Crytek’s cutting-edge rendering technology caught NVIDIA’s eye back in 2000, and the engine’s growing capabilities have continued to catch the attention of developers in the decades since. The release of landmarks like Far Cry, Crysis, and Ryse: Son of Rome have continued to push the boundaries of real-time rendering. Crytek has made their in-house engine available for free since 2016, so a wide spread of games are based on CRYENGINE. Shooters are one of the most common use-cases, but the CRYENGINE catalogue includes MMOs, RPGs, and survival horror games. Read on to see the AAA, AA, and indie offerings that take advantage of Crytek’s signature engine.
1. Crysis
Crysis is the first-person shooter that first demonstrated the full capabilities of CRYENGINE. Developed by Crytek, the game pushed the boundaries of what was possible with computer graphics at the time.The realistic visuals were paired with open environments and non-linear levels that encouraged experimentation. Players choose the angle of approach, what objects in the environment to use, whether to cloak in, or to steal a vehicle and ride in guns blazing.
CryTek developed the engine from the ground up to support the features they needed. Crysis was first announced in February 2006, about a year before its release, but work on the engine and pre-production goes back at least to the launch of FarCry in 2004. The game cost $15 million Euros to make at the time, according to director Cevat Yerli at the Leipzig Games Conference. As a result of the long development, the engine was one of the first to feature dynamic lighting, real-time light scattering, depth of field, and motion blur. The systemic gameplay also required a custom physics system. Trees are destructable, players are able to pick up and throw objects, and players are able to break down buildings with explosives, vehicles, or their nanosuit-powered fists.
2. Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an RPG with a uniquely immersive world. Players take on the role of Henry, a villager in 15th century Bohemia. The systems-based design is what makes the game so immersive. For example, the first quest is to collect money from a local drunkard who owes Henry’s father, but the player has full freedom over how they complete the task. One player steals the money from the drunkard, or another earns it themselves by haggling with merchants. Throughout the game, players develop 18 skills they’re able to use to tackle problems, which they develop through use similar to the Elder Scrolls series.
Warhorse Studios developed and released the game in 2018, and the game sold over 5 million copies by June 2022. They first licensed CRYENGINE 3 from Crytek in 2012, meaning 6 years passed from earliest pre-production to release. The budget is reportedly $36.5 million according to Forbes, but a specific breakdown isn’t available. The Kickstarter campaign blew through its original asking price of £300,000 pounds and reached £1.1 million, which equals about $1.9 million US today.
3. Hunt: Showdown
Hunt: Showdown is an extraction shooter developed by Crytek and released in 2018. The premise is an alternate history where paranormal creatures are normal occurrences, and groups of hunters have sprouted up to track and kill the monsters for cash. In-game, the player earns a bounty by defeating the monster and returning to an extraction location. As in most extraction shooters, death means the end of their hunter and loss of equipment, so the player must start over after failure.
Hunt: Showdown spent 4 years in development because it was originally a creation of Crytek USA, which Crytek shut down in 2014 for financial reasons. The game moved to Crytek’s home studio and finally reached the market in 2018. The game leverages the best optimization and visuals of CRYENGINE. The game runs on the most recent version, CRYENGINE V, which supports voxel-based global illumination and screen-space reflections. The former simulates the way light bounces around the environment, while the latter calculates reflections in real-time in an efficient manner. The optimization provided by CRYENGINE means that this modern title runs at 4k and 60 FPS on PS5.
4. Prey
Prey is a 2017 immersive sim released by Arkane Studios, the creators of the Dishonored franchise. The development took 5 years, as pre-production began immediately after the release of Dishonored in 2012. Morgan Yu, the protagonist, awakens aboard a space station called the Talos 1 to find it overrun by a deadly, shape-shifting alien threat. As an immersive sim, the game mixes RPG elements with a first person shooter. Hidden in the game environment are neuromods that give players the option to hack computers, repair turrets, upgrade weapons, and activate bullet time.
The game sets itself apart with its systemic design and organic worldbuilding. Computer logs detail the last actions of the dead scientists you find, and the grand, gilded-age aesthetic shows the arrogance of the corporations that thought keeping deadly aliens captive was profitable.
5. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is a 2013 tactical shooter developed by City Interactive. The main character is US Marine Captain Cole Anderson. The player isn’t the hero of the story, but a sniper who supports other soldiers as they infiltrate enemy territory. The gameplay is a mixture of stealth and shooting. Players sneak past enemies to infiltrate enemy positions and then take enemy soldiers out with their sniper to clear the way for their friends. The bullets are affected by wind and gravity, adding a layer of challenge to the shooting mechanics.
The game released after about 3 years of development, as is clear from the fact they first licensed CRYENGINE in 2010. Sniper: GW 2 has mixed reviews given its linear gameplay. The visuals are impressive because of the game’s CRYENGINE lineage, but this plus doesn’t save the gameplay for most players. The level objectives instruct players, telling them exactly when to sneak, then shoot, then sneak again, without many branching paths or options for making the stealth mechanic engaging. City Interactive will improve and iterate on the series numerous times beyond this title, as we see below.
6. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a story-based adventure game by the UK-based indie studio The Chinese Room. The player controls an unknown observer exploring the derelict (and fictional) town of Yaughton, England. The town seems to have been abandoned in place, with dirty dishes piled up in sinks, cars half-loaded with luggage, and bikes left at the side of the road. The mystery slowly unravels as players fully explore the town.
The game mechanics are minimal. Players primarily interact with the environment by walking through it and exploring. They have the ability to interact with certain everyday objects such as doors, gates, and radios, but the main mechanic is tilting the controller to tune balls of light that reveal clues.
The Chinese Room leveraged CRYENGINE’s famous visual capabilities to the fullest in its 3 year development span, even if it hurt performance. As a narrative-based game, the developers didn’t need to target a consistent 60 FPS. PBR materials mimic the way light bounces, reflects, and refracts through the environment. Materials like frosted glass correctly separate the light instead of simply blurring it, and volumetric light beams interact with foliage in a realistic way to create a naturalistic atmosphere. Screen space reflections make water react and reflect in real-time, even when disturbed and rippling.
