent hexagon patterns fill the periphery of the screen, representing your suit hardening itself.
    • While Alcatraz is laying siege to the Prism in "Eye Of the Storm", Lockhart hides himself behind a transparent window/barrier that stops ordinary bullets (including .50 cal) but not Gauss Rifle slugs (while taking potshots at Alcatraz using a Gauss Rifle of course). When the barrier takes fire it does light up in a classic beehive/hexagon pattern.
  • BFG:
    • The TAC, a grenade launcher that fires a tactical nuke.
    • The Gauss Rifle's slugs aren't particularly large, however it's a railgun that fires them at 8 times the speed of sound, dealing very high damage against most targets.
  • Big Applesauce: In Crysis 2, especially after another Ceph lithoship comes out of the ground in Manhattan.
  • Big Bad: The Alpha Ceph is the Hive Mind of the Ceph forces on Earth and was working behind the scenes in first two games, and appears in the third game as the main enemy.
  • Big Brother Is Watching: This seems to be what life on Earth is like under CELL's leadership in Crysis 3.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Tara Strickland in the "Masks Off" level of Crysis 2.
  • Bilingual Bonus: On the highest difficulty setting, the Koreans speak Korean rather than English.
  • Black Dude Dies First: Two black dudes and a Hispanic fellow, actually. All of them die within the first 2 levels. One gets better, though. Until he dies during the start of Crysis 2. Subverted; he lives on in the Nanosuit, possibly to the extent of hijacking Alcatraz' body.
  • Blessed with Suck:
    • Alcatraz, protagonist of the second game. Bonus: he's wearing a suit that makes him super strong, super fast, super tough, and can turn invisible, as well as scanning the battlefield to mark enemies, strategic points, and analyze enemy weaknesses. Minus: he received multiple life-threatening wounds before it was put on him, including fatal damage to his heart, spine, and lungs. At several points in the game, the suit malfunctions and Alcatraz becomes so weak he can barely crawl. A few scary scenes require the player to use the suit defibrillator on his heart. The suit is not only keeping him alive, but it's doing most of the fighting for him. Oh, and if he removes the suit, he dies of said injuries - the suit's also growing into his wounds.
    • The book goes even further - it's been harvesting non-functioning and less essential organs for materials to shore up more vital systems. He probably doesn't have lungs or a heart at all by the end of the game, judging by the fact that he realizes he doesn't need to breathe anymore and doesn't have a pulse. He does, however, possess the ability to see along the length of the EM spectrum, detect when people are lying to him, and resist any attempt by CryNet or the military to disable him, among many other things, having essentially become a through-and-through post-human.
  • Bling of War: Colonel Lee in Warhead wears a stylized nanosuit with large, shiny gold shoulder epaulets and various officer insignia on the chestplate. In contrast, General Kyong's nanosuit is completely utilitarian, being indistinguishable from the ones worn by the regular North Korean nanosuit soldiers.
    • Possibly justified by Lee being from a completely different branch of the DPRK military, as Ashcroft reveals over the civilian radio in the resort bar. Kyong had also been on station for far longer.
  • Body Horror: Alcatraz's nanosuit is revealed to have been growing into his body as a result of his injuries. Watts states that since it can't make biomass from nothing, it's been breaking down damaged tissues and less-used organs to do it. Given enough time, Alcatraz fully expects to become a Ghost in the Shell-type cyborg.
    Civilian: Jesus...it's eating me!
  • Brought Down to Badass: In Crysis 3, Psycho is a regular human after having his nanosuit stripped from him by CELL, a fact that causes him quite a bit of angst as the story progresses due to no longer being able to keep up with Prophet. However, he's still a very competent Badass Normal; the man was in the SAS and Delta Force after all. He even manages to survive the events of the game, and in a post-credits scene wipes out an entire CELL security detail to confront the CELL board of directors.
  • Bolivian Army Ending: Happens to Colonel Lee at the very end of Warhead. He's left with a taser to fight off the Alien "Warrior" (a massive flying war cruiser).
  • Book Ends:
    • Crysis 2: "They call(ed) me Prophet." Stated by the same person near the opening and closing of the game.
    • Crysis 3 begins and ends with a monologue by Prophet musing on the game's Central Theme.
    • The first cutscene in the trilogy is an out-of-control fall towards Lingshan Island. The final cutscene in the trilogy is an out-of-control fall towards Lingshan Island.
  • Border Patrol: The waters around the Lingshan island chains, starting with a shark, then warships, then the Nanosuit's self-destruct feature.
    • Crysis 2's water is guarded by tentacles that kill the player if he or she tries to go out of bounds.
  • Boring, but Practical: Alcatraz is quite straightforward when dealing with enemies he's grabbed. Either he caves in their heads with a single punch, or he slits their throats with a single, economical cut with his knife.
    • As opposed to the badass display in the demonstration video before the game starts, slow, methodical stealth, and intelligent abuse of the cloak ability, puts the game on easy mode even on the hardest difficulty.
  • Brain Uploading: Before Prophet commits suicide in the second game to give Alcatraz his nanosuit, his mind is copied into the suit's systems, eventually emerging to protect the marine from Hargreave. Unusually for this trope, this event surprises Prophet as much as it does the player.
    • Watts has a different impression based on the events of the game (particularly the extent of Alcatraz' injuries) - the Nanosuit destroys the user's personality in the process of transforming them into "post-human warriors". Gould, who knew Prophet even before he first put on a Nanosuit, points out that it looks more like both Prophet and Alcatraz have been psychologically modified to the exact same Super-Soldier template.
      The thing is, Alcatraz, Prophet — two more different jarheads you will never meet. Prophet never shut up, he was always joking around, and Alcatraz — well, let’s just say, not much in the way of social skills. But put ’em in the N2 and even people that different start to — converge. EEG, voxprints, ACG gates, they all start looking the same after you’ve been in that suit for a while. ...From the outside, sure, you look like an absolute ass-kicking wild man, but really you’ve been — Tamed, I guess. Tamed.
  • Bulletproof Human Shield: Averted in Crysis 2. Grabbed human soldiers or Ceph still allow shots through.
  • Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Doctor Gould, who is a giant conspiracy nut. This is one of the reasons why Tara Strickland never informed him that she was CIA. According to Legion, he's also a meth junkie; Alcatraz notices crystal remains around his house and Hargreave mentions something about drugs reducing his ability to think straight.
  • Bus Crash: A lot of the major characters that die do so between games instead of actually in them. Notable examples include Nomad, Helena Rosenthal, most of Eagle Team except Dane and Bandit, Colonel Barclay, and most likely Nathan Gould. Most of these deaths are All There in the Manual as they occur in supplementary material and are not even actually mentioned in the games themselves.
  • Call-Back: One of the first things you see in Crysis 2 is a Statue of Liberty that has "taken some hits". Throughout the first few levels you'll come across bits and pieces of Lady Liberty scattered throughout Manhattan.
  • Captain Obvious: SECOND(Nanosuit V2's AI) during Lab Rat when Gould realizes that the user of the Nanosuit isn't Prophet.
    Gould: "Wait a minute... You're not Prophet!" [points a pistol at Alcatraz]
    SECOND: "Threat detected."
  • Car Fu: You can run over enemies while driving a vehicle. However, keep in mind they could do the same to you if you're not careful.
  • Cassandra Truth: In 3, no one believes Prophet's claims that the Ceph are back until it's too late.
  • Central Theme: Crysis 3 asks what are you prepared to sacrifice to save the world? And do Clothes REALLY Make One A Superman?
  • Character Development: Psycho, who goes from the obligatory 'psycho' in Crysis to the surprisingly sympathetic main character in Crysis Warhead, where he is much less of a Featureless Protagonist than Nomad. He undergoes even further development in the third game, where he must deal with the fact without his Nanosuit, he is completely Overshadowed By Prophet.
    • Hargreave is... complicated. From what can be discerned, the guy has a gentlemanly, turn-of-the-century code of honor and genuinely cares about the people under him (he briefly sends Alcatraz to look for one of the CELL squads he had sent into an alien hive, and sounds genuinely upset when he finds their bodies), but he allows none of these to interfere with his century-long battle against the Ceph. Also, since he witnessed certain important events like the market crash, the world wars, the Cold War, the 2012 "Double Dip" and the spiraling worldwide chaos that followed it, he has a seething hatred and mistrust of anything government-related.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Or rather, Checkhov's Tactical Nuclear Grenade Launcher.
    • Crysis 3: The Archangel laser satellite. The subject of a doomsday countdown for one mission, where the mission is to prevent it from firing. Prophet uses it at the end of the game to destroy the massive Ceph colony ship coming through the wormhole.
  • Clothes Make the Superman: The Nanosuit. You would be in trouble without it: you face huge alien exosuits, hundreds of NK soldiers (some with their own nanosuits), Helicopters, APCs, Tanks, etc. There are environmental hazards too: a zero-G alien spaceship and and an energy sphere so cold that it literally snap-freezes unprotected humans.
    • In Crysis 2, it's hinted at a case of Clothes ARE The Superman; Alcatraz was so badly wounded in the intro cutscene that he can barely walk without the suit, much less kick all forms of alien ass. In fact, when Alcatraz is lying in a nanosuit scanner Gould requested he use, it's revealed that his injuries are so severe that he would have died if Prophet hadn't happened by. It's even hinted that the suit, and Prophet by extension, is taking control.
    • Watts believes that the suit was so traumatized by Prophet's suicide that it's tearing apart Alcatraz's body to ensure that he can't do the same.
      It is a jealous skin, Roger, and it’s already been dumped once. Prophet had to literally rip it from his flesh and blow his own brains out to be free of the fucking thing. Maybe the suit doesn’t want to go through that again. Maybe it’s whittling me down so I won’t be able to -— leave...
    • In Crysis 3, this trope is discussed in-universe, and causes no small amount of angst for Psycho, who has been stripped of his Nanosuit. Ultimately, this is a Defied Trope. The Nanosuit gives superpowers, but its the human wearing it that makes the hero.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Lockhart loves his F-words.
    • In Crysis 3, Psycho practically can't have two lines without an F-bomb.
  • Colonel Badass: USMC Major Strickland in the first game, and Colonel Lionel Barclay in the second.
  • Composite Character: In-universe, Alcatraz + Prophet + their nanosuit.
    • And also hosts before and after being moulded by the suit.
      Alcatraz: Just another reminder that I’m never alone in here. What I am, and what I was, and whatever this damn armor thinks it is.
      Heh.
      We are legion.
  • Conspicuously Selective Perception
  • Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: "Alcatraz, over here! Punch it man, let's go! Alcatraz, over here! Punch it man, let's go! Alcatraz, over here! Punch it man, let's go!"
    • Humorously, you can hear Lockhart doing this to his soldiers at one point, interspersed with insults at both you and his men.
    • The Nanosuit 2 does this to Alcatraz when Hargreave tries to rip him out of the suit, using Prophet's face and voice no less.
    Prophet: Wake up, marine! This is no time for dying. Get your ass back in the fight!
  • Continuity Drift: In Crysis 2, the Ceph seem to have changed (evolved?) quite a bit; they're no longer cryophillic creatures native to a world where a balmy day is in the double-digit Kelvin range (Hargreave says they evolved in an ocean and supposedly settled on Earth millions of years ago) and they've traded their squid-like flying robots for Terminator-style bipedal suits. Also, they've gone from freezing people dead to melting them to goo with a nanotech supervirus. In a similar vein, the North Korean superpower from the previous game is never mentioned (though New York is under a severe quarantine and the entire USA is under a government-enforced media blackout, so we don't know anything about the outside world), and the Nanosuit is revealed as a product of alien technology rather than simply an advanced super-suit built by CryNet.
    • This is actually the purpose of the IDW comic interquel: as the Ceph are not truly intelligent, the first wave of attackers use pre-programmed fire-and-forget intrusion countermeasures to drive invaders from their sensitive areas - tools that destroy the very assets they are supposed to harvest i.e. unique proteins. The Manhattan wave uses rough equivalents of our own weapons and tactics while deploying precision harvesting tools such as the Synthetic Plague and the Ticks.
  • Continuity Nod: Crysis 2 has references to the Lingshan Incident, Strickland and Helena Rosenthal at various points. Also, by the end, another Ceph lithoship (like the one at Lingshan but obviously different) rises out of the ground and prepares to deploy a devastating area-denial weapon (a nano/biotech spore instead of an ice sphere).
    • The whole plot of the second game shares similarities with the first: Botched insertion, protect the scientist, getting captured, being reassigned to a Marine officer mid-way, and the alien area-denial attack at the end. Your efforts throughout the game are to prevent another Lingshan disaster, but in a massively populated area.
      • Or, according to Legion, this disaster should have been way worse - Spire was supposed to spread replicator version of the "melting virus" that would be actual spreading plague with 100% lethality and thus wiping out humanity.
    • Legion gives us, as expected, some more, and also ties up some loose ends from in between the two games, e.g. what happened to Lingshan Island. Apparently, one side decided to glass the entire island.
    • The collectible intel items in Crysis 3 have many references to characters and events from the first two games.
    • At one point in Crysis 3, Prophet receives the dog tags of his teammates who were killed in the first game: Aztec, Nomad, and Jester. He throws them away at the end after retiring to Lingshan Island.
    • In the first Crysis, General Kyong's nanosuit starts glowing blue after the Ceph mothership activates, triggering a boss battle in which he can take significantly more damage than other enemy nanosuit soldiers. At the time it just seems like a random thing that happens so he can be a boss fight. In Crysis 3, you learn that nanosuits are based on Ceph technology and can be supercharged by overexposure to Ceph energy; in the last level, you can supercharge your suit with the same blue glow and increased durability that Kyong had.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Averted with General Kyong in the first game, who can be knocked around by thrown objects and even knocked into the water and drowned (the console port and remaster avoid this by removing physics objects from the boss arena), and with the Cepth Guardians in Crysis 2, who can be instantly killed with backstabs just like any other enemy (in fact the speedrun strat is to stun them with the K-Volt then backstab them). All other boss-like enemies in the series are typically unique, extremely large enemies for whom it makes sense that standard tactics wouldn't work on them.
  • Convection, Schmonvection: Averted. Fire still hurts.
  • Cool Old Guy: By Crysis 3, Psycho is well into his 50's, yet he's still an extremely skilled soldier able to go toe-to-toe with CELL and the Ceph, despite no longer having a nanosuit to augment him.
  • Cosmic Horror Story: The novelization of the second game hints at this, and the third game outright confirms it. The Ceph are a species that's been around for half a billion years, and their technology is so far beyond humanity's that they are akin to gods. Humanity pretty much has no hope of surviving even the wayward attention of the true Ceph, and the Ceph that have been trouncing humanity throughout all three games are pretty much just cavemen with clubs. Appropriately enough, when the Ceph send one of their warships through the wormhole from the M33 galaxy, it looks like a massive, mechanical Cthulhu-eqsue monster that will effortlessly wipe out humanity if you don't stop it, and it's bigger than the moon.
    • And in the end: You do.. With an entirely Earthling satellite. Apparently, even gods succumb to hubris. Then again, it's made clear that the "ship", which is 1/25 the size of the planet, is not actually what the Ceph would consider a warship, but rather just a single Ceph (inasmuch as the "Ceph" could be said to have one form) of which there are countless numbers in the galaxies they control. The equivalent of a single gardener walking over to prune his garden after an automated tool failed and then dying in a 'freak accident'. In Legion it's made clear that any victory on the part of humanity would be more because the Ceph didn't even notice we were there than that we actually beat them- we simply lack the capacity to know what the Ceph were actually after.
    Aiyeola: Are we invading an anthill when we build a drive-through bank machine on top of it? Probably, from the ants' point of view. And if some small fraction of those ants survive-if they manage to get out of the way and set up a new colony somewhere else- are we incompetent invaders because we haven't exterminated all of them? Have they beaten us, if the bulldozers came and went and left some ants alive? No, because the goal wasn't to wipe out the anthill. We were putting up an ATM. But you can’t explain currency, finance, or automated tellers to an ant. It’s impossible for them to comprehend our acts as anything other than a devastating attack by a god-like force that the ants—for some mysterious reason—were able to fend off."
  • Crapsack World: In Legion, Alcatraz describes that the world apparently became like this in the years between 2010-2020. There were a couple of economic crashes (the "Double Dip"), multiple wars in Asia and South America, new epidemics (at least one of them weaponized by Egypt against Syria in the "Water Wars") and a number of Secession Riots in Texas, which were quelled with Marine deployment. Things are so bad that the USA is under a DHS-enforced media-blackout, cellphone restriction and a No-Fly zone, all of them voted into long-term law. As for the rest of the world, we literally don't know what is happening after the Ceph awakened.
    • In Legion Watts points out that the Ceph's cryogenic weapon would set off environmental catastrophes worldwide - which corrupt governments were able to spin into Soviet Russia-level authoritarianism. Ceph hives are slowly waking up, causing city-smashing earthquakes. And on top of that, bioterrorism is a growing concern - Alcatraz compares the Ceph bioweapon to enhanced necrotizing fasciitis that somebody turned loose in the Middle East to defend the pipelines.
    • Just in case anyone thought that there was a chance that humanity might be able to match the Ceph directly, that prospect is thoroughly dashed in Crysis 3, where it's made clear that the Ceph are billions of years old, utter masters at adaptation to any environment in the galaxy, and have colonized millions of planets across multiple spiral arms of our galaxy alone. Also, the Ceph's tech is so far beyond humanity's that the Ceph that humanity has been fighting are their equivalent of cavemen with clubs.
      • Taken a step further in Legion when Alcatraz states that, based on the current data, the Ceph that we're familiar with aren't even cavemen with clubs, but rather automated gardening tools. The equivalent of an automated sprinkler system. Or maybe a Roomba.
      Alcatraz: I mean, try and wrap your head around the magnitude of the imbalance here. Maybe you’re imagining us as a bunch of cavemen going up against a Taranis or a T-90 with reactive armor, but that’s not even close. Cavemen are people, too, Roger, they’ve got the same raw brainpower even if their tech is Stone Age. The Ceph are a whole different species. So let’s say Hargreave’s right and we’re not facing soldiers. Do you really think the world’s lemurs, say, would have a better chance against a bunch of gardeners? If a bunch of gardeners wanted to take out an anthill, would they attack the ants with formic acid and titanium mandibles? ’Course not. They’ve got sprays and poisons and traps and guns, things no ant has ever seen, things no ant could possibly defend against. So why the Ceph gunships, Roger? Why the exoskeletons that walk pretty much like we do, and the guns that fire pretty much like ours, and bloody artillery for chrissake that does pretty much what ours does? Why are Ceph weapons and tactics so much like ours, hmm?
      Alcatraz: I don’t think they’re gardeners at all. I don’t even think they’re aliens. Not the real aliens, anyway. Not the real gardeners.
      Alcatraz: I think they’re hedge clippers and weed whackers, left in the shed to rust. I think they’re the dumbest of the garden tools, programmed to bump around the property mowing the lawn while the owners are away because after all, this place is too far out in Hicksville to waste real intelligence on. I think they have basic smarts because where they come from, even the chairs are smart to some degree—but nobody ever read them The Art of War, because they’re goddamn hedge clippers. So they’ve had to learn on the fly. Their tactics and their weaponry look like ours because they’re based on ours, because we were the only game in town when those cheap-ass learning circuits looked around for something to inspire them. And I think a lemur wouldn’t have a hope in hell against a bunch of gardeners, but he just might stand a chance in a war against the Roombas. Organic? Are you fucking kidding me? Dude, even we’ve got CPUs made out of meat, we had neuron cultures wired into machines back before the turn of the century! Why do you think those blobs in the exoskels are any different? What makes you think the Ceph—whatever made the Ceph —what makes you think they even draw a distinction between meat and machinery? Because I’m telling you, Roger, that line is not nearly as black-and-white as you seem to think. Trust me on this.
  • Crazy Enough to Work: In 3, Psycho says that going straight through the front door into the Liberty Dome will work because it's so crazy that CELL will never see it coming.
  • Crazy-Prepared: The Nanosuit, which has, among other things, zero-gravity maneuvering thrusters. In case you're accidentally catapulted into space, presumably. The Nanosuit also has a defrosting mechanism. Perfect for temperatures below -200 degrees, as well as freeze rays.
    • The thrusters are actually used for swimming, Speed Mode sprinting and maneuvering yourself in midair while strengh jumping.
    • Crysis 2 has a good explanation for this-it's revealed that the suit was originally made with the intention of fighting the aliens all along.
  • Crew of One: Although this is averted on the higher difficulties, except for the tank, whose HUD suggests some sort of computer-assisted turret control.
  • Critical Existence Failure: The original games play it straight with soaking up bullets and explosions like nobody's business. However an "Ultra Realism" mod was developed that averts this to hell and back. Bullets to the leg? Limping. Other leg? Crawling. Arms? Shitty aim. Whole body, and low health? Just give up... We won't blame ya.
  • Cutscene Boss: Lockhart. Basically, you bust into where he's hiding, activating your armor setting before going in. He blasts you with a Gauss gun and it bounces off and knocks you back a bit, but you keep coming, grab him by the throat, then throw him out a window.
    • There is Colonel Lee as well. He and Psycho clash multiple times in Crysis: Warhead, but only ever in cutscenes. It ends with a cutscene where Psycho subdues him during a fight in a VTOL, shocking him with his own calibrator, before throwing him out the back (and throwing him his calibrator) and leaving him mostly unarmed and alone against the approaching Ceph fleet.
  • Cutscene Incompetence: There are a few times where the plot would have continued smoothly without interruption, had the game at that point not wrested control from the player and made Alcatraz stand, idiotically staring at the Whatever about to ruin his work.
  • Cutscene Power to the Max
    • What the Game Tells You: "You are a Badass, Powered Armor wearing Super-Soldier who can leap like Spiderman, throw people people around with your bare hands, ignore .50 caliber bullets, sneak around like a ninja, and generally wade headfirst into a gunfight with only your bare hands and emerge, standing atop a pile of wrecked armored vehicles, triumphantly holding a heavy machine gun."
    • What Actually Happens in the Game: You can do all of the above, but only as long as the short battery lasts, meaning some of the suit powers are less useful than others. You will be chopped up if surrounded by more than 6 of anything. You'd generally want to avoid wading headfirst into a gunfight, so you might as well just sneak around like a ninja.
      • Alcatraz:To hear the brochure tell it, you just put on the N2 and hit the ground at sixty, invisible and invulnerable, world without end a-fucking-men. But all those bells and whistles take power - and the suit may be a hundred years ahead of its time, but the batteries? Let me tell you, sometimes it feels like this thing’s running on a couple of triple-A’s.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: From 2 onward, the Ceph are kicking the shit out of humanity.
  • Curb Stomp Cushion: It is shown a few times that the Ceph (or rather their gardening tools which we can actually fight) are simply far ahead of us, but not totally invulnerable against the 20 Minutes into the Future tech of the Muggles (it's more like the difference between a modern army and a World War II army, rather than the difference between a modern army and cavemen). Alcatraz is particularly pleased in Legion when he sees a Ceph Gunship, otherwise superior in every way to its human equivalents, getting taken down by regular attack helicopters with the help of surprise and numbers.
    Alcatraz:' The ship's staggering through the airspace, weaving and wobbling, and part of that might be evasive maneuvers but I don't care how alien this bird is, you can tell it's wounded. It might as well be skywriting HOLY SHIT I'M FUCKED in black smoke. And here comes the mofo that's kicked its ass and its one of ours, it's a goddamn Apache. A 64D, I think, not even bleeding-edge. I mean, this is a flying saucer we're talking about- built by creatures from another fucking solar system- and it's getting its ass handed to it by a bunch of apes in a ten-year-old helicopter. Fuck yeah. It's like watching someone shoot down an X-35 with a slingshot.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In Crysis 3 you can no longer lean out to aim when standing near a corner or crouching behind a low object.
  • Damage-Sponge Boss: Mastermind in 3 can turn into this pretty easily.
  • Dead Man Walking Anyone who puts on a Nanosuit is this, according to Prophet, although Crysis 3 seems to contradict this. The most common sense explanation is that what he means is that once you put the suit on, you can never take it off (as it essentially fuses with your body).
    • A little more literally with Alcatraz, at it's stated that, aside from the previous point, his injuries from the Ceph gunship in the opening are fatal and the Nanosuit keeps him alive.
    • Jacob Hargreave claims that the entire human race is this, unless we have "Post-Human Warriors" capable of combating the Ceph, otherwise the Ceph WILL completely EXTERMINATE humanity like pests.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Nomad has one or two of these moments. One conversation via radio is roughly as follows; "Sir, I think the Koreans have nanosuits." "That's impossible!" "...if it's any consolation, they look like cheap knockoffs."
    • Hargreave is a bit dry when speaking with Alcatraz.
      Hargreave: If it's at all possible, son, d'you think you could keep my billion dollar suit out of the line of fire for awhile? It'd really be better for all involved if you came back to me in one piece.
    • Psycho in 3. Good example is when he realizes he let it slip that him and Claire are in a relationship after he promised "not to tell a living soul". At first he curses at himself for breaking the promise....then realizes that Prophet might no longer be considered "alive" via the standard definition.
      "Ah! I promised her I wouldn't tell another living soul!.......Ah well, guess I didn't go back on my word, eh?"
    • Alcatraz himself basically acts like a Marine Troper during his debriefing in Legion.
      "You know that line they feed you in boot camp, You can rest when you're dead? Complete bullshit!"
      • Just Alcatraz in general is a snarker so prolific that you could fill several pages with quotes alone.
  • Decoy Protagonist: Although Nomad and Alcatraz are playable in Crysis 1 and 2 respectively, it was Prophet who's the main character.
  • Destination Defenestration: Lockhart's fate when Alcatraz finally catches up to him. The fall isn't instantly fatal, though; it takes him a while to die, unless you decide to be merciful.
  • Diegetic Interface: One of the suit's features.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Throughout Crysis 3, it's mentioned that the True Ceph from the M33 Galaxy are half a billion years more advanced than the Ceph on Earth, and are so beyond humanity's scope of comprehension that they're essentially gods. The goal of the entire game is to prevent the Earth Ceph from opening a wormhole to M33, as once the original Ceph arrive on Earth they would be utterly unstoppable. The game ends with Prophet failing to do so, as a massive continent-sized, Cthulhu-looking True Ceph emerges from the wormhole and looms over Earth. It looks like the game is going to end on a Downer Ending... then Prophet has a surge of willpower and blows up the super-Ceph and the wormhole with CELL's massive Kill Sat, which ironically was powered by the same nearly-unlimited energy harvested from the Alpha Ceph.
  • Dirty Business: Discussed in 3, where Psycho says that Claire feeling regret about skinning him in no way absolves her of guilt.
  • Disc-One Final Boss: General Kyong in Crysis and Commander Lockhart in Crysis 2.
  • Disney Villain Death: Lockhart. After spending the whole game harassing you, you finally catch up to him and smash him on the pavement out a three-story window. You can see him struggle for a bit before dying. You can also shoot him to speed up his demise. However, we don't get to see most Disney villains spattered messily all over the pavement.
  • Do Not Drop Your Weapon
  • Dragon Their Feet: You've beaten the alien Exosuit and secured the dead alien in your VTOL. Then Colonel Lee shows up...
  • Earth-Shattering Kaboom: In 3, Prophet warns that this will happen if CELL fires their Kill Sat on the Alpha Ceph.
  • 11th-Hour Superpower: This is actually a recurring thing in the Crysis games:
    • Crysis: You get the TAC Gun and the ability to disrupt the alien drones just in time to destroy a shielded Hunter and the Warrior.
    • In Warhead, you get the PAX cannon in order to destroy the Red Hunter.
    • In Crysis 2, the final levels have most of the game's MIKE maser canons, which cause the aliens to explode into a mushy pulp very easily. Also, by that time, the suit has finished profiling the Manhattan virus and is capable of turning it into an anti-alien bioweapon, which is how the whole mess gets solved.
    • Although it has no gameplay effects...