7. Aporia: Beyond the Valley
Aporia: Beyond the Valley is a narrative-based adventure game created by Invisible Walls, a Denmark-based indie studio. The game is set in the world of Ez’rat Qin, which the player explores upon exiting suspended animation, long after the civilization has collapsed. The game gives players no guidance other than tapestries and pictograms, as there’s no text or dialogue. In the tradition of Myst, players complete puzzles and explore in order to progress the story.
The game received generally positive reception on its release in 2017 because of its unique atmosphere and beautiful effects. CRYENGINE excels at godrays and volumetric effects like fog, which the game uses effectively to create a mysterious but inviting atmosphere. The game’s puzzles are rather simple, though, and the game suffers from a number of glitches and visual bugs that prevent players from rating it a 10/10.
8. Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is a top-down action RPG in the style of Diablo. Created by the appropriately named Wolcen Studio, Wolcen takes place in a dark fantasy setting where the Republic is threatened by the Brotherhood of Dawn, an enemy force adept in witchcraft. The player controls a member of the Army of Purifiers, who are Republic-allied experts in defeating supernatural creatures.
The gameplay follows the pattern of Diablo. Procedurally generated dungeons are filled with monsters to fight and loot to find. A top-down RPG isn’t a traditional use for CRYENGINE, whose SDK comes packaged with templates for first and third person shooters, but the engine is highly customizable, as the source code is fully open for all users. Wolcen Studio said a complete technological overhaul was necessary to keep supporting the game past 2023.
Wolcen was the result of a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2015, which broke its $225,000 goal with the promise of a hack n’ slash that has no class restrictions. The game released in 2020 after 5 years of development.
9. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is the decidedly improved sequel of Ghost Warrior 2, a modern military shooter with a focus on stealth and sniping. Ghost Warrior 3 is set in Georgia (in Eastern Europe) in the near future, where the player is sent to destabilize a terrorist cell. The game opts for an open-world approach, where the player has freedom to attack outposts from multiple angles, engage in side missions, and find weapon upgrades.
The game received mixed reception, as it released without all announced features such as multiplayer, but the mechanics were further refined from the previous title. The game took 3 years to develop, releasing in 2017 after a delay due to the game’s large size. The game sold 1 million copies by 2018, as the City Interactive CEO announced in February of that year. The open-world makes fitting use of CRYENGINE’s global illumination, ambient occlusion, and volumetric fog. The thick foliage, the rays shooting through leaves, and the subsurface scattering makes the environment feel realistic and immersive.
10. Far Cry
Far Cry is the first CRYENGINE game, which put Crytek on the map for its ambitious visuals and open-ended gameplay. Before Crysis, Far Cry was setting the bar for graphical fidelity. The tropical island environment was brought to life through its fine details: the dense foliage, flocks of birds, rippling waves, and dynamic shadows. Gamespot’s original 2004 review noted the strong stability of the game, without any crashes or glaring bugs, despite the advanced rendering techniques for the time.
The player character is Jack, an ex-soldier who’s been hired as protection on a wealthy woman’s sailing voyage. Mercenaries attack the ship, and Jack ends up on a tropical island where mercenaries are hunting him, hired by a scientist who’s creating genetically-modified monsters in his secret lab. The game’s open-ended terrain was new for the time. The game doesn’t feature a full open-world, as the missions themselves are fairly linear, but the fully explorable island made the game that much more immersive and set the stage for Crysis’ open-ended gameplay.
Far Cry started life as a tech demo called X-Isle: Dinosaur Island, which demonstrated the long render distances their technology was capable of. Crytek finished the demo in 1999 and earned their first commercial deal by showing it to NVIDIA in 2000. NVIDIA was impressed enough by the demo to package it with their GeForce 3 cards to demonstrate what the technology was capable of. Ubisoft learned about Crytek through this arrangement, and they wanted to be the publisher of a game created with the new rendering tools. Crytek turned their demo into a game engine and finished the development of Far Cry 3 years later.
11. Homefront: The Revolution
Homefront: The Revolution is a 2016 first-person shooter with a Red-Dawn-style premise. North Korea has taken over and occupied the United States, and the player is a member of the revolution fighting back against the Korean takeover. Taking to the streets of Philadelphia, players incite regions of the city to rebel as they sneak around taking down propaganda. The game is distinct from the first game in the series, Homefront, for having an open-world and co-op multiplayer story mode.
Homefront experienced a troubled development cycle, taking 6 years from announcement to release. Crytek acquired the rights to the series and began development in the Crytek UK division in 2013. The division encountered financial trouble in 2014, evidenced by the fact they reportedly failed to pay out wages and bonuses for some time that year. Crytek sold the IP again and development continued at Dambuster Studios, but only after Crytek had changed the focus to an open-world experience.
The reception of the game is mixed. The open-world doesn’t meet its full potential given the development hiccups, and the game isn’t the representation of the best CRYENGINE has to offer. The game has issues with optimization, strange checkpoint timings in the middle of combat, and repetitive busy tasks like taking down propaganda that are required to progress the story. As a CRYENGINE title, it has nice visuals, featuring global illumination for realistic materials and dynamic shadows, which are cast directly on weapons in the player’s hand.
12. Ryse: Son of Rome
Ryse: Son of Rome is an action game created by Crytek as an exclusive for the Xbox One release in 2013. Players control Marius Titus, a Roman soldier and son of a senator, as they hack and slash through barbarian hordes. The combat is similar to the Batman: Arkham series, with a simple light attack, a deflect button for defending against attacking enemies, and a dodge for dealing with heftier attacks. Motion capture cinematics make use of CRYENGINE’s system that’s been in use since Crysis. The game’s executions in combat are gory and satisfying, with limbs flying and enemies becoming a gladius kebab.