      Nanosuit: Warning! EMP shutdown! All systems impaired. Switching to core function mode. Life support priority. Warning! EMP shutdown! All systems impaired. Switching to core function mode. Life support priority. Warning! Deep layer protocols engaging. Rerouting systems. Wake up marine! This is no time for dying. Get your ass back in the fight!
    • In Crysis 3, you can supercharge your Nanosuit by absorbing energy from Ceph mindcarrier energy nodes. While supercharged, you're completely immune to all damage and have infinite ammo for all Ceph weapons. You get compulsory supercharges for your Nanosuit 3 times in the final level, and the last charge usually lasts long enough to get you through the first phase of the final boss.
  • Elite Army:
    • The Ceph. Not so much in the first game, but definitely the case in 2 and 3. To wit, the basic Ceph Grunt is a seven and a half foot tall cyborg with a Healing Factor, telepathic communication with his comrades, an automatic rifle that can punch through heavy body armor like paper which he can fire accurately one-handed on the move, Powered Armor that makes him over thrice as durable as CELL troopers, and vastly superhuman physicality enabling him to handily outrun any human as well as toss people around like ragdolls and perform ten-meter vertical leaps. This guy is The Goomba of the Ceph. They get much more insane from there.
    • To a lesser degree, the Americans. In the first game, all of their gear is objectively superior to that of their North Korean opponents (at least where it isn't identical, like them both using the Bulldog LTV and the LAW rocket launcher). The SCAR has 50% more damage, 33% more capacity, and 25% less bullet spread than the FY-71. The M-5A1 main battle tank has 25% more health and 100% more cannon damage than the T-108 main battle tank. The MV-24 VTOL is faster, tougher, and more heavily armed than the WZ-19 attack helicopter. The American Nanosuit soldiers refer to the North Korean Nanosuit users as "cheap knock-offs." U.S. Marines all wear heavy body armor, as opposed to only half of the KPA, and armored Americans can survive two to three times as much damage as armored North Koreans. The GK-8 Gauss Rifle is twice as powerful as the DSG-1 sniper rifle. The USMC's air support is consistently on-call and effective while the KPA's is only ever seen being blown out of the sky. The first few hours of Crysis showing off how superior the American armed forces are serves to further strengthen the impact when the Ceph show up and start giving them some serious trouble. And that's before they massively upgrade in the sequels.
  • Elite Mooks:
    • NK Special Forces in the first game, especially those that are wearing Nanosuits. Even the non-Nanosuit wearing ones have better aim and always come equipped with body armor, grenades, and silenced weapons with laser sights (for regular KPA troops, only about half of them wear body armor and only 1 or 2 troopers in a squad carry grenades). They can be identified by their black body armor as well as said laser sights.
    • Ceph Grunt Captains, Heavies, and Stalkers in the second game. The Captains have an Armor Mode energy shield similar to yours, the Heavies are extremely tough Giant Mook enemies, and the Stalkers are fast and agile.
    • The third game replaces the Captains with Reapers, who lack an Armor Mode shield but have twice as much health as regular Ceph Grunts and use the same Ceph "battle rifle" style weapon that the Captains use. They're not as tough as the Captains were, but appear in larger numbers.
    • The intel entry on CELL Recon soldiers in the third game mentions they're professional soldiers, unlike the regular CELL soldiers who are predominantly debt-slave conscripts, but in practice they're just palette-swaps of the shotgun-wielding "flanker" soldiers from the second game, and aren't noticeably tougher than the regular troops other than having slightly different weapons and tactics.
  • The End of the World as We Know It: In 3 this is the result if you don't fire Archangel at the True Ceph warship; it fires its Wave-Motion Gun and the last thing you see before fade to black is the shockwave visibly spreading over Earth's surface.
  • Enemy Mine:
    • Towards the end of Crysis 2, the surviving CELL forces team up with Alcatraz to fight the Ceph. In Crysis 3, Prophet's diary mentions that the Delta Force and KPA Nanosuit soldiers formed a common alliance under Prophet's leadership to fight the Ceph, but they were all eventually hunted down by CELL.
    • When the Roosevelt Island is about to explode all grudges are forgotten - everybody just wants to get out:
      Alcatraz: The Ceph are everywhere. So are CELL, and it really doesn’t matter whether they heard Hargreave’s last orders or not; we’re all just animals in a forest fire now, all just trying to keep ahead of the flames, and there’s no predators and no prey when you’re all about to be burned alive. We run like hell; we shoot at Squids when they get in our way.
      Alcatraz: The elevator turns out to be right where the bridge crosses the eastern edge of the island. Three CELL are crowded around the lower doors when I arrive, repeatedly stabbing the call button. They bring up their weapons the moment they catch sight of me; I bring up mine. We stand there waving our dicks at each other, wondering about appropriate battlefield etiquette at times like these.
      Countdown Girl says two minutes. The elevator arrives. We pile in. Someone pushes UP, again and again and again. Someone else pushes CLOSE DOORS.
  • Eldritch Abomination: The Alpha Ceph and its various other brothers and sisters. Although the Alpha Ceph's abominable nature is put into more view here, being the very old leader of a Hive Mind that has the ability to Mind Rape people.
  • E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi: Watts implies this is the case in the CRYSIS-verse, since Hargreave-Rasch has been a tech leader since its inception - since Hargreave salvaged something from The Tunguska Event;
    ...in all the long decades since, Hargreave has been walled away with the fire he stole from the gods, breathing on those dangerous embers all through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, patiently waiting for our technology to grow into something that could crack the codes and solve the riddles. Sometimes not so patiently; you have to wonder how much of our vaunted human technology really belongs to us and how much we were herded toward by some megalomaniac and his stolen box of miracles, working behind the scenes.
  • Every Car Is a Pinto: You can cause vehicles to explode by punching them.
  • Evil Counterpart:
    • The collectible intel items in Crysis 3 reveal that CELL has their own Nanosuit operative, codenamed Silverback. However, he never actually appears at any point in the game.
    • An unique, encrypted datapad on the third level reveals Silverback's true identity.

    +++ Silverback to SSU. Deep cover over-cloak deactivated. Comms back online +++
    +++ Strategic Support Unit to Silverback, we read you Commander Lockhart. How was the mission? +++
    +++ Successful. Patching data to you via the suit HUD now...
    +++ Understood... Receiving. Commander, you've missed a hell of a lot under deep cloak. I need to brief you on world events, CELL, the future of the Blackhart Initiative...
    +++ Let it wait, Harris. Check the data. I've found him. I've found Nomad...

    • Although Silverback is also referred to as "Commander Lockhart", it's currently uncertain if he is the same Commander Lockhart (kept alive in a similar manner to Alcatraz) or his nephew (who could have faked his death). Whoever it is, Silverback is absent during the events of Crysis 3 due to a top-secret mission: finding Nomad.
  • Evil Laugh: Hargreave gives one when Ceph overrun his facility.
  • Exploding Barrels:
    • Though you can pick them up and throw them if their initial location is inconvenient for you.
    • Crysis 3 has Ceph energy storage containers that glow bright red. Unlike the barrels in the first game, though, you can't move them.
  • Explosive Overclocking: It is known that playing the game for too long has a fair chance of resulting in the most realistic explosion the world of gaming has ever witnessed.
  • Faceless Goons: Cell snipers and a few US marines wear stylized head gear to cover parts of their faces.
  • Fast Tunnelling: The Ceph can, thanks to giant mechanical Combat Tentacles.
  • First-Episode Twist: Like the opening narration from Blade Runner, Prophet's opening monologue reveals/spoils a lot of details that would otherwise have emerged quite organically over the course of the story; namely, CELL took over the world after Crysis 2, and the Alpha Ceph is the Big Bad of the series.
  • Floating Continent: Central Park at the end of Crysis 2. Not really floating, though. More like kept up by huge metallic tentacles.
  • Fluffy the Terrible: One of the friendly Nanosuit-wearing Delta Force NPCs in Warhead has "Cupcake" as a callsign.
  • Foreshadowing: The intro to Crysis 2 shows that the nanomachines are cute little critters based on the "machines made out of protein" school of thought. It's not just stylistic.
  • Forgotten Fallen Friend: Alcatraz in the third game. Justified in that he wasn't really the "friend" of anyone involved in that game, and is treated as more of a means to an end than anything else.
  • Four Is Death: Four Ceph Guardians at the end of 2.
  • Freeze Ray:
    • The Alien MOAR (Molecular Arrestor) instantly freezes enemies, though it's rather useless in the multiplayer as the frozen enemy could simply move their mouse back and forth to thaw out. It could also freeze vehicles, though the occupants are unharmed note  and are still able to fire the vehicle's weapons. Unpleasantly surprising when it's a jeep-mounted machine gun, reaches painful status when it's a tank's cannon. Highly satisfying to use against helicopters.
    • With luck or teamwork the freezeray is very effective, making 1-Hit kills.
  • Fridge Logic: In-universe. In Legion, Watts's Alcatraz points out two things;
    • 1). Hargreave claims that he knew that the Ceph were in Manhattan all those years, and stayed in a city he hated just to prepare to fight them - but Central Park (which the central hive was hidden beneath) was built in 1857, and left alone for all that time while every other aspect of the city changed around it.
    Alcatraz: Isn’t THAT a coincidence I think, and then: Hargreave. Hargreave and his corporations within corporations, their tentacles squirming down through the boardrooms and the back rooms and the generations, the butterfly flaps its wings in 1912 and a hundred years later neither crime nor depression nor all the developers in the world have managed to make a dent in that sacred green space. ...Think about how old New York is. The Europeans showed up what, five centuries ago? The Amerinds, thousands of years before that.
    Alcatraz: I have no idea why, Roger. It’s all just idle speculation bouncing around in the back of a Bulldog on its way to the final showdown. All I’m saying is, maybe Tunguska wasn’t the first time Hargreave got in and got out, and maybe Ling Shan wasn’t the second. Maybe Ling Shan was just the first time the owners woke up and found him in their bedroom.
  • Fulton Street Folly: In Crysis 2, Alcatraz never goes anywhere north of Times Square or off Manhattan Island until the final mission, when the Ceph's underground structure lifts half of Central Park into the sky.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: In the Final Boss of the first game, there's a bug that makes it so that the game's 11th-Hour Superpower won't lock on to the designated targets (and it's a weapon that can only fire after a successful lock on). The general consensus is that you have to reset the entire stage, get back to the boss, and pick a god and pray that you'll lock on.
  • Game Mod: Crymod is an entire community based around these.
    • One of the more well-known mods is MechWarrior: Living Legends, a total-conversion mod in the BattleTech / MechWarrior universe.
    • Graphical mods which make the game look even better (photorealistic) and run at the same speed or just slightly slower are very popular.
  • Gameplay Ally Immortality: The friendly Delta Force nanosuit soldiers who help you through a couple levels in Crysis Warhead are immortal; being "killed" only knocks them down for several seconds, after which they get back up again to kick more ass.
    • In the Crysis mission "Assault," it is possible to destroy the AA gun in the harbor without being detected, which causes all the enemies to start shooting at Psycho rather than looking for you. No matter how many bullets he takes, he won't even fall down, much less die.
    • Mostly averted in the sequel. Other than a single plot-important named character, your Marine squadmates are mortal and can die, although they are pretty tough and can survive reasonably well. There's even an achievement in the console versions for getting all of them through one of the levels without any of them dying.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Averted in Crysis 2 in regards to the multiplayer mode. The Marine and CELL nanosuits are significantly weaker than the main Nanosuit 2 used by Alcatraz in single-player, with faster Stealth energy drain and a less effective Armor Mode. Without Armor Mode, a Marine or CELL can only survive about as much damage as a CEL Mook NPC from single-player. Indeed, one of the Level 3 killstreak rewards is the Maximum Nanosuit, which boosts the power of the player's nanosuit up to the levels seen in single-player, and pretty much makes them a walking tank for as long as the killstreak is active.
    • That is because the Cell and Marine Nanosuit are not Nanosuit 2.0. They can be seen stored in glass cases in Hargreave's study, using the Tactical Mode to analyze them will reveal that they are indeed custom made Nanosuit 1.5 and not Nanosuit 2.0
    • As a general rule in the Crysis series, if you see them do it in a cutscene, you can pull it off yourself.
  • Gatling Good: One of the weapons is a man-portable minigun, of course. Justified in that you need a superpowered Powered Armor nanosuit in order to wield it. And even then, you need to switch the suit to Maximum Strength to actually hold it on target.
    • Subverted in Crysis 2. Instead of a minigun, you get slower firing, but no less effective Portable and Disposable HMG. You no longer need to switch to Maximum Strength to use it (That's on by default now), but it does slow you down and there's no way to reload it.
  • Gas Mask Mooks: CELL soldiers wear a stylized gas mask while patrolling New York City in the middle of evacuation in Crysis 2 and later in Crysis 3. A heroic example occurs with a few models of the US marines wearing a more traditional looking gas mask in Crysis 2.
  • General Ripper: Lockhart, whose hatred for both Prophet and the nanosuit program goes right up to irrational hatred to the point that he actively sabotages Hargreave's efforts to save New York City. Legion goes into detail regarding Lockhart's hatred for the program, as not only does he consider the use of the technology to be an "abomination" but that he also lost a nephew during the program's early testing phase.
    • Watts actually says that Lockhart isn't completely wrong; Every iteration of the Nanosuit up to 2.0 has killed its user, and From a Certain Point of View, they were designed to do it. He points out that the suits replace every biological function save independent thought; “assume autonomic, regulatory, and motor functions in the event of somatic damage or operator incapacity.” In other words, the system can run itself just fine when the person inside is dead. The Nanosuit's purpose is to turn humans into "post-human warriors" - except that the users are not told of this until it is too late. Lockhart refuses to see how nothing less will stop the Ceph, and goes insane with his hatred of the suits, but damn.
  • Genius Bruiser: Alcatraz develops into one over the course of Legion, becoming a startlingly intelligent and savvy person thanks to the help of the suit and the fact that its growing into his body and co-opting a lot of mental processing power, speeding up his thought processes.