The game emphasizes style with flashy cutscenes and gory combat, and it uses CRYENGINE with the (at the time) new generation of consoles. Particle effects for blood, flames, lightning, and smoke are exceptionally detailed. Game development began in 2006 at Crytek Budapest, but reorganization in Crytek brought the game to the company’s headquarters. The game started life as an Xbox Kinect game, but it ended as a launch title for the Xbox One after switching hands and going through new gameplay iterations.
13. Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts
Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts is the next installment in the Sniper series by City Interactive, following up on 2017’s Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3. Released in 2019, Contracts digs its heels in on the open-world concept and iterates on the gameplay of the previous game. The designers added a number of side activities to the sprawling open levels: bounties, sub-objectives, and challenges in addition to the main mission objectives. Players explore five levels, but each level is its own mini open world, a style of game CRYENGINE is best suited for.
Reception to City Interactive’s change to the formula has been positive. The gameplay is much more open-ended and choice-oriented than previous titles, even though some critics have found fault with the fact the gadgets from the previous game like the drone don’t see as much use in this title. The improvements have to do with how the assassination targets react to players. For example, one target has a body double for protection. If the player assassinates the body double instead of the real target, they head into a bunker, forcing the player to take a different approach.
Contracts released 2 years after Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, though the budget for the project is unknown. The game displays CRYENGINE’s particle effects with the gorgeous weather effects, such as the snow in the second mission. Self-shading foliage is another small quality-of-life feature that CRYENGINE enables.
14. Evolve
Evolve is a 2015 multiplayer shooter developed by Turtle Rock Studios, the creators of the original Left 4 Dead. Turtle Rock Studios was initially acquired by Valve and titled “Valve South,” but the studio split again in 2010 when they began to work on Evolve. The studio’s experience with multiplayer shooters and “boss” fights like Left 4 Dead’s Tank informed and inspired their vision for the new title.
Players in Evolve fight a 4v1 match, a combination of co-op and PvP multiplayer. The single player on the other side balances the scales by controlling an monstrous alien creature. The game sets itself apart from the crowd with its asymmetrical gameplay. Much like in the Predator movies, the alien creature is much more powerful than any one human. The monster is able to increase their powers by destroying more wildlife in the area, and they have camo abilities for escaping detection. The four humans drop in 30 seconds after match-start to give the monster a chance to hide in a large, open environment, a type of level that CRYENGINE is well-equipped to render in full detail.
The co-founders of the company, Phil Robb and Chris Ashton, said they tried to make the lush jungle environment they needed with the Source engine, but it just wasn’t possible. They switched to CRYENGINE to make sure they had a tool powerful enough for the levels they needed.
Evolve’s popularity suffered because the paid characters, maps, and other DLC made up a significant amount of the content. This model makes sense for a free-to-play game, but this multiplayer-only title was a $60 release. The game received a bump up in player numbers in 2016 with the transition to true free-to-play, but the servers aren’t available today, having shut down for the final time in 2023.
15. ArcheAge
ArcheAge is a free-to-play MMO developed by Korean studio XL Games. The MMO initially came to market in 2013 and remains online in the form of ArcheAge Classic, although a new experience, ArcheAge Chronicles, is slated to release in the near future (TBA). The MMO is set in the fantasy world of Erenor, where two continents, Haranya and Nuia, are at war with one another. The game is marketed as a mix between an MMORPG and a sandbox game. The game includes standard elements of an MMORPG like selecting a class, completing quests to level up, and combat, but a large section of the game is spent playing with the world’s systems. Players are able to farm, raise animals, and build ships. They engage in the game’s economy at a deeper level than repeating the dungeon-crawl-get-loot-and-trade loop.
16. Lichdom: Battlemage
Lichdom Battlemage is a first-person action-RPG released in 2014 by the indie studio Xaviant. The player takes on the persona of The Dragon, who is chosen by the mage Roth to take down the Cult of Malthus who have cast a spell on the world. The combat is entirely based around magic. The player builds spells through Sigils (fire, ice, lightning, etc.), Patterns (AoE, Targeted spell), and augmentations that add extra effects. The power of the player character and the customizable set of spells give players a lot of agency in how they approach the game’s challenges.
The game received favorable reviews from critics despite being a niche title. Needing to rebuild spells to meet new challenges adds depth to spellcasting that a mixed melee/magic RPG doesn’t have. The pacing of gameplay rarely changes, though, with the player often mowing through large groups of enemies through linear paths, with any branches off to the side being optional.
CEO Michael McMain said that CRYENGINE came with all the tools they needed out of the box, enough for them to create a prototype in a few weeks. At that time, licensed engines with that kind of power were rare, with CRYENGINE and Unreal being the two main options. The license agreement for CRYENGINE 3 was announced in 2010, indicating a 4 year development cycle. The developers chose the engine for its tools like fast navmesh creation.
The XaviantLLC YouTube channel documents their process using CRYENGINE in more detail. Tim Lindsey, the design director, praised the easy navmesh creation. Navmeshes tell enemies what surfaces they’re able to navigate on. Getting a navmesh created for enemy AI was as simple as drawing a shape around an area and letting Crytek’s solution fill in the geometry. The navmesh regenerates when environmental geometry is moved, too (say, if a tree or rock moves). A similar solution is used for drawing cover (looking back to the engine’s shooter roots), where the designer drops an arrow in a scene next to an object and the cover point gets generated in the shape of the object in question.
17. Crysis Warhead
Crysis Warhead is an expansion to the original Crysis which follows the same events but through the perspective of Psycho, a minor character in the first game. Warhead doesn’t require the original game to play, but its gameplay is similar and the story is much shorter. The game released only a year after Crysis, in 2008.
The player fights North Korean soldiers through the jungles of Lingshan Island to prevent them from acquiring alien technology found on the island. The player returns to the world of Crysis with the same nanosuit abilities, but this time with new vehicles, weapons, and combat encounters. Critics have praised the fact the game has more frequent battles and better pacing than the original. The game also takes advantage of the same advanced rendering techniques Crysis did: dynamic lighting, light scattering, depth of field, motion blur, and environmental destruction.