  • George Lucas Altered Version: Crysis: Remastered isn't simply a graphical update of the original Crysis, but features numerous subtle but meaningful gameplay changes from the original game, many of which are due to being based on the 7th-generation console port of Crysis. For example, the suit interface now works like Crysis 2 and 3, weapon damage has been decreased for both the player and enemies (with some weapons having sizable damage increases when wielded by the player, such as the sniper rifle and minigun), bullet spread has been added to assault rifles when fired in full-auto mode, the shotgun (which previously averted Short-Range Shotgun) has had its effective range cut in half, enemies strafe more, enemy placements have been altered somewhat (most notably on the Awakening level), the laser sight attachment has been removed from enemy weapons (meaning you won't get it until much later in the game), enemy nanosuit soldiers are now immune to the tranquilizer dart, and the Korean General boss battle has had a scripting and A.I. overhaul.
  • The Ghost:
    • Roger, the poor interviewer debriefing Alcatraz in Legion. It's clear from the narration that Roger is asking Alcatraz questions as certain points, as we'll see Alcatraz pause and respond ("So anyway...I'm sorry? Oh, you meant the [x], no, I was talking about the [y]..."), but he doesn't actually have any printed lines of dialogue, forcing the reader to guess at his questions based on Alcatraz's reactions.
    • Also Silverback in 3.
  • Giant Mook: Ceph Heavies in Crysis 2 and Crysis 3. Huge, strong Mighty Glacier dual-wielding a heavy machine-gun analogue and a rocket-launcher, along with having an EMP ability like most Ceph. Bullets are generally ineffective as it takes almost a dozen full mags of assault rifle fire to down one, although concentrated fire focused on the head does eventually work. It even takes two direct hits of C4 to kill one.
  • Good All Along: Tara Strickland seems to be a high ranking CELL leader, but near the end of Crysis 2 turns out to be a CIA agent inflitrating them.
  • Grand Theft Me: Turns out, this is why Prophet killed himself in Crysis 2 - if he let the Ceph virus fester in him, he'd get hijacked. Implied to have happened to Alcatraz at the end of Crysis 2, though Legion indicates things are a lot more complicated than it seems. Complete by 3, with Prophet ultimately being the mind in charge of Alcatraz's corpse, and altering the outer shell of the suit to his old body's appearance at the end...seemingly having forgotten it's not his body after 20+ years occupying it.
  • Gray-and-Gray Morality: All of the different competing human villains in Crysis 2 actually have generally good motives and are trying to save humanity from the Ceph. It's just that to varying degrees they're perfectly fine with killing marines + civilians, killing each other, and most especially killing you in order to achieve that goal.
  • Grievous Harm with a Body: You can Neck Lift enemy soldiers, then throw them at their comrades. And your nanosuit's strong enough to do this even when you're not in strength mode. Not only do aliens have necks, but Neck Lift is instantly and invariably fatal for them. It is possible to finish The Core chapter (and some levels after that) using cloak and Neck Lift only, on any difficulty.
  • Gun Accessories: You start with an underbarrel tranq gun, a silencer, a EOTech holosight and a flashlight, then you get a grenade launcher, an ACOG scope, a sniper scope, and a laser sight. You can mount every accessory on every rifle, but some combinations are more useful than others.
    • Some combinations are hilariously useless - you can mount a sniper scope on a shotgun. However, with the shotgun's tight-spread setting, it averts Short-Range Shotgun, and so the combination of sniper scope and laser pointer on the shotgun can have some pretty awesome utility, especially for killing nanosuited Koreans at the end of the first game.
    • Crysis 2 dumbs this system down somewhat: the number of slots has been decreased, the flashlight is gone (made slightly redundant with NANOVISION ENABLED), and there's only a choice between underbarrel shotgun, a late-game gauss rifle, or grenade launcher, and the ironsights/scope/laser sights on most guns.
    • The third installment returns to the roots bringing back some old mods and combinations and including brand new ones like CQC handles, thermal scopes, muzzle attachments to reduce spread/boost damage and different ammo types.
  • Grapple Move: The game allows you to grab human enemies with the "interact" button and use them as a Human Shield. You can also throw them, and doing it with your nanosuit set to Maximum Strength is a guaranteed kill against at least the person you threw.
  • Hacking Minigame: The third game introduces this. You can use it to reprogram turrets and mines as well as open CELL supply lockers... or even reactivate dormant Ceph Pingers.
  • Hand Cannon: The Hammer pistol and Majestic revolver from Crysis 2.
  • Harder Than Hard: Delta difficulty. No aiming reticule, enemies speak Korean, you can't drive and shoot at the same time. It also drastically reduces the speed at which your health regenerates. The game files refer to Delta as "bauer". In Crysis Remastered, Delta difficulty also reduces your max ammo and increases enemy damage, but the difference is pretty small, you can carry 1 less clip for each weapon and can survive about 1 less bullet compared to Normal.
    • The sequel has Post-Human Warriornote , where your health is significantly reduced, to the point you can be killed by just a few bullets. Your Armor Mode shield seems to be just as durable as on Normal, though, so as long as you use it correctly, the game's still manageable.
  • Harmless Freezing: Zigzagged. The player is fine, everyone else isn't. You can still be shattered whilst frozen if you die in the wrong place. You can also be killed if you are frozen by an exosuit and don't break the ice (rapidly moving your mouse back and forth), though - you'll fall down and shatter.
  • Heavily Armored Mook:
    • The minigun-wielding KPA Nanosuit soldiers in the first game. They're even more durable than the regular Nanosuit soldiers, but lack the regular versions' cloaking or enhanced jumping, being limited to walking around with their miniguns shooting at you.
    • Downplayed with CELL commanders and heavy weapon troopers in the second and third games. They wear black-colored improved armor compared to the regular troops, but all that means is that they can withstand 1 or 2 more assault rifle bullets or (barely) survive 1 sniper rifle shot to the torso.
  • Heroic BSoD: Psycho.
  • Heroic Mime: Lampshaded in the opening scene of Crysis 2, where it's stated that Alcatraz doesn't feel like talking because he's got the mother of all hangovers. Afterwards, it's highly likely that Alcatraz simply CAN'T talk, due to his collapsed lungs, damaged heart, broken spine, and other injuries that essentially make him a walking corpse.
    • The book supports this; his larynx was one of the things trashed during the attack. He's figured out how to 'speak' by the end, though, by using the suit's voice synthesizing programs and its direct link into his brain...sort of.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Major Strickland faces off against a Ceph Hunter in Crysis to buy time for Nomad and his marines to escape in a VTOL.
  • Heroic Safe Mode: In Crysis 2, the Nanosuit 2 occasionally goes into this, ESPECIALLY when it starts shouting at you to get your ass in gear. Turns out, it's Prophet's consciousness back in action.
    • It is unclear whether it's Prophet, suit or hallucination of a dying mind:
      It’s False Prophet. It’s False Prophet, I can see his face hanging there in the void before me. It’s nothing like the original, it’s barely even an imitation. Just pixels and polygons. A constellation, a thousand stars that just happen to look like a human face.
      It’s the goddamn suit. The suit is shouting at me.
      “Get your ass back in the fight!”
      Go away. You’re dead. I saw you die.
      “Back at you, soldier. You think that’s an excuse?”
      Maybe this is SECOND in denial, just a dumb biochip reliving the good old days in an attempt to rekindle the flame with a partner who dumped it days ago. Or maybe it’s pretending to be Prophet because it accessed a psych database somewhere and decided I’d react better to something that sounded like it had a life. Shit, maybe it is Prophet — some warped-mirror cartoon of Prophet at least — cobbled together from loose talk and synaptic echoes long after the conscious meat blew itself to kingdom come. Maybe it’s insane, maybe it thinks it’s real.
      Or maybe not. This could just be the oxygen-starved brain of Cyborg Asshole Mk2 making stuff up as it goes along, Tin Man’s version of a near-death experience: as meaningless as all those lights and angels the neo-agers go on about during their asphyx parties. Maybe there’s not even any brain left to starve, maybe it’s been dead for hours and all these thoughts are running along a net of carbon nanotubes.
  • High-Tech Hexagons: It uses this trope excessively: all Crynet technology is covered with hexagons, be it the Nanosuit or the CELL guns; even the Crynet logo is made of 120° angles.
  • Hive Queen: The Alpha Ceph in Crysis 3 is revealed to be the controlling force behind the Ceph's hive mind. It's also the main source of power for all the Ceph on Earth.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: Multiple:
    • In Crysis the aliens are defeated by overloading their energy-siphoning systems with a specific coded command.
    • In Crysis 2 they are beaten out of Manhattan by re-purposing their own bioweapon to attack them instead of humans.
    • Hargreave, "the absolute master at using your opponent's strength against him", gets his own when the suit that he had built to perfection refuses to be separated from its dying host.
  • Humans Are the Real Monsters: Jacob Hargreave certainly thinks so, and he believes that the rest of humanity is too stupid, short sighted, or combative to effectively fight against the Ceph, forcing him to take matters into his own hands. On the other hand, he repeatedly expresses admiration for the Ceph's ecological recovery efforts and tactics in wiping out humanity. Doesn't stop him from investing all of his time and resources into fighting against them, though that may have more to do with saving himself than saving everyone else.
    Gould: What have you done old man? They're here!
    Hargreave: That's right, Nathan! The owners are back! Waking the systems, firing up the boiler. Back to spring-clean the old family residence, and not much liking what they've found festering behind the fridge. Can you blame them, really?
  • Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Easy, Normal, and Hard are straightforward, but then there's Delta, which the game files refer to as "bauer". Among other things, it averts the Translation Convention with the NK soldiers and makes them speak actual Korean.
    • Crysis 2 renames "Delta" difficulty to "Post-Human Warrior", or Super-Soldier for consoles.
    • Crysis Remastered applies this to the graphics configuration: the absolute highest setting, where the engine cuts absolutely no corners on final rendering and drops common shortcuts like line of sight distance and level of detail (i.e. the engine draws literally the entire world at all times on full detail), is called "Can it run Crysis?". As of February 2020: no, it can't; literally not even a top class gaming PC with AMD Ryzen Threadripper and Geforce RTX 3090 GPU can run that level of detail at more than 30 FPS on 4K.
  • IKEA Weaponry: The LAW missile launcher's venturi and scope collapse into the tube when not being used for mobility's sake.
  • Ignored Expert: Both Dr. Rosenthal and his daughter Helena are ignored by General Kyong and Admiral Morrison, respectively. And both times, it only makes things worse.
  • Imported Alien Phlebotinum: The Nanosuit. It's pretty much just a Ceph exoskeleton re-sized to fit on a human rather than Starfish Aliens. And the Ceph want their tech back. Multiple times when Alcatraz has been incapacitated, the Ceph have avoided killing him in favor of grabbing and trying to analyze or study him, as if trying to figure out how the mold in their fridge learned to work the TV remote.
  • Impressive Pyrotechnics: Any object that can explode will explode with incredible graphical effects. The pinnacle being A NUCLEAR GRENADE LAUNCHER.
  • Infinite Flashlight: The tactical light weapon attachment never runs out of power, while making you highly visible to enemies.
  • In-Series Nickname: "CELLulites" for the PMCs in Legion. Ceph, Squiddie and "those alien bastards" are also common nicknames for what are officially called The Charybdis.
  • Insistent Terminology: In 3, Claire insists on calling Prophet "hardware". Prophet does not approve.
  • Invisibility Cloak: Standard nanosuit feature. Also tends to be a Game-Breaker in singleplayer. In multiplayer, savvy players will notice that cloaked players still leave shadows, and the handheld scanner will pick them up and display them on the minimap.
  • Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: oddly twisted about in Crysis 2: near the end of the game, in-between cutscenes, the Nanosuit will chew you out and yell at you. It turns out it's Prophet's consciousness.
    • Legion indicates that the SECOND AI system is aware and able to make its own judgment calls and decisions, but relies on a human operator to make most decisions. Alcatraz does not appreciate SECOND choosing to....second-guess him. Eventually, Alcatraz, SECOND, and Prophet merge into some gestalt entity within the suit.
  • Instant Sedation: The tactical attachment for rifles in Crysis 1, which fires tranquilizer darts. Subverted, they get back up in thirty seconds.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: In Crysis 2, you can kick a car across a street, but most doors and windows are made of solid Wall.
    • Winked at in Crysis 3 when Psycho tries to kick down a door and just falls flat on his tuchus. Then Prophet does it easily. At another point, he watches Psycho struggle to pry open an elevator door and bemusedly asks if he needs a hand. The implication is that Prophet is just being polite and waiting for Psycho, since he has no problem opening his own doors when he's on his own.
  • Interface Screw: Happens frequently whenever you encounter the Ceph, or when someone or something disables your Nanosuit.
  • Interquel: The Crysis comic shows the immediate aftermath of the first game, provides allot of backstory for Prophet and his recruitment by Hargreave, and most importantly explains why Nomad and Helena are absent from the rest of the series.
    • The novel Crysis: Escalation also bridges the 20-year gap between Crysis 2 and 3, explaining the fate of Alcatraz and how CELL was able to take over the world.
  • Invisibility Flicker:
    • When performing a stealth kill, the invisibility cloak will drop for a moment, allowing nearby enemies to see you. Fortunately, it restores itself immediately afterwards, letting you get away, and an upgrade in the third game allows you to remain completely invisible through the process. Imagine being one of those poor grunts watching one his buddies suddenly get his head rotated 180 degrees without seeing what's doing it.
    • Firing weapons while cloaked drains energy; this leads to some players manually invoking this trope, sneaking into position, dropping invisibility long enough to fire their weapon, then recloaking to run away.
    • The Assassin module in Crysis 3 lets the player attack without breaking stealth.
  • It's Up to You: Virtually everything that needs to be accomplished is done by the player. If you do have allies, they're mostly there to provide the enemy with another target to shoot at instead of just you.
  • Just Hit Him: Inverted; enemies can survive multiple punches but will die from just one throw.
  • Just One Man: Commander Lockhart, who is hilariously Genre Blind, says this about Alcatraz more than once.
  • Kaizo Trap: Commander Lockhart is, by all accounts, an anticlimactic Cutscene Boss. However, if you don't burst into his room quickly enough to trigger the cutscene where you kill him, he will blast you through the door with his gauss rifle.