18. Warface
Warface, currently known under the name Warface: Clutch, is a 2013 first-person shooter made by the Crytek Kiev satellite studio. CRYENGINE 3 is Crytek’s native engine, and, given its long tradition of development for shooters, was a fitting choice for a multiplayer experience. The game is a live-service free-to-play deathmatch shooter, with a business model based on in-app purchases of cosmetics and lives. The game was first announced by Crytek in 2011, when they were looking to partner with Chinese companies to get experience with free-to-play content. They released the game to global markets 2 years later, in 2013. The game shifted development over its the course of about a decade of live support from Crytek Kiev to the newly formed Blackwood Studios in 2019 and then to MY.GAMES
The multiplayer plays much like Call of Duty deathmatch, with a focus entirely on combat over objective-based gamemodes. The Sniper, Rifleman, Engineer, and Medic classes, along with a robot called an SED, determine the equipment and role of each player in the match. Since the game feels very similar to the Call of Duty games of the time, the reception to the gameplay was lukewarm. Crytek announced the shutting down of the Xbox 360 servers only a year after release, although the PC version continued to get support and a next-gen release took place in 2018. The aggressive micro-transactions also turned players off, since the shooter genre was yet to be popular with a free-to-play model.
19. Enemy Front
Enemy Front is a WWII shooter developed by the creators of Sniper: Ghost Warrior, the studio City Interactive (CI). The protagonist himself sets this WWII shooter campaign apart from the likes of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, as the player controls not a soldier but a journalist. The game gives players more options as a result of their new background, letting them choose between sneaking or running in guns-blazing.
City Interactive announced the game in 2011, and the game took another 3 years to come out, a significant amount of time for the shorter cycles CI tends to favor. City Interactive chose CRYENGINE 3, the most up-to-date version of CRYENGINE at the time. They used it for the Sniper: Ghost Warrior series as well, where they cited the next-gen capabilities of the engine as their reason for licensing it. The game makes extensive use of the detailed particle effects for blood, explosions, and muzzle flash. CRYENGINE’s optimizations make creating a mixture of hi-res natural and urban environments possible for this historical shooter.
The gameplay has received mixed reviews for the fact that the stealth and combat need more polish. Enemies instantly detect players from strange angles and through clutter, so the concept feels underbaked to players. A stealth game needs to clearly signal what areas are safe and which ones aren’t, and any small issues become big in the player’s mind. The enemy AI too runs into challenges with pathfinding which make combat less challenging and therefore less engaging than its potential.
20. Armored Warfare
Armored Warfare is a free-to-play live service MMO where players control combat vehicles from the 1950s to the present, trying to defeat each other in destructible environments. Players have the option to play in groups against environmental foes or go head-to-head in deathmatches. Competitive games are capped at 15 minutes by default, and two teams of 15 battle until one side is eliminated.
The game sets itself apart with its methodical, tactical gameplay. Players spend credits they earn in missions to customize their tanks, changing the camouflage, weapons, and armor, while also saving up for new, upgraded tanks. The game originally released in 2015, developed by Obsidian Entertainment in partnership with MY.GAMES. They left the partnership in 2018, and the game has since changed hands to Wishlist Games and then to META Publishing, who shut down the servers in June 2025.
21. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (KCD II) is an immersive, systems-based RPG much like its prequel. Players take on the persona of Henry once again, an average blacksmith’s son who has found himself in the midst of war and political intrigue. King Sigismund of Luxembourg has invaded Bohemia, and it’s up to the player to resist the occupation and return King Wenceslaus IV to the throne.
KCD II has 93% positive reviews on Steam, an outstanding score, and critics have praised the game for improving the formula while still retaining the deep world of the original. The combat is more fluid, with the number of different zones for aiming a weapon reduced from five to four. In the KCD franchise, feinting by attacking one zone then switching to another at the last minute is a core component of combat, and the reduced number of zones makes the awkward combat of the original easier to deal with. The game also features new ranged weapons, crossbows and firearms that shake up the formula.
The game released in 2025, seven years after the original. The team had to grow substantially in that time, doubling to 250 employees. Warhorse Studios has continued to modify CRYENGINE as they’ve worked on it for the past decade. Motion capture is a feature CRYENGINE supported from the beginning, and for the sequel the developers used it to generate detailed facial animations as well, not just poses as they did for the first game.
22. Far Cry Instincts
Far Cry Instincts is a remake of Far Cry for the original Xbox. Ubisoft took over the creation of the half-remake/half-port, as they did for all other Far Cry games to come. The game only took a year to release after the first game, coming out in 2005. The game follows the same story as the original: Jack, an ex-special forces bodyguard, winds up on a tropical island after his boat is attacked. He is hunted by mercenaries and discovers a scientist creating a new race of creatures by tinkering with DNA.
Players are hemmed-in more in Far Cry Instincts to ensure the Xbox was able to handle the large world. Ubisoft also added traps like claymores and a new mechanic called “primal instincts,” special abilities that Jack has evolved to boost his speed, improve his senses, or augment his strength. Ubisoft added a map editor with the game as well, which allowed users to upload and play their own maps on Xbox Live, all in-game.
23. Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2
Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 is City Interactive’s sequel to their new open-level format for Sniper: Ghost Warrior games. Players again take on the persona of a contract killer. Like the previous game, players go through only 6 relatively long levels. The difference from the previous game is that some missions are more open and others are long-range missions conducted entirely from >1,000 meters.
Contracts 2 uses CRYENGINE’s capabilities to their fullest in the game’s open setting. Techpowerup praises the long draw distances without extensive pop-in that’s common with titles using near industry-standard Unreal Engine. Temporal anti-aliasing helps make foliage and environments look crisp from a distance, a crucial characteristic for sniping games. The main technical hiccup here is that CRYENGINE only supported DirectX11 at the time of release, which resulted in the CPU bottlenecking the entire system in terms of framerate.
The game has found its niche as a Hitman-style game after years of playing with other premises. The expression of skill finds itself in both lining up the perfect shot but also strategizing to make sure no alarm is raised and the target doesn’t get away. The game has received mixed reviews, though, since the gameplay gets repetitive. The price for failure is full alert, but full alert always means the same enemies attacking and only ever demands the same response from the player.