    • After the first Pinger boss fight, three marine squad cars suddenly plow through a wall and, should you be even remotely close, your energy will be wiped out and, (if you're unfortunate enough to be insta-killed) thrown back a checkpoint to before the boss battle. Even on Supersoldier, which means we're talking about restarting an extremely difficult boss battle because your allies don't bother to brake or check where they are driving.
  • Kick the Dog: The Aliens' sphere freezes everything. Even turtles. In Crysis 2, they kill a lot of civilians, in a very slow and painful way.
  • Kill It with Fire: The Scorchers in 3 and their Incinerators do Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The database entry says that the Ceph came up with them deliberately to capitalise on Earth lifeforms' vulnerability to heat.
  • Kill Sat: In Crysis 3, CELL have an orbital satellite responsible for regulating and distributing power across the globe. This satellite can also discharge most of the Earth's entire global power supply into a single target.
  • Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Ceph Heavies and Grunt Commanders are Back Stab-proof. Grunt Commanders need to be softened up before the Neck Lift-and-throw can be used, while Heavies being Giant Mooks are understandably immune.
  • Lampshade Hanging: In Warhead, one of the Marines comments on the large number of VTOLs that get shot down.
  • Large Ham Radio: Radio Free Manhattan, complete with your obligatory self-appointed wisecracking overeager motormouth DJ making light of the situation, Eddie "Truth" Newton.
  • Late-Arrival Spoiler: The trailers for 3 freely call you Prophet. Alcatraz? Who's that?
  • Lethally Stupid: In-Universe. DARPA in Crysis 2 somehow concludes that the Marines that they're in the middle of deploying won't be enough and decides to bomb the dam and flood the city in an attempt to slow the aliens down. The aliens are nicknamed "Ceph", as in cephalopods. They're amphibious. Humans are not. Lampshaded by every single character.
  • Lightning Bruiser and King Mook: The Ceph Guardians fought at the end of the game. They're as fast and agile as the basic Ceph Stalkers, have as much if not more health than a Ceph Heavy, and can cloak. And you have to fight 4 of them at once.
  • Living on Borrowed Time: Alcatraz.
  • Made of Explodium: Most vehicles detonate spectacularly if shot in the correct location; ie, the fuel tank. Or any fuel tank. Jeeps have a small fuel can on the back, presumably used for refuelling them in an emergency. Guess what happens when it's shot...
  • Made of Iron: The North Korean General can survive several sniper rifle shots to the face (despite not even wearing a helmet) or even a full extended mag of SMG fire. Although he's weak against thrown barrels due to a surprisingly common physics exploit (see Wreaking Havoc below).
  • Magnetic Weapons: The Gauss Rifle. One-Hit Kill, practically hitscan, has low ammo availability, leaves a trail that the enemy will trace to you if you miss, and is extremely expensive when playing multiplayer Power Struggle. Becomes the Gauss Sabot Rifle in 3, as a Sniper Rifle.
  • Meaningful Echo: In Crysis 2, Prophet's last words to Alcatraz before killing himself are "They used to call me Prophet. Remember me." Then, in Crysis: Escalation, when Alcatraz surrenders permanent control of his body to Prophet, his last words are "They called me Alcatraz. Remember me."
  • Meaningful Name: Alcatraz, as it's revealed, cannot leave the Nanosuit due to grievous wounds - and then it's implied Prophet hijacks his body. The rest of his unit is similarly named after prisons.
  • MegaCorp: Hargreave-Rasch, as stated in Legion. By the time of Crysis 3, they essentially own the planet.
  • Men of Sherwood: As noted under Elite Army, the U.S. Marines in the first game spend the first half kicking the ass of the KPA, both in-gameplay and in-story. Once the Ceph take over as the main antagonists in the second half, they have less luck, though still get some good licks in. By 2, the Marines mostly get their asses kicked, but can act as decent in-gameplay support to the superpowered player and have a scripted Curb Stomp Cushion every now and then against their technologically superior foes, such as Chino's introduction (where a squad of Marines ambushes and wipes out a squad of Ceph Grunts without a loss) or the mission where you reactivate a knocked-out SAM battery (followed by the SAMs shooting down three Ceph Gunships).
  • Mercy Invincibility: Sort of. In the first game, enemies will inexplicably pause when your health hits 20%. This pause only lasts a few seconds, and it's only granted once every minute or so, so make the best of it!
  • The Milky Way Is the Only Way: Averted. The Ceph are from the M33 Galaxy, better known as the Triangulum Galaxy.
  • Mistaken Identity: Crysis 2 starts off with Prophet rescuing Alcatraz (the player character) and giving him his suit before dying. Prophet's suit is one of the last known in operation, so naturally everyone assumes you're Prophet for the first third or so of the game, including your Voice with an Internet Connection as well as (unfortunately) all the mercenaries trying to kill Prophet. Alcatraz is unable to correct anyone on the matter, mostly due to them all trying to shoot him (and possibly not being able to speak at all).
    • The comics indicate that the reason why Aztec and Jester got eviscerated by alien Scouts early in Crysis is because the alien machines mistook the reverse-engineered nanosuits for alien technology, and tried to interface. If you pay attention, you'll notice that the same thing happens in Crysis 2 when you first meet a Ceph Grunt, but the Nanosuit 2.0's more advanced systems resist more effectively.
  • Mission-Pack Sequel: An examination of the game files reveals that the underlying gameplay code of Crysis 3 is nearly identical to that of Crysis 2, right down to most of the weapons and enemies having identical stats unchanged from Crysis 2. However, some things have been tweaked (i.e. armor mode is more powerful, while cloak mode doesn't last as long), new weapons and enemies have been added, and of course the graphics have been overhauled.
  • Monster Threat Expiration:
    • The Alien Scouts demonstrate superhuman speed, strength, and a cloaking device while wiping out your nanosuit-wearing Delta Force teammates in the game's first few levels. When you actually fight them later in the game, they display none of these abilities, and behave pretty much like attack helicopters.
    • In Crysis, the Hunter Exosuit is able to wipe out an entire platoon of U.S. Marines due to possessing an invincible energy shield, and is only defeated at the end of the game via Applied Phlebotinum that allows the scientist girl to hack his shield and disable it. In Warhead, which takes place before the first game, the Hunters no longer have this energy shield, and can be fought as standard boss battles whenever you encounter one. Warhead also inverts it with the smaller alien 'infantry' exosuits, who now use squad tactics instead of just rushing in from up front and jumping into the air for no reason.
    • In Crysis 3, the higher-end Ceph units (Devastators and Pingers) are noticeably less tough; they're still resistant to small-arms fire, but it takes a lot less explosives to kill one than it did in Crysis 2.
  • Monumental Damage: Well, it's New York we're talking about. Over the course of the second game you are treated to the sight of quite a number of famous landmarks collapsing in a spectacular (and devastating) manner - Hell, one of the first things you see in Crysis 2 is a somewhat untouched Statue of Liberty. On the plus side, it seems you do manage to avert the nuclear strike so at the end some of the stuff is still standing. Talk about happy endings...
  • More Dakka: The Swarmer is this applied to missiles. And yes, it reduces Ceph Heavies to a nice paste in seconds.
    • Crysis 3 introduces us to the Typhoon, a six-barreled electrically-controlled stacked-charge Metal-Storm-type weapon that fires 500 rounds per second.
    Prophet: It's the purest form of expression.
  • Murder, Inc.: CELL, as they have no problems killing civilians or even Marines (such as the player) despite ostensibly working for the US government.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Dr. Rosenthal, when he reluctantly gives Kyong the means to open the 'temple' (actually the alien ship) on Lingshan Island.
  • Nanomachines: The nanosuits are made of them, and the game would end four minutes in without them.
  • Near-Villain Victory: At the end of the third game, Prophet kills the Alpha Ceph, only to get sucked into space and see the "advanced Ceph" (which looks like a gigantic tentacled robot thing.) emerging from a space portal. Thankfully, he is able to use Archangel to destroy it before it fully emerges and is still vulnerable (it's implied if it got all the way out, it would be completely unstoppable.)
  • Nerf:
    • The shotgun has been reduced to a standard FPS Short-Range Shotgun as opposed to the long-range one-hit-kill weapon it was in the first game, though it is still effective at medium range.
    • In Crysis 3, cloak mode drains energy much more rapidly and lasts much shorter than it did in Crysis 2, even with the longer cloak upgrade equipped. This is likely to balance out the new additions such as the stealth kill upgrade and the bow, both of which let you instantly kill enemies without decloaking or draining energy.
      • On the other hand, the other two suit modes were buffed: sprinting no longer takes energy, and armor mode drains energy slower.
  • Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer: Inverted early in the first game, as it's Prophet (the leader) who won't give you, (the subordinate) a straight answer, instead insisting you and the others come and see in person and saying you wouldn't believe if he told you. To be fair, it is that bizarre You find a ship on land, miles from the water, which is completely frozen despite the game taking place on a tropical island.
  • New Game Plus: in Crysis 2 all Nanosuit Modules and weapon attachments are available from the start in subsequent re-runs of the game. Crysis 3 uses the same system.
  • The Neidermeyer: Admiral Morrison in the first game really comes across this way. Not only does he take Nomad's extremely useful MOAC away (even though Nomad has hands on experience and is thus by far the most qualified to use it.) he insists on nuking the island despite multiple scientists warning him this will only make things worse. Sure enough, things go From Bad to Worse due to his actions. As such, it's hard to feel any sympathy when a ceph breaks into the ship and kills him.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Admiral Morrison and the USN's attempt to nuke the Ceph Ice Sphere only makes it larger, and makes the Ceph allot angrier.
    • Halfway through Crysis 3, Prophet shuts down CELL's global power source, not realizing that their system was actually keeping the Alpha Ceph dormant. Naturally, the Alpha Ceph wakes up and everything goes to Hell.
  • Nintendo Hard: Even if you're playing on the easiest difficulty setting, every single enemy in the game is capable of killing you in one shot. It's very rare for any of the Korean enemies (at least the ones without sniper rifles) to get the necessary headshot, but they're certainly capable of doing it. Then, when the aliens take over as the main enemies, even one of the smallest mooks can easily one-shot you... and you often face at least four or five of them in one go!
  • N.G.O. Superpower: By the time of Crysis 3, CELL essentially owns the entire planet, thanks to their monopoly on electricity following the depletion of all other Earth energy resources (they're pretty much Shinra Inc, with about as much of a moral compass). It appears that world governments still exist, but CELL is essentially able to do whatever it wants (including enslaving most of the population with monetary debt schemes, and even nuking major cities) because they're simply too big to fail, and they have the largest and most advanced military left on Earth.
  • No Body Left Behind: To prevent anyone getting their hands on the nanosuits, they self-destruct in an immolatory fashion, taking with them the body of the wearer.
  • Novelization: The second game has a novel adaptation called Crysis: Legion. It expands on the setting, characters, technology, and enemies. The book is written in the form of an after-action interview of Alcatraz, occasionally interspersed with reports and interviews with other characters. However, for all information revealed, almost all of it is in-universe speculation. It was written by Peter Watts - who applies his nightmarish genius to it in so many ways.
  • Nuke 'em: Played painfully straight. Backfires when the alien 'shield' absorbs the energy from the nuclear detonation and expands suddenly, just like a scientist had predicted. Oops!
    • Comes up again in the sequel, though thankfully it's prevented. You'd really think they'd have learned better by now. Lampshaded multiple times.
  • Older Than They Look: Both Jacob Hargreave and Karl Ernst Rasch are well over 100 years old, yet both appear to be in their mid 60's at most. The "Hargreave" you see throughout the game is actually a computer-generated image; Hargreave himself is a Mr. House-style Human Popsicle networked to a sophisticated computer system. Rasch, meanwhile, used Ceph DNA and nanotech (the same technology used in the nanosuit) to extend his life.
  • One-Hit Kill: The Nanosuit 2.0 is capable of superhuman feats, and in the right user's hands effectively makes them a One-Man Army. So it's not really all that surprising when Alcatraz rushing to grab Lockhart's throat results in a blood spray of flesh being crunched from the sheer force; even despite being Defiant to the End with what follows, he was effectively doomed the second he was touched.
  • 100% Completion: In Crysis 2. In fact, there's a separate completion percentage for multiplayer as well. Oh, and to get 100% in Single Player, you WILL have to beat the game on its highest difficulty, Post-Human Warrior.
  • One-Man Army: While you do have allies that team up with you from time to time, for the most part you do a lot of fighting on your own. Fortunately your nanosuit allows you to do such things which would probably get a regular soldier killed.
  • One-Word Title
  • Only Sane Man: Hargreave considers himself this. This is why he wants to kill you and take the nanosuit for himself: he thinks he's the only one who can save humanity. Strickland mocks him, saying he believes he's "the only competent person on the planet". Not unjustified, given the astronomical stupidity of every government that ever discovered the Ceph. Attempting to take the Nanosuit back from Alcatraz is pretty much the only mistake he ever makes - and perhaps that was because it was a purely selfish decision; only a fully operational Nanosuit could sustain his life outside of his People Jar.
  • Optional Stealth: The game allows you to pull this off thanks to the Nanosuit's cloak function. The official strategy guide for the third game even has two separate campaign walkthroughs-one for stealth-focused players, and one for those take a more head-on approach.
    • A player can drop quite a few enemies by utilizing cover, dropping stealth long enough to pop a shot into an enemy, re-cloaking and moving to another area of cover before his buddies can figure out what happened.
  • Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: Almost completely averted.
    • Except with the Swarmer from Crysis 2: the thing is basically a crate of rockets with guidance and launching ports.
  • Our Wormholes Are Different: In the third issue of the comic series, Nomad, Prophet, Psycho and Helena are forced to go through a portal inside the Ceph mountain base, ending up on a moon of Jupiter.
    • The Ceph's entire purpose in the third game is to open one of these to the M33 galaxy.
    • Hargreave, as well as a few others, seem to think that all of the Ceph installations have a portal somewhere inside, for bringing in help from off-planet.
  • Outside-the-Box Tactic: In the third game, there is a segment in the second mission where a jammer is interfering with your nanosuit, and the way to the jammer is a field with tall grass and many Ceph Stalkers, making the journey a desperate run to destroy it while being slashed on all sides. The thing is, the jammer is just barely visible from the platform that you start that part on. A single shot from the bow with an fragmentation arrowhead means good-bye jammer and straight on to the next objective.
  • Overturned Outhouse: In Crysis 2, you can knock over an outhouse at the start of "Eye of the Storm" with a fully-powered punch, to the annoyance of the CELL operative inside.
  • Passing the Torch: At the start of the second game, Prophet is dying, but knows the Ceph are still out there, so he transfers the suit to the marine Alcatraz. He then kills himself to sever the link, leaving the saving of the world in Alcatraz's hands. Maybe.
  • Pedestrian Crushes Car: The opening cinematic shows off the rapid improvisation the series' nanosuits are intended to make possible. At one point a mook tries to run Nomad down with a Humvee, but Nomad switches suit modes to Super-Strength and destroys the vehicle by punching it.
  • Pet the Dog: Alluded to. Alcatraz helps a mother and child in Legion and, when his interviewer expresses suspicion, makes a crack about shrinks and mommy issues.
  • Poor Communication Kills: Helena Rosenthal's attempt to explain why nuking Lingshan is a bad idea sounds a lot like a You Have to Believe Me! speech.Darling, if you'd just said that the alien constuct is a giant heatsink that could absorb all the energy from a nuclear blast, you might have saved the US Navy a carrier.
    • Jacob Hargreave in the second game apparently just quietly sat on his knowledge of the Cephs for at least a century without telling anyone. His (rather justified) excuse is that in his experience, the bulk of humanity has proven itself too stupid to deal with far less dangerous threats, and preferred to act on his own.
    Gould: Here? They were here, in New York, all along?
    Hargreave: Their dormant systems were, yes, Nathan. Hargreave speaks slowly, patiently, as if explaining the facts of life to a special-needs child. One of their cottages, and the quantum port facility to transmit themselves aboard. You think I'm based in this cesspit city because I like it here?
    Gould: Why didn't you warn someone?
    Hargreave: Warn whom, Nathan? Humanity at large? The species that has proven so bracingly honest with itself in the face of unpleasant truths? That race so quick to accept the facts about population growth and resource overconsumption and climate change? No, thank you very much, I preferred to trust only myself, and a few handpicked men.
  • Pop the Tires: Popping the tires on vehicles won't immobilize them. It'll slow them down, though.
  • Powered Armor: a bit of it.
    • It's interesting to note that, given their rather frail constitution and likely inability to function at all in normal gravity, the Ceph themselves are dependent of Powered Armor and autonomous drones for combat purposes. In the first game, their machines are squid-like, tentacled in appearance, and most are autonomous. By Crysis 2, however, they're using humanoid(-ish) robotic suits that are visibly manned by some kind of alien organism, though one that looks different from the aliens we see in the first game.
  • Powered by a Forsaken Child: In Crysis 2, it's revealed that the Nanosuits are not the cool next-gen Powered Armor that everybody thought they were. Instead they're a sort of symbiotic techno-organic machine/organism, and it's hinted that the reason Nomad and Psycho don't appear in Crysis 2 is because Very Bad Things eventually happen to anyone who puts on a Nanosuit. Hargreave conveniently left out this little detail when assigning the prototype suits to Prophet's team in the first game.
  • Power Fist: Strength Mode; in gameplay terms it basically quintuples your normal punching damage.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation: Legion isn't a perfect adaptation of 2. There's a note in front that points out the need to change stuff for the prose experience.
    • Possibly the best demonstration is the fact that Alcatraz, in the interview he's narrating, tends to gloss over the combat sequences. It seems like saving space, until one realizes that Peter Watts is perfectly capable of writing combat sequences, Alcatraz has perfect memory, and the skirmishes he is describing in a few vague words involve killing dozens of CELL and Ceph. He simply doesn't think they're worth mentioning.
  • Precision F-Strike: Legion has Gould describing the intended purpose of the Nanosuit (corrupting the Ceph virus and delivery system) as gay rape on hanging flies. It Makes Sense in Context, but every conversation within hearing distance ends abruptly. Even the wounded stop moaning.
  • Prequel: Noname Island, a Game Mod from Crytek.
    • The comic miniseries serves as a prequel to Crysis 2, connecting the plot with that of Crysis.
  • Present Tense Narrative: In Legion, Alcatraz narrates this way. Oddly, he's recounting the events of the game, so he's talking about things in the past. This is even lampshaded when the unheard interviewer debriefing him asks why he's talking that way and Alcatraz essentially just shrugs and says that with his nanon-augmented-memory, he can recount everything with crystal clarity and as such feels like he's reliving it.
  • Press X to Not Die: Crysis 2 has quicktime events. They're tolerable, though, because they're limited to only about 3 or 4 key scenes, you have a very generous timeframe to perform the action before failing, and the buttons you're required to press always correspond to the actions your character is trying to perform on screen (i.e. pressing the jump button to jump up to a helicopter). Furthermore, due to the way cutscenes are woven into the game, the player is always able to continue looking around with the mouse, so you'll pretty much always have your hands on the controls ready to Press X.
    • One of these events is pressing a button to activate your suit's built-in defibrillator. Literally pressing X to not die.
  • Put on a Bus: By Crysis 3, Alcatraz. He was essentially killed at the end of the previous game, but the nanosuit saved a copy of his brain. Which is too damaged to possibly repair.
  • Really 700 Years Old: Hargreave is at least 127 years old. Alcatraz suspects that he is even older, possibly hundreds or thousands of years old thanks to Ceph ubertech.
  • Red Shirt Army: Most of the non-nanosuit wearing allies can die fairly quickly. Of course, you're often facing off against enemies using high powered weaponry, and the nanosuit you're wearing makes you much more durable to damage than them. That said, they do provide some good in the form of another target for the enemy to shoot at instead of you. And once in a while they may even kill a random mook.
  • Removable Turret Gun: In the second game, you can pull heavy machine guns off their turrets. The third game adds automatic grenade launchers.
  • Required Secondary Powers: In Legion, the first time he cloaks, Alcatraz is surprised his weapon is cloaked too. The implication being that previous methods of active camouflage didn't do so.
  • Retcon: The first game ends with Nomad flying into the Lingshan ice sphere. The comic interquel picks up about five seconds later; the ice sphere has disappeared without a trace.
  • The Reveal: ...after reveal after reveal after reveal in the second game. It ranges all the way from the revelation that the wounds Alcatraz received during the attack on the sub are fatal and he'll die if he takes the nanosuit off through the fact that the Ceph aren't really invading, they're just waking up to take back what was originally theirs, all the way to Hargreave being in a semi-vegetative state to allow him to live for more than a century, then to the fact that Prophet's mind was saved by the nanosuit, and finally that Karl Rasch is still alive. Heck, even the pirate radio DJ, Eddie 'Truth' Newton, has his own small reveal if you're listening to his broadcasts: he's a Marine Corps veteran.
    • In the third game, finding out the identity of Psycho's torturer. Also, the reason how Karl Ernst Rasch is 150 years old but still as spry as ever.
  • Revolvers Are Just Better: The Majestic revolver in Crysis 2.
  • Scenery Gorn: New York looks pretty beat up from the start of the second game, especially when you get into Ceph-controlled territory, but things really get trashed after the military floods the city. Goes From Bad to Worse in the third game, as New York is now ruined and seriously overgrown.
  • Scenery Porn: Crysis is infamous for this: in fact, one could argue that in many ways Crysis is Scenery Porn With Plot.
  • Sculpted Physique: The Nanosuits, especially the 2.0 versions from Crysis 2 and Crysis 3. The slightly lower-tech North Korean Nanosuits are an aversion, using more traditional armor plate carriers instead.
  • Secondary Fire: Most weapons can be toggled between the usual single, burst, and full auto fire modes. If there's a tranquilizer launcher or grenade launcher, the same key selects that. For the shotgun, it switches the spread between close and wide. Vehicles have both a machine gun and either a main cannon, dumbfire rockets, or homing missiles.
  • Semper Fi: All of the American infantry in the first game (bar the Nanosuit users) are Marines, including the aforementioned Major Strickland. Played with in Crysis 2 a few times:
    • Alcatraz is a Force Recon marine. He references the culture of the corps a few times in Legion.
    • After the government pulls support for CELL and orders them disarmed, one asks his guard to let him out of his cell and give him a gun. When the guard refuses, the CELL trooper pleads with him on the basis that they're going to need everyone they've got to fight the Ceph, adding, "Christ, I used to be one of you; nine years in, U.S. Army, just like you." Before the guard explains that the CELL trooper's previous service record is irrelevant in light of his current status as a private contractor, he says, "I'm a Marine."
    • A pair of CELL troopers discuss the prospect of seeing action soon, one getting moto and saying "oorah!" The other chastises him, saying "You're not a Marine anymore." Given the first speaker's lack of protest, this can be another sign of how villainous CELL is for anyone familiar with the Marines' particular brand of espirit de corps.
    • In one of his broadcasts, "Truth" Newton drops the bombshell (as he admits it probably is to the type of people likely to tune in to him) that he's an "old Semper Fi Alumnus," assuring his listeners that they can trust the incoming Marines to get them to safety just as much as they can't trust CELL.
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Everyone "Mistakes" you for Prophet in the beginning of Crysis 2, when it's revealed at the very end that his consciousness was uploaded into the nanosuit on his death.
  • Sequel Escalation:
    • Alcatraz in 2 is much stronger and tougher than Nomad and Psycho were in the first game. To wit, with Armor Mode enabled Nomad could survive four (SCAR) to six (FY-71) assault rifle rounds before dying, kill a man in a few seconds by grabbing him and breaking his neck with one hand, flip a Humvee with some effort, one-hand toss Korean soldiers a couple dozen feet, and regenerate back to full health within ten seconds. Alcatraz could survive six or seven SCAR shots without Armor Mode (and nearly thirty with it), consistently kill men in half a second each with a quick one-two jab, punt a Humvee across the block by kicking it, one-hand toss CELL troopers over a hundred feet (despite the CELL troopers being both taller/bulkier and carrying heavier gear than the Koreans), and regenerate back to full health within the same time period despite having far more energy to replenish. Fittingly, Alcatraz's Nanosuit 2.0 is far bulkier than the 1.0 used by the other two.
      • Alcatraz also carries far more powerful weaponry than Nomad and Psycho: for example, his version of the SCAR fires hypersonic (2,000 m/s) tungsten discarding sabot rounds as opposed to regular 6.5mm Grendel, his JAW fires missiles nearly twice the diameter of 1's LAW while carrying 5 spare missiles as opposed to 3, and his machine gun fires .50 BMG rounds rather than 7.62x51mm rounds as the Hurricane did. This upgrade in equipment applies to the enemies too; and not only are the CELL troopers' small arms far better than the North Koreans', but unlike the latter all CELL soldiers come decked out in heavy body armor with various tactical toys. As a result, CELL troopers can survive two or three times as much damage as KPA soldiers could in the first game. Even CELL's Humvees and light attack helicopters are more heavily armored and armed than the KPA equivalents. And let's not even talk about how incomparably more dangerous the Ceph units are compared to their rather lackluster equivalents in the Lingshan Islands.
    • Crysis itself to its spiritual predecessor, Far Cry. Both games have similar settings, enemies, and gameplay, with two big differences. One, the KPA and Ceph are much more well-armed than the mercenaries and trigens. Two, instead of playing as a highly vulnerable Badass Normal, you're playing as a Super-Soldier with the powers of regeneration, Super-Strength, Super-Speed, invisibility, and more. Playing both games back to back feels very satisfying, as you go from needing to sneak and carefully plan every encounter in Far Cry (lest you get shredded in seconds) to basically bulldozing everything in Crysis, despite the opposition being tougher.
  • Sequel Hook: in the first game, Nomad, Psycho and Helena Rosenthal going back to the island for Prophet. The IDW comic picks up from there, with them quickly losing the dropship and going on a whirlwind tour of the fully awakened Ceph infrastructure, now filled with the Crysis 2 exo-squid and including a ride through their Portal Network to one of Jupiter's moons - a Derelict Graveyard filled with lost human craft dating back decades.
    • At the end of Crysis 2, Prophet tells Alcatraz that he's not allowed to die yet, and reveals a map showing even more Ceph bases, all over the planet. As you wake up, you get a call from Hargreave's old collaborator, Karl Rasch (who should be well past 100 as well).
  • Shell-Shock Silence: Present in Crysis 2 once something explodes near you (especially the devastator units energy cannons). The nanosuit quickly repairs the potential damage that would technically leave Alcatraz deaf otherwise and the classic whistle and muted sounds rapidly disappear.
  • Shout-Out:
    • The small and medium-sized alien war machines, once seen moving in-game instead of screenshots, bear a striking resemblance to squiddies from The Matrix.
    • In the game configuration files, the Delta difficulty is referred to with a "bauer" tag.
    • When you activate your cloak in Crysis 2, you hear the clicking noise the that the Predator makes when it's pissed.
    • In Crysis 2, in the electrified tunnel near the end of the second chapter, the first time you get shocked, the suit discreetly warns you that the electricity is 1.21 gigawatts.
    • The intro to Crysis 2 is an almost word for word homage to 2007's I Am Legend, two Newscasters debating baseball teams and playoffs, interspersed with news footage.
    • During the beginning of Crysis 2, one of the marines makes a reference to the aliens being "illegal aliens" which is a reference to another marine's comment in Aliens.
    • Some of the Achievements/Trophies for 3 are these. Arrow To The Knee,, Clever Girl, Hit Me Baby One More Time, I See Cloaked People, Lord of the Pings, Stick Around, Would you kindly...
    • The codename for CELL's method to contain a Ceph outbreak in the third game is "Red Star Rising."
    • Believe it or not, there's an encrypted shout-out to the bronies.
    • Crysis 3 opens with its armored protagonist leaving a sort of purgatory after about two decades, much like the start of Half-Life 2.
  • Short-Range Shotgun: Averted. Just like in real life, a well-aimed shotgun blast can one-hit-kill a human soldier at distances of a little over 100 feet (assuming you're using the "narrow spread" fire mode as opposed to the more standard FPSy "wide spread" fire mode.) The game even allows you to mount a short-range scope on shotguns - and for good reason.