CI announced SGWC 2 in 2019, the same year the first game released, so development took roughly 2 years. The budget for the game was PLN 30 million, including marketing, according to a report released by the company.
24. Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric
Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric is a 2014 action-adventure platformer created by studio Big Red Button. The player takes control of the whole Sonic crew in this experience – Sonic, Knuckles, Amy, and Tails – in order to stop a robot apocalypse. The game leaves the traditional platformer roots to aim at a Ratchet and Clank-type experience. Players explore the world, fight enemies, and complete puzzles to progress.
A unique mechanic is the ability to switch between characters to take advantage of their special abilities. Sonic has his homing attacks, Tails is able to float, Knuckles burrows through the environment, and Amy is more agile, being able to triple jump and walk on balance beams the other characters aren’t able to.
The game had a troubled development which resulted in a game less than its potential. Sega initially communicated that Big Red Button was to release the game on unspecified “next gen hardware,” so the studio chose to work with CRYENGINE to build a Sonic game with advanced graphics. The team only learned late in the process that the game was going to release on Wii U instead. As a result, the team didn’t have time to carefully port the CRYENGINE technology to the Wii U, which isn’t supported natively by the engine.
25. Miscreated
Miscreated is a multiplayer survival game in the style of Rust. Released by Entrada Interactive in 2018 after 4 years in Early Access, the game’s progress is well-documented on the Entrada Interactive YouTube channel. Development was on CRYENGINE 3, a rather old version of the engine, since the game was in active development for nearly 10 years. In Miscreated, players drop into a post-apocalyptic world full of deadly mutants. Most of the excitement, though, comes from the multiplayer component. Any chance encounter with another player includes the possibility that they’re willing to kill anyone they find to gain an advantage.
The mixture of urban and rural environments are well-poised to take advantage of CRYENGINE’s optimized graphics, and the game is praised as one of the most beautiful survival games of its time. The game makes extensive use of the vegetation and terrain editing tools built into CRYENGINE for building desert environments, forests, and beaches. CRYENGINE’s built-in vegetation types also respond to wind and player movement, making for a dynamic world.
As development continued, updates only slowed down coming out of early access, so the loss of server access was only a final nail in the coffin for this indie survival game. The indie studio got its start developing Miscreated, but they’ve since moved on to other projects. Their server provider, i3d, shut down server access in October 2022. Since then, players have had to run their own servers in order to play the game.
26. Crysis 2
Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter and sequel to the original game with even bigger environments at the player’s disposal. Crytek released the game 4 years after the original in 2011. The player puts on the nanosuit one more time in the guise of “Alcatraz,” a marine whose life is saved by taking the suit from Prophet, a character from Crysis 1. Players search for a scientist who holds the secret to combating the Ceph, the aliens who were found in the first Crysis.
The nanosuit retains similar abilities to the previous game: super strength, invisibility, and enhanced armor. The game has added a new upgrade system for the nanosuit as well, which allows players to increase their health regeneration speed, increase movement control in the air, or add new functions like an enemy proximity alarm, among other upgrades. The level design upgraded as well. The CRYENGINE moved into dense, urban environments with the switch to New York City from a tropical island. They add a lot of verticality, giving players many more options for how they approach combat encounters.
The game saw positive critical reception, as the new environment was a fresh take on the formula and the game still pushed the boundaries with its advanced graphical features such as lens flares and global illumination. Development started as soon as the first Crysis shipped, as shown by the fact the team went to New York to get on-location footage only the year after in 2008. Pre-production lasted a long time as developers investigated where to take the series. Crytek decided to target consoles for this release, and they cited development for consoles as a large reason Crysis 2 took so many years to come out.
27. The Climb
The Climb is a VR game developed by Crytek and released in 2016. The Climb started development because of the success of Crytek’s tech demo Return to Dinosaur Island, which is Crytek’s first VR experience. The feeling of standing up high and looking over the island felt exhilarating, and the developers noticed that the performance looking over the whole environment was actually better than expected.
The Climb’s premise is given in the title, as gameplay is entirely focused around using your hands to climb up the faces of mountains. Players have difficulty level options and special challenge maps which take away the handhold guides. Most VR games are lower quality than other PC games because more processing power is required, but The Climb’s selling point is that it still aims at realistic graphics in the VR space. The game beautifully renders the four environments Bay, North, Alps, and Canyon. The only immersion breakers are some parts of the environment which don’t move like static waterfalls and low detail geometry that’s very far away.
28. State of Decay
State of Decay is a survival game developed by Undead Labs and released in 2013. Players of State of Decay find themselves in a zombie-infested valley quarantined by the government. Players manage resources as they build up their base and, if they choose, complete the story mode to escape the valley. The scarce resources and weapon durability system mean players must keep changing their tactics as the game progresses. A unique twist on the gameplay is a lack of a main protagonist. The player recruits survivors which builds up the roster of playable characters. Death is permanent, and any mistakes will result in needing to switch to a new player.
The game spawned two sequels, with one of those sequels currently in development. The game has 81% positive reviews on Steam. Despite some pop-in of assets and bugs, the gameplay is praised by the community for the new RPG-lite twist on zombie survival
29. Robinson: The Journey
Robinson: The Journey is Crytek’s second VR game, released in November 2016. Robinson was developed out of the Return to Dinosaur Island tech demo, much like The Climb. Players take on the persona of Robin, a small boy adventuring through space on a ship called the Esmerelda. He crashes on the planet Tyson III, left with no help but his AI companion. Players explore the gorgeously realized world, solve puzzles, and find collectables. They do so with the help of a multi-tool that picks up and moves physics objects, which is also equipped with a laser pointer for directing their dinosaur companion, Laika.
The game has received mixed reviews, with a 57% positive rating on Steam and a 3.3/5 on the Meta store. The main complaints are technical issues that bog down the otherwise excellent experience, with some headsets like the Valve Index and software like Meta Horizons Link not working correctly.
The graphical fidelity brought to the lush forests and steaming tar pits is a step above what most expect for VR, though. Low fidelity is often a must to make sure the game runs smoothly, but, while there are some hardware issues, no reviews report hitching or performance problems.
30. Panzar
Panzar is a third-person fantasy MMO developed by Panzar Studio and released in 2013. Players fight in 8v8 team battles or get together for raids. Eight playable classes are available, letting players choose between ranged or melee combat. The need to level up their character and craft more gear drives players to return to new matches and gain the materials, gold, and XP they need to improve.
One of the highest praised aspects are the graphics built on CRYENGINE 3’s technology. The game features a mix of mountains, jungles, castles, and ruins to explore. However, the game received mixed reviews at launch for its aggressive monetization. The resources required to level up took dozens of matches for some players to find, and crafting new gear after acquiring the resources takes a number of hours or days. Money speeds up all parts of this process, and the players who play quickly outclass the free players, and matchmaking between the two groups isn’t separated. The studio serviced the game for nearly 10 years, but the latest updates from the developers were in 2021.
31. Nexuiz
Nexuiz is a 2012 video game based on a 2005 Quake Engine multiplayer game of the same name. THQ purchased the rights to the game and wanted to take fast-paced arena shooter gameplay to consoles. IllFonic developed the game with THQ’s blessing.
Nexuiz features traditional elements of an arena shooter: low time-to-kill, small arenas, and fast movement. The weapons are powerful and players generally praise the gunplay. While controversial for some players, THQ added “mutators” to the core gameplay loop. Mutators are powerups like extra speed or damage that a team earns by completing objectives.
The core gameplay was strong, but the game needed to attract a large population to remain fun. The offline bots mode didn’t present enough of a challenge, as the computer struggles to achieve objectives against humans. Players also weren’t able to join a match that’s already started, meaning players who lost connection created a permanent disadvantage for their team. The final nail in the coffin was THQ’s financial situation. THQ’s bankruptcy interrupted any future plans for the game, as the servers shut down in 2013 and the game became delisted from the Xbox marketplace and Steam as a result.
32. Entropia Universe
Entropia Universe is a free-to-play MMO developed by the Swedish company MindArk. Entropia Universe began development in 1995, releasing 7 years later for an open trial. The game continues to be supported to this day, and the game has changed engine technologies multiple times. In 2003, the developers switched to Gamebryo, but the engine looked outdated for the next-gen graphics they wanted. The studio moved to CRYENGINE 2 in 2010, which brought a new level of visual polish. They’re now looking to switch to Unreal Engine to bring the game up to modern standards.
Entropia Universe is a game where players buy property from each other with real money. This property ranges from pets to shopping malls to real estate, and players are able to cash out any property for US dollars. A player even bought a virtual island for $26,000 in 2004, and that isn’t even the largest sum spent in the game (which is around $6 million).
The game toes the line between game and business venture, so evaluating the popularity like a traditional game isn’t really possible. All the gameplay is tied up in buying and selling property, so there’s little to say about the moment-to-moment mechanics. The game retained 86,000 subscribers as recently as 2021, so the game and its promise of making a return on investment continues to bring players back.
33. The Land of Pain
The Land of Pain is an indie survival horror game released in 2017 on CRYENGINE V. Alessandro Guzzo started developing the game solo in 2014. He used photogrammetry to create most of the models for his game, which is the process of creating a 3D model by taking pictures of an object in the real world to bring it into virtual space.
Players start the game by taking a walk through the woods but soon find themselves in a hostile world. Going through a portal, the player enters the domain of an elder god of immense power, and they become hunted by wicked creatures. The moment-to-moment gameplay is similar to an adventure game, where players explore to find a key or other tool to progress the story.
The game has been well received, with a 78% positive review rating on Steam and a 91% Google review rating. The graphics look their best in outdoor environments, where CRYENGINE’s global illumination, god rays, and dense foliage bring the world to life. The main criticisms reviewers had of the game were the slower-paced gameplay and the startlingly low-res indoor assets, which were a cut below the naturalistic exteriors.
34. Blue Mars
Blue Mars is an MMO social game similar to Second Life, where players explore cities, buy items, and play mini-games. Community members are able to become developers and build their own cities for other players to visit. Any revenue made through shops in these cities comes in the form of Blue Mars dollars, which are purchasable with cash or earnable in game.
The developers use CRYENGINE 2’s technology as the basis for their community editor. Any member of the community is allowed to use these tools to create buildings, furniture, clothes, characters, and whole cities. The open beta released in 2009, and the developer incrementally added new features over the next couple years. However, player counts were low (~3,500 concurrent players reported in 2010), and the company turned over operation of the platform to Ball State University in 2012, which houses researchers of virtual and augmented reality experiences. No posts have been made by the operators of the platform since 2016.
35. ASTA: The War of Tears and Winds
ASTA: The War of Tears and Winds was an MMO created by Korean developer Polygon Games. The ill-fated MMO released in Korea in 2013 and expanded to North America and Europe in March 2016. The servers shut down only seven months after the global release in October when Polygon Games cut ties with their previous publisher. The game was re-released in April 2017, but the damage was done, and the servers shut down permanently that December.
ASTA takes place in a fantasy setting inspired by Asian mythology. The player picks one of two warring continents to join, Asu and Ora. Once they pick a side, players engage in activities similar to other popular MMOs like World of Warcraft. They engage in quests and combat in order to level up their character’s stats. As end-game content, players have access to PvP arena fights, 10v10 battles, and PvE encounters. PvE modes include dungeons, where a group of heroes faces increasingly powerful enemies, and Raids, which are locked until the player reaches max level.
36. The Climb 2
The Climb 2 is Crytek’s 2021 sequel to the VR climbing game they released five years prior. Developer Fatih Öybayram stated that pre-production started in 2020, the same year the game was announced, and the game was finished a year later. The core climbing mechanics were already present, so game production time was much faster. The sequel focuses instead on delivering a more stable experience and in different environments.