    • The second game plays this trope straight. This extends to the remastered version of the first game.
    • Zigzagged in the third game. While the shotgun is still short-ranged when loaded with standard ammunition, loading it with slugs extends its effective range tremendously. And just like the first game, you can slap a scope on it.
  • Shown Their Work: Little things here and there, but really helps with the immersion of the game, especially in terms of worldbuilding. Goes a long way to separate it from a lot of sci-fi shooters out there. For instance:
    • The Nanosuit not being covered under the Geneva Convention. Aside from being a weapon system whose full potential is unknown and that few have access to, much less with any definite means of countering it, the Nanosuit Operators are Delta Force, which is a Tier One Element from the United States Army Special Forces. They're black ops. They don't wear any identifying marks on their gear, meaning there's no indication what country they're from. They're deniable assets. In the event that they get captured and they can't terminate the suit by vaporizing it, their country of origin will not confirm their identities and deny their existence. Because Nanosuit Operators don't wear any identifying marks on their suits, they're treated in the same way as private military contractors are, and others contracted to handle wetwork and the like.
    • When Nomad retrieves Helena from the dig site and preps her for evac, he lets her know that he's US Army Special Forces. He doesn't tell her that he's Delta. Aside from the off-chance that she doesn't know what Delta is, it's common for Special Forces operators not to specify anything beyond just that. Lots of sci-fi and fiction properties like to treat different units within each branch of the military's Special Forces community as if they're totally removed from their own branch and make up their own.
    • Outside of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Battlefield, Crysis is one of the few games to accurately portray a HALO jump.
    • The weapon manipulation techniques being used by Nomad, Pscyho, and Alcatraz/Prophet are real-world techniques. Not many First-Person Shooters go to the extent that Crytek did with rendering different types of mag swaps, speed reloads and the like. Sure, its far from perfect, but it is refreshing to see different methods being used which have their roots in actual methods.
    • The amount of hard science that both Richard K. Morgan and Peter Watts were able to imbue into the series, even if its relegated to background information, throwaway lines and other natter; is nothing short of phenomenal, especially when Peter Watts so lovingly goes into describing the processes and capabilities of the Nanosuit, many which are tied into what's actually being researched and developed by companies like Raytheon-Sarcos.
    • A lot of the individual movement techniques and squad tactics that CELL deploys are based on what lots of military, law enforcement and paramilitary organizations make use of.
      • And then subverted entirely for the final levels of both the first game and Warhead. The carrier doesn't look a thing like a real carrier and the uniforms most crew are wearing are wrong, and the North Koreans are, for some reason, using exclusively American vehicles both before AND after the US pulls out of the airstrip.
  • Simple, yet Awesome: Prophet's opinion of the Predator Bow in this trailer. Ironically enough, when he first gets the bow in the game, he's not impressed with it. His opinion has clearly changed by the time he makes it into the Liberty Dome.
    Prophet: "The bow and arrow. Beautiful in its simplicity. Is it coincidence that every culture on Earth developed it independent of one another?"
  • Sound-Coded for Your Convenience
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: The Wall, what with the version of "New York, New York" being sung by British singer, Polly Scattergood, amidst the carnage and alien/human war raging around the deserted streets of a decrepit New York city.
  • Spider Tank: The Ceph Hunters.
  • Spiritual Successor: To Far Cry. Both are made by the same studio. Heck, Crysis has more similarities to Far Cry than Far Cry 2, the latter of which is almost In Name Only.
  • Stable Time Loop: The reason Prophet went back to Lingshan against orders. After he was separated from Nomad, he spent about a dozen hours running around under Lingshan through Ceph tunnels with a reasonable KPA soldier. Then stepped though a Portal Network to one of Jupiter's moons and back only to find that those hours had rolled back. He spent several of those hours following himself around before reconnecting with Nomad, then ultimately returned after receiving a radio message from himself to return.
  • Starfish Aliens: The aliens we see in Crysis look like various kinds of bioluminescent elongated, tentacled jellyfish with Predator-like quadruple jaws and finned tentacles for legs. The overall impression is that of an aquatic organism that lives in zero gravity instead of water. By Crysis 2 the design is streamlined to a mass of jellyfish-like flesh and tentacles operating Powered Armor suits. Note, since they're so advanced, the organic beings don't necessarily have to be the original, "true" aliens; they can just as well be another kind of drone.
    • In Crysis 2, people call them the Ceph, as in "cephalopod". Hargreave states that there's little doubt that they evolved in an ocean. Legion indicates that the Ceph as we know them might not even be the "true" aliens but rather their "gardeners" who woke up to find humans running rampant all over the lawn they're supposed to be tending - and Alcatraz takes a step further down, theorizing that the Ceph aren't the gardeners, but rather their specially-engineered tools.
      • In the comic, Psycho is dumbstruck for a good few hours by the notion that he's had his ass repeatedly handed to him by what he essentially sees as seafood.
      • Crysis: Legion also reveals that their "official" designation (in military reports and such) is actually "The Charybdis", after the mythical sea monster. "Cephalopods" is a moniker people came up with because... well... they look like squid.
    • In 3, CELL scientists figure out that the Ceph actually communicate directly via energy transfer, and by monitoring the energy released by the Ceph, they're able to learn a great deal about their biology, mentality, and how they've spread around the galaxy. Every single thing they learn is terrifying.
  • Static Stun Gun: The K-Volt submachine gun in Crysis 2 knocks CELL troopers on their back with a single bullet, and stun-locks Ceph with sustained fire. It's described as a crowd-control stun weapon being misused by CELL as a lethal weapon by applying multiple shocks instead of just one to the victim. It is, in fact, the key to making the Ceph Heavies manageable; the K-Volt will stun-lock them just like the other Ceph, and does extra damage per-shot. With a good angle on a Heavy's soft bits, the K-Volt will drop one in less than one full mag, on Post-Human Warrior.
    • In the third game, the K-Volt is quite effective against turrets and can kill Ceph Scorchers without triggering their self-destruct mechanism, allowing the player to take their flamethrowers.
  • The Stinger: After the events of Crysis 3, CELL members are seen running from an unknown assailant and barricading themselves in one of their safe houses, but their escorts are shot dead. A familiar face reveals himself out of the shadows...
    Psycho: Good evening, members of the board. I was a guest at one of your hospitals a little while ago... and I'd like to make a complaint.
  • The Stoic: Nomad is awfully calm about encountering aliens. Psycho, less so. Jester loses it. Prophet knew what to expect.
  • The Straight and Arrow Path: The Predator Bow in Crysis 3. It is the only weapon you can shoot that doesn't decloak you, and with the proper draw weight, it can one-hit kill CELL grunts and weaker Ceph warriors. The regular arrows can even be picked up out of corpses (or walls for missed shots) and reused.
  • Strong Flesh, Weak Steel: Obvious when you throw an NK grunt through a scrap-metal hanger, damaging everything but the mook. Averted in the sequel with non-human enemies; the Ceph, being boneless, take damage far easier than the armor they're wearing and explode into clouds of goop when shot between the seams.
  • Stupidity Is the Only Option: When Hargreave ambushes you with EMP machines, you can easily see them under the door. However, you can't go around, so thou must walk into the mousetrap.
  • Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: Crysis: Legion points out that, given the Charybdis' frankly staggering technological ability, we can barely guess at their true motivation, and the Manhattan attack certainly makes no sense from a strategic point of view; a comparison is made with humans building an ATM over an anthill - it doesn't even register with us if some ants are left after we're done with our job.
    • By the end of the novel, it's outright stated that whatever they're doing, it's almost certainly not an Alien Invasion or conquest.
    • Hargreave theorizes that what we're actually fighting aren't really "soldiers", but rather gardeners. The mass-slaughtering technology they deploy is the ultra-tech equivalent of tongs and shears. He states that their sole interest in the planet is likely scientific: they're interested in what unexpected things evolution might churn out in time, and that they've set up a small presence here to wake up every few million years, in order to investigate. Humans, with their expansionism and their radical reduction of biodiversity, are a weed to be pruned.
      • Peter Watts, cheerful fellow that he is, has an even worse theory: The Ceph are a species that can teleport macroscopic objects—including, apparently, living organisms— over interplanetary distances. The Nigh-Invulnerable "soldiers" which Hargreave theorized to be near-mindless "gardeners" might actually have been the dumbest, most primitive of Ceph gardening tools. The only provable fact known about the Ceph is that Hargreave stole their technology. Maybe the Ceph just wanted it back. The plot of the entire series may have been comparable to a human being bending over to retrieve a dropped set of car keys... and getting bitten by a few ants. Resulting in a short(to them) period of annoyed stomping.
  • Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome:
    • Dane & Bandit, two of the allied NPC Nanosuit soldiers in Crysis Warhead, die midway through the first level of Crysis 3.
    • Nathan Gould got shuffled off to a CELL concentration camp in the third game, and is most likely dead.
  • Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Hinted at in the first and second games, and said nearly word for word in the third by the CELL research division's Only Sane Man. Studying the Ceph's transmissions indicates that the primary Ceph in the M33 galaxy have had half a billion years to evolve their technology, and that they are "the closest thing to gods." The immensely advanced, difficult-to-match, endless Ceph armies that humanity is fighting against tooth and nail across the three games are the Ceph equivalent of cavemen wielding clubs.
  • Superpowered Mooks: The NK soldiers in nano-suits. Nomad quips that they're cheap knockoffs, although other than a lack of Speed Mode and fairly average enemy A.I., they don't seem all that different from your own suit. Notably they can cloak, super-jump, have enhanced durability, and even have the same Regenerating Health you do. In multiplayer, the US and Korean Nanosuits are identical for fairness reasons.
  • Super Drowning Skills: Which the NK possess. Doesn't stop them from merrily marching straight into the water after you if you're close enough.
  • Super-Strength: By default, Nanosuit 1 users are roughly Captain America levels of strong, able to use heavy weapons normal humans couldn't, Neck Lift and toss armored men several meters with one hand, and kill regular humans with a single hit (if they grab them first). Strength Mode enhances this four-fold letting them also do stuff like flip Humvees with their punches and leap over one-story buildings (melee damage is also literally quadrupled, and said heavy weapons suddenly lack recoil). Nanosuit 2 users in standard mode are stronger than Nanosuit 1 users in Strength Mode, and have their own enhancement called Power Mode (a more on-demand version of Speed and Strength mode). With this they can do stuff like one-hand toss an armored man more than a hundred feet, punch power-armored alien super soldiers to death, or kick cars and Humvees hard enough to launch them through the air and across streets.
  • Suspicious Videogame Generosity: You absolutely know you're about to get your ass kicked if you find a rocket cache. And if there's C4, it's even worse.
  • Synthetic Plague: The "Manhattan Virus", identified by Hargreave as an "area-denial bioweapon beyond your wildest dreams". It doesn't just kill people, it melts them into sludge. Worst part is that it's not technically a "weapon" - Hargreave compares it to the BSE cullings; the problem was not killing the cattle, but disposing of the remains without creating a vermin population explosion. The "virus" breaks us down to sludge that most terrestrial fauna can't eat, but that the Ceph Ticks gobble right up.
    Hargreave: What do you do with the millions of rotting corpses? Well, there you see the answer the Ceph have evolved. They wipe us out, they break us down, they reduce the environmental impact almost to zero. Exemplary.
    • Peter Watts' contribution; It wasn't created by the indigenous Ceph, and it's not even designed to kill humans. Even in the main game, the Nanosuit is stated to be covered with receptor sites for the spore - which is just a Ceph exoskeleton re-sized to fit on a human rather than a Starfish Alien. Thus, it is an integral part of their synthetic biology - an external component of their immune system meant to keep ambient flora and fauna from interfering with Ceph biochemistry. It just happens to work just as well on macrofauna as microfauna QED two-legged mammals. Hell, it even influences victims to move towards Ceph to be killed the same way mice with Toxoplasmosis are drawn to cats to be eaten. Neat, clean, simple, effective. Zombie Apocalypses wish they were a cube root as effective at screwing humanity to the wall. New York is being depopulated by the passive effect of an alien vaccine!
  • Tactical Suicide Boss: After you pump enough damage into the Ceph Mastermind, it'll pick you up with telekinetic lightning, which gives Prophet an opening to overload the Mastermind's power systems. Normally this would be excusable because the Mastermind has no way of knowing Prophet can do this, but then the boss tries to do it a second time...
  • Take Cover!: Crysis 2 has a Killzone-style cover system that lets you stick to walls and peek over / around them to fire. It triggers automatically when you try to aim while near a wall, instead of occuring when you press a specific button, so it sometimes causes you to get stuck to a wall when you were trying to strafe around it and shoot. The cover system was removed for Crysis 3, which uses more traditional First Person Shooter mechanics.
  • Take That!: In Legion, Alcatraz says that the way the nanosuit keeps rebooting makes him think Microsoft made the OS.
  • Take Your Time: Averted at least once in 2, during "Power Out" where a Ceph spear appears and you must interface with it within a certain amount of time or die.
  • Take Up My Sword: At the beginning of Crysis 2, Prophet rescues the Player Character, codename "Alcatraz", and bestows his nanosuit upon him before taking his own life before The Virus does something worse.
  • Tank Goodness: One level in the first game allows you to drive around a tank. It's as fun as it sounds.
  • Tech-Demo Game: Trope Codifier by far, even if other games were typically used as real-world benchmarks.
  • Ten-Second Flashlight: The night vision mode on your nanosuit lasts only a few minutes at most, but rapidly recharges.
  • Tentacled Terror: The Ceph are an evil cepalopod-like race and are as evil as these things come, waking up from their million-year hibernation to destroy humanity and take over the planet. They deploy terrible Freeze Rays and horrific flesh-melting bioweapons against population centers (such as New York) before invading and fucking the place up with their litho-ships.
  • Theme Naming: In Crysis 2, the Marine Force Recon team sent in at the beginning of the game are all named after famous prisons - the player is Alcatraz, one of your main gameplay allies is named Chino, and the other Marines are Folsom, Leavenworth, etc.
    • The CELL forces in Crysis 2 use colour-coded unit names (Cobalt, Azure, Maroon, and Saffron Sections among others).