Players use the VR controllers as their hands, clicking buttons to grip and release parts of the terrain. The gameplay remains the same as the previous, but now players climb through cities, islands, and mountains with new and improved visuals. The game includes the maps from the previous game as well, so it’s a worthwhile purchase for those who haven’t experienced the first game. The game received favorable reviews, with IGN giving it a 7/10 and 6DOF giving it a 7.5/10.
37. Aion
Aion is an MMORPG created by NCSOFT and released to Korean markets in 2008 and then globally in 2009. Two warring factions are available to play, the demonic Asmodians and the graceful Elyos. Players choose between, at the current moment, 15 classes. The game world has fortresses scattered throughout it that are controlled by player guilds. Besieging a fortress involves a mix of PvP and PvE gameplay. Players must gather siege weapons through PvE raids, and then they’re ready to assault player-defended fortresses. The fortress holders get the advantage of tax collection and discounts with vendors to help keep their claim over their domain.
The remainder of the gameplay is similar to MMOs like World of Warcraft, where players do quests out in the world, join up with groups in more difficult regions, and purchase items to improve their characters. The MMO is still available to play today, and still looks nice with its long render distances and detailed character creation. This MMO was one of the first to use the new CRYENGINE for large, truly open-world graphics.
38. MechWarrior Online
MechWarrior Online is a 2013 free-to-play competitive multiplayer game released by Piranha Games. MechWarrior takes place in the BattleTech universe, a fictional sci-fi universe where combat engagements are decided by massive, piloted walking vehicles called Mechs. Players in MechWarrior Online take control of one of these mechs to defeat enemies in battle. Gameplay is much slower because players need to control the arms and legs of their mech separately, making navigation and evasion a difficult skill to learn. The game is entirely multiplayer-based, and players engage in various competitive game-modes including deathmatch, king of the hill, and Conquest, a mode where players compete to take over a planet. Successful games result in more currency to spend on new pieces for customizing mechs and buying new ones.
The game received mixed reviews, as the gameplay was slower paced and offered few game modes to shake things up. For players willing to put the time in to learn the challenging, slow combat mechanics, the game is a worthwhile experience. However, reviewers from IGN and GameTrailers felt that the game did a poor job explaining its mechanics to the player, and they factored this into their reviews.
MechWarrior Online was several years in the making, but not as an online battler. After getting the IP back from Microsoft, Smith & Tinker started working on a new MechWarrior game with Piranha Games in 2008. The game was slated to have a full singleplayer campaign, with a vertical slice and trailer already released by 2009. However, publishers weren’t picking up the game, and Smith & Tinker decided to leave the partnership. Piranha Games retooled the project into MechWarrior Online, switching from Unreal Engine 3 to CRYENGINE 3 and beginning from scratch.
39. Heathen – The sons of the law
Heathen – The sons of the law is an indie first-person shooter inspired by the book The Island of Dr. Moreau. The premise of the book is that a mad scientist has made his home on a remote island to continue his unnatural experiments. He creates half-human, half-animal mutants by dissecting animals alive and adding human parts. The book inspired the original Far Cry, so CRYENGINE is a fitting choice for this new take on the Dr. Moreau premise.
The gameplay involves a mixture of exploration, puzzle solving, and combat in the player’s attempt to reclaim the island. The game keeps up the tension with limited ammo, quick enemies, and many segments of the game that limit the player’s vision with fog or poison mist requiring a gas mask. The unique mechanic added to the basic shooting is the beast mode. Players are half-human, half-beast, and they’re able to switch between their halves to access different abilities. Players are only able to use guns and heal in human form, but they have a high jump in beast form that enables reaching out-of-the-way areas. In combat, beast form grants players claws which they’re able to use for close-range kills.
The game released in early access, and to this day hasn’t received any updates more recent than 2020. The developers cited the fact that they needed more sales in the early access phase to support further development, and it unfortunately seems that they didn’t receive that support. Early reviews were positive, but the final narrative and gameplay isn’t polished enough to make a complete experience.
40. The Memory of Eldurim
The Memory of Eldurim was an indie action RPG developed by 3-person team Liminal Games. The game released in early access in 2015. The most positive reviews at that time are for the strong art direction and the solid outdoor lighting provided by CRYENGINE 3. Unfortunately, the game remains in early access to this day as the studio wasn’t making enough money to support development.
In its complete state, the game was to be an open-world game like Skyrim with towns to explore and quests to complete. The combat itself is a mix of melee and magic with Souls-like parry timings and varied movesets. The developers also planned simulator gameplay including investing in businesses and purchasing real-estate. As the game is, only the combat is in place, and any player who invests in the $0.99 price tag will be exploring an empty world.
41. Hallowed Encounter
Hallowed Encounter is an indie horror game by game developer Austin Handle, published under the name Alpha Pack Studios. The player takes on the first-person perspective of Weston Norris, a man who lost his daughter exactly one year prior on Halloween. The player tries to keep from going mad in their house as children ring the doorbell, the voice of his daughter echoes in his ears, and something sinister is stalking him in his home.
The game has few reviews available on Steam or elsewhere, as it’s a small indie title with low exposure online. The game is still in an unfinished state, unfortunately: it has issues with the controls freezing up, screen going dark, and NPCs freezing in place. This and other games by the same creator have been praised for detailed lighting and graphics, but the game still needed more work before release.
42. Vanguard: Normandy 1944
Vanguard: Normandy 1944 is a PvP multiplayer first-person shooter that takes place on real WWII battlefields. The Steam store description emphasizes CRYENGINE’s ability to render realistic locations, which is the reason the developers chose it. The game’s main mode is Raid, an objective-based game mode with two teams, attackers and defenders. Throughout the match, the defenders receive a new location to defend. The team gets three “lives,” which determine how many times the team is able to respawn before they run out and fail the objective. Vanguard emphasizes realistic, challenging combat with a quick time-to-kill. In fact, players have no healing available whatsoever, whether through items or regeneration, so they need to make their lives count.
Pathfinder Studios released the game to early access in 2019, and they’ve continued to work on the game in the years since. The developers have hosted weekly “play with the devs” events as recently as 2024. Most reviewers praise the gameplay, but the fact the game has so few concurrent players makes finding a match challenging.
43. Crysis 3
Crysis 3 is the next, and currently final, entry in the Crysis first-person shooter series. The game released in 2013 after only a year of development and short pre-production. The development wasn’t shorter because they were rushed, as the developers say, but because they had already overcome the biggest hurdles developing Crysis 2. Once Crysis 2 opened the opportunity for a Crysis game to release on consoles, they had room to play with the premise. A strong direction emerged from the fact that Crysis 2 lost some of the open world, systemic gameplay of the original game, so Crytek wanted to add that back in for the third entry.
The gameplay is similar to Crysis 2 with some new additions to the sandbox. Hacking has been introduced which adds another reason to take a stealth-based approach. The player’s able to hack turrets to attack their owners or minefields to turn them against the enemy. The game’s signature weapon, the compound bow, even allows the player to attack from stealth. The bow features a range of arrow types including explosive rounds and electric darts.
Crysis 3 was a critical success on release, with IGN and Game Informer giving the game an 8.5/10. Eurogamer gave it a 7/10, citing the game’s lackluster story and hesitation to return to the true freedom of the original as the reasons it didn’t earn an even higher score.
Crysis 3 was the first game Crytek developed after they added voxel-based global illumination, which allowed for global illumination in real-time without any pre-rendering. Tessellation is another technique the game used to increase the fidelity of organic surfaces. Tessellation automatically adds geometry to a model, which smooths out the jagged edges which appear on a low-poly object.
44. Monster Hunter Online
Monster Hunter Online was an MMO and the first PC-based Monster Hunter game, which released to open beta in 2013. Capcom outsourced development to Tencent for a release in China. The game never released globally, but it wasn’t region locked either, and fans created an English language mod in 2016. Unfortunately, the servers shut down in 2019 and the game is no longer available to play.
Since the game used CRYENGINE, it was an upgrade in visuals to previous titles. The MMO featured dynamic lighting, detailed weather, and high-quality particle effects. This was also the first Monster Hunter game to release on PC, so it was an early experiment in porting the controls and core loop to a new platform. The gameplay follows the same formula as other Monster Hunter games, in which players switch between fighting monsters, harvesting materials from them, and upgrading weapons to tackle even more powerful creatures.
45. The Alien Cube
Alessandro Guzzo, creator of another CRYENGINE title called The Land of Pain, released The Alien Cube in 2021. Guzzo started working on the game as soon as the previous one released in 2017. The Alien Cube is a spiritual continuation of The Land of Pain, but with a greater variety of environments to explore. The game includes forests, snow-covered mountains, ancient dungeons, and even modern urban environments. Like his previous title, Guzzo used photogrammetry to turn photos of real objects into 3D models. The new cold weather also inspires the new survival mechanic in this game, where the player must find shelter lest they freeze first.
The game is a small indie title, but it’s received overwhelmingly positive reviews on its release platform, Steam. The reviewers often have trouble articulating exactly why they like the game, but they find it scratches an itch for Lovecraftian horror in a uniquely appealing way. The graphics are excellent for an indie title, as the natural environments most closely fit CRYENGINE’s ideal use case. The main criticisms are the fact the game is only a few hours and is too linear to be replayable, so any potential customers ought to keep that in mind.
46. Lex Mortis
Lex Mortis is a 2015 indie horror game developed by Denis Esie. The player character begins the game by heading to Berdwood, an island in Northern Europe where their father lives. Their father reported that inhabitants of the island had begun to disappear, so the protagonist heads to the island to investigate.
The main selling point of the game is the fact it’s an open-world horror game. As soon as the player sets foot on the island, they have access to the entire map. Unfortunately, the game came out of early access before fully realizing this vision. The game world is mostly empty, and the main story brings the character through a linear set of objectives which don’t let the player explore the world themselves. For example, the player receives an objective to find a vehicle, but once they arrive, they learn the vehicle is out of fuel and they must walk back the same way they came to find it, pick it up, and return again. In the end, the vehicle isn’t even required to navigate the island, but the player is funneled through these steps without accounting for deviations from the intended route. The main element reviewers consistently praise are the graphics and lighting, which CRYENGINE excels at.
47. The Cursed Forest
The Cursed Forest is a 2019 indie game developed by KPy3O. KPy3O is a studio from Siberia, and The Cursed Forest is their first released game. The team originally released the game on IndieDB in 2014, and they collaborated with the studio Noostyche to create a remake with an updated version of CRYENGINE and release it on Steam.
The player character starts the game by wrecking his car in the forest and becoming lost. The forest seems like it doesn’t want the player to leave, and they begin to learn about other survivors through notes. Bit by bit, players uncover the secrets behind the evil presence lurking in the forest.
While the game has a small audience, the Steam reviews are highly positive. Players praise the game’s polish. The levels have hidden branching paths which encourage replayability, the environments themselves are well-rendered, and the game doesn’t need any invisible walls or artificial guides to put the player on the right path.
48. Winning Putt
Winning Putt is a golfing MMO, which I thought was totally unique before writing this, and it was released by Bandai Namco in October 2016. Support for the game ended in 2018, when the last content update released and the developers shut the servers down. The Steam stats seemed to show low player numbers at the time of the shutdown in 2018, so the game seems to have retained its playerbase for only a short while. Critic reviews were positive, but most criticism of the game centers around the free-to-play model. Paid items include performance boosting consumables and new clubs, so the players who pay have a significant edge over their opponents.
Players take on the persona of a professional golfer rising in the ranks. The gameplay is relatively simple, with the timing of button presses determining the power of your shot and the amount of stamina consumption, which determines the player’s accuracy. The player also must manage their Mentality, which is a stat that lowers each time the player takes a swing and represents their decreasing morale. Playing with low morale reduces the accuracy and power of swings, so the player is discouraged from trying 100 times to get the ball to the hole.