  • Theme Music Power-Up: During the Mission Briefing before each chapter of Crysis 2, some variation of the game's main theme always plays to get you ready for the next chapter.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In Crysis: Escalation, in order to capture Prophet & Psycho in Siberia, they had to resort to detonating an EMP bomb that was equivalent to the electromagnetic pulse released by a thirty thousand kiloton nuke. The blast was so powerful that the entire surrounding region was instantly knocked back to the Stone Age and even shielded electronics were fried. And STILL, Prophet's Nanosuit continued to operate, albeit in a severely weakened manner. It took a CELL operator to hit him with a couple more shotgun blasts to shut Prophet down long enough for CELL to put him into a hardened container. Damn.
  • Threatening Shark: Guess what happens when you swim out too far in the ocean?
  • Throwaway Guns: In the second game, when Alcatraz runs out of ammunition for the HMG, he tosses it aside and goes back to his previously-equipped weapon.
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • The US Military Command come off as this repeatedly over the course of the series, blatantly ignoring rather obvious facts about the alien threat. In Crysis they authorize a nuclear solution against the energy-siphoning alien structure, despite warnings from Helena Rosenthal (who didn't even get the chance to speak with the Joint Chiefs or POTUS). In Crysis 2 they top it off with the ludicrous decision to bomb the Manhattan flood barrier in order to drown the aliens. Though even that stroke of sublime genius may pale against the Clock Alcatraz has to Race Against at the climax of Crysis 2 - yet another nuclear strike. Despite the results of the nuke in Crysis 1. Alcatraz says it best in Legion:
      Alcatraz: "Let me repeat that, Roger, for the benefit of your chickenshit bosses behind the mirror. The Pentagon. Decided. That the best way. To take out. Super-advanced. Aquatic. Aliens. Was to drown them."
    • CELL in 3, for using the Alpha Ceph as their main power source for the world, basically dooming humanity if a Nanosuit wearer ever got to their power facility... which is probably why CELL went to such great lengths to capture every Nanosuit on the planet; they were able to keep the spoiler in question perfectly stable for two decades, netting them trillions of dollars. Lampshaded by Prophet.
      Prophet: No... They couldn't have been that stupid!
  • Took a Level in Badass: North Korean Nanosuit soldiers have been made noticeably more difficult in the console port of Crysis. They're now immune to the tranquilizer gun, are much better at seeing through your cloak at close range, and have insane aim and are capable of literally cutting you apart in less than a second of fire with their submachine guns.
  • Trailers Always Lie - Early advertising for the first game implied that, once the aliens show up, the NK and the Americans team up to fight back. No such thing happens in-game, the KPA hightail it off the island once the aliens begin kicking everyone's asses. The closest thing to a "team-up" they have is the fact that they left some of their military hardware behind which the American forces appropriate for their own use.
  • Trailers Always Spoil: Crysis 2 - The trailer reveals that Hargreave isn't what he seems to be when he states "Finish what I started over a century ago
  • Translation Convention: In any difficulty but Delta / bauer.
  • Trick Arrow: The Predator Bow in the third game can shoot electrified arrows, arrows that embed in a target and then detonate after 3 seconds, or arrows that explode directly on impact.
  • Tripod Terror: The Ceph Pingers in the second game, massive war machines you have to fight no less than four times.
  • The Tunguska Event: The Ceph were involved.
  • Too Awesome to Use: The Gauss Rifle in Crysis 2. It's essentially a railgun, with all the advantages of the rocket launcher and none of its flaws — deadly accurate, rapid-firing, quick to reload and enormously powerful, dealing a ton of damage even to heavily armored targets. However, good luck finding any ammo for it (other than the paltry 8 rounds you get with the weapon itself...)note 
    • Warhead fixes this problem by making the Gauss Gun much more plentiful and available much earlier, while also reducing its rate of fire.
    • The MIKE as well. There are only about 5 of them in the whole game (one of which is a prototype that can't have its battery replaced), but each one is extremely satisfying to use, since it makes those octopus aliens burst like popcorn inside their armored suits.
  • Uncanny Valley: Invoked In-Universe. It's stated in Legion that most people who meet Alcatraz are dead-scared of him, either irrationally or because they are confusing him with an alien unit; a priest calls him a devilnote  and a mother and little girl that he'd just saved can't leave his presence soon enough. He gets quite pissed about it sometimes, since he's obviously humanoid and doesn't get why admittedly futuristic-looking Power Armor makes him an outcast even among his fellow Marines.
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change
    • "Onslaught", where you drive a tank. However, due to its moderate durability and lack of repair kits in singleplayer, you'll most likely end up abandoning it near the middle of the level. You can find a parked Korean tank near the train station, but it doesn't last very long.
    • "Core", you fight the aliens in their zero-gravity ship.
    • "Ascension", lets you pilot a transport VTOL and engage in air to air combat with Ceph Scouts.
  • Unique Enemy: In the original Crysis, only 12 enemy Nanosuit Soldiers appear throughout the entire game. While this somewhat makes sense from a storyline perspective (Nanosuits costs about 1 billion dollars each), it's a bit underwhelming from a gameplay perspective since they're only about as tough as a Covenant Elite, so they could have easily been used more often without being unbalanced, especially in the later levels.
    • There's a type of alien trooper that has a different head crest and is equipped with a freeze ray instead of an ice gun. There are only about 3 or 4 of them in the entire game. Again, they're a fairly standard enemy, so it's not like they make up for their rarity by being much tougher than normal or anything like that.
    • In Crysis 2, there's the quartet of stealth-capable Ceph "Guardians" that appear at the end of the final mission, with black armor, glowing white visors, and black jelly. They are startlingly durable, able to casually tank multiple hits from JAW missiles.note 
    • Ceph Heavies in the third game are a lot rarer than they were in Crysis 2, so much so that the entire game (not counting the last level) only has about 2 or 3 of them to fight. A handful do appear in the last level, but are fairly easily mowed down by your 11th-Hour Superpower.
  • Updated Re-release:
    • Crysis: Remastered is a remastered version of the original game with modern textures and graphics effects including real-time ray tracing. It also makes some changes to gameplay and level design. For example, the suit modes now function more like in Crysis 2 and Crysis 3, with Armor activated manually and Speed and Strength tied to actions rather than being seperate modes. Weapons do less overall damage for both the player and enemies, but this is balanced out by your Armor Mode not being on by default and also your suit energy regeneration now being interrupted by damage. Some enemy placements have been changed, enemies strafe more and weapons are less accurate at long range (presumably to make ranged combat more challenging), and the A.I. in the fight with General Kyong seems to have been improved to make the fight more dynamic and more of a true boss battle.
      • Many of the gameplay changes to Crysis Remastered are because it's based upon the console port of Crysis. Manual saves have also been removed, even on the PC version.
    • Unlike Crysis Remastered, Crysis 2 Remastered and Crysis 3 Remastered haven't changed the gameplay at all, though they do add some modern conveniences such as native support for high refresh rate monitors and the ability to change FOV. The most major changes are increasing the texture resolution up to 8k, and the addition of hardware-agnostic raytracing. Of the two, Crysis 2 has the most dramatically overhauled graphics, and even then it's more of an overall polish rather than a complete from-the-ground-up overhaul in the style of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare or Gears of War remasters.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Central Park in Crysis 2. It's a lot more epic and exciting than it sounds. Part of this is because the whole park is suspended half a mile into the air by that point. It Makes Sense in Context.
    • In Crysis 3, the Alpha Ceph's lair deep under New York.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: Starting with choking Korean soldiers and tossing them off cliffs, into enemies, into each other, or through roofs. With proper modification, one can fling troopers clean into the air... from where you can shoot them out of the air with a weapon of choice, if you're quick on the draw. Turtles, frogs, chickens, quails and the like can all be rifle-butted or used as thrown weapons.
  • The Virus: A key part of Crysis 2's plot is the citywide infestation by an alien plague. The aliens also deploy a more powerful version, instantly lethal from their Spears and Hive towers.
    • In Legion it's revealed to be far more than just a deadly bioweapon. It turns out that every single piece of alien technology is covered in receptors for the spore, which is why the Nanosuit, being reverse-engineered from that technology, can interface with and manipulate it. It's speculated that it might be a sort of "portable ecosystem", or an "external immune system" for the aliens.
  • Vocal Dissonance: While the Alpha Ceph recreates a large variety of voices to get into get into Prophet's head, its truest voice is a small boy whispering.
  • Walk It Off: The game wouldn't last long without the Nanosuit's regenerating power supply and healing function.
  • The War Has Just Begun: In the first two games..
  • Wave-Motion Gun: The PAX (Plasma Accelerator) in Warhead, an infinite ammo weapon with a somewhat short range. No explanation is given about its mechanism, the game basically just tell you:
    "Here's the PAX. It fires plasma. Don't ask how. Now blow up that alien Spider Tank over there."
    • Crysis 2 has the X-43 Mike, basically a jumbo maser gun that would never be authorized for human warfare by any sane ethics committee. Since your enemies are genocidal aliens in armored exoskeletons, however, none of the ethics regulations apply, and you are free to make them explode like water balloons to your heart's content.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: The Superpowered Mooks North Korean Nanosuit soldiers in Crysis could be taken out with a single shot from the tranquilizer gun. This was patched out in the console port of the game.
  • We ARE Struggling Together: In Crysis 2, there are 3 distinct human factions; the main C.E.L.L. forces under Commander Lockhart and the Board of Directors, the small splinter-faction still loyal to former CEO Jacob Hargreave, and the U.S. military. All have the general goal of fighting the Ceph, but spend a huge amount of time fighting each other due to disagreements over the exact manner in which the war against the Ceph should be conducted.
    • In the first game & Warhead, the Americans and North Koreans continue to fight each other even after the aliens have awoken and frozen the island solid. In Warhead one of your commanders even emphasizes that the North Korean forces are to be given higher target priority over the aliens!
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Nomad, Psycho, Helena Rosenthal, and the secondary team of Nanosuit-wearing operatives from Warhead. However, see Powered by a Forsaken Child above.
    • O'Neill, the dropship pilot who played a significant role in Crysis: Warhead and was also one of Psycho's Vitriolic Best Buds, was never heard from again after the events on Lingshan Island.
    • You catch a glimpse of another Nanosuit wearer in New York in one of Prophet's flashbacks, but even though he sounds somewhat like Nomad it's virtually impossible to confirm who it is.
    • The interquel comic book shows that Nomad and Helena were murdered by the C.I.A., while Psycho survives along with Prophet but simply plays no part in the events of Crysis 2.
    • The collectible intel items in Crysis 3 reveal the fates of Eagle Team from Warhead. Lazy Dane and Bandit joined the Resistance along with Psycho, while the rest were killed by C.E.L.L..
    • Nathan Gould seems to be forgotten by everybody in Crysis 3, even though he was one of the most important characters in the second game and was a friend of Prophet. One of the collectible intel items in the game mentions that he was "disappeared" by CELL along with many other political dissidents.
    • Averted with Tara Strickland. The final cutscene in Crysis 3 reveals that she is now a U.S. Senator and leading the dismantling of the CELL corporation.
  • Western Terrorists: CELL, moreso in 3 then in 2.
  • Wham Line: Crysis 2 delivers two of them in its last seconds:
    Strange accented voice: Karl Ernst Rasch, at your service. And you are...?
    Alcatraz: They call me... Prophet.
    • Crysis 3 as well.
    Claire: Subject Michael Sykes reports a stable condition.
    Prophet: The firing of Archangel will empower the Alpha Ceph, which will punch a hell of a hole in the Earth. There will be no Earth left.
    Rasch: Thank you. You helped me awaken and make my children active again.
  • What the Hell Is That Accent?: Karl Ernst Rasch is presumably German or Nordic (descent) by his surname, but his accent doesn't sound the part. Escalation states he's supposed to be German.
  • Who Wants to Live Forever?: After several decades spent living in a jar-like life support module with no direct human contact, Jacob Hargreave (who has set his headquarters on Roosevelt Island to self destruct) admits in his final transmission to Alcatraz that he's looking forward to finally dying.
    Hargreave: To tell the truth, I think I had enough of afterlives as it is - this one has been pretty purgatorial. Almost fifty years floating in supercooled jelly like some medical specimen, thoughts creeping like rats through cramped silicon corridors of machines trapped behind video screens and camera systems. Never sleeping, never resting, never ceasing to think about the world I no longer belong to. No, if this is a taste of the afterlife, I think simple oblivion will do nicely.
  • Wreaking Havok: The amount of stuff that can be picked up and thrown into other stuff is really quite impressive. This includes being able to bring down houses by tossing grenades or driving vehicles into them (or simply punching the walls down), or cut down palm trees with machine gun fire. Some enemies and certain objects are extremely vulnerable to thrown objects. Thrown driftwood can cause truck-sized jamming devices to explode. This extends to players as well. Getting trapped by a pile of cardboard boxes can be unexpectedly lethal.
    • Unfortunately, this leads to the game having a horrendous CPU bottleneck which is the main reason why the game was such a pain-in-the-ass to run to begin with (and still causes problems 8 years later; an Intel i7 4770K and an Nvidia GTX 780 will still have dips below 60FPS if you're looking at a large area with a lot of destructible objects or if everything is blowing up all at the same time).
  • Xtreme Kool Letter Z: Well, it's called Crysis.
  • Yank the Dog's Chain: In Warhead, while fighting your way through the ice sphere, you can find several abandoned tanks, and you can even climb into them! Naturally, they're all flash-frozen so you can't actually do anything with them.
  • Zero-Effort Boss: In 3, the True Ceph warship, for all its buildup in-story, is this. You hack into Archangel, line it up and fire. There is so much time to aim that you have to deliberately refuse to fire to lose.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: The flash-frozen village that Barnes (in 2019, Prophet is not his callsign yet) and his Delta Force team encounter in northern Colombia in Escalation. The Ceph spire that emerged was low on power, and the bioweapon it released was only enough to cause cancerous growths on the ~1,000 inhabitants while also fueling them with a fanatical religious devotion to the spire itself. Opening fire on them drives them into a frenzy and Barnes is only saved by the timely arrival of three CELL helicopter gunships.

Alternative Title(s): Crysis 2

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