Crysis: Escalation is a novel to bridge the games Crysis 2 and Crysis 3, which is a bit more interesting than Crysis: Legion, since it was just a retelling of the events of Crysis 2. I didn’t dislike that book, since it contained additional lore about the world and characters. However, the general plot didn’t excite me much, as I already knew what would happen going in. Crysis: Escalation avoids this baggage completely by telling new captivating stories about the world of Crysis, and boy if it doesn’t supplement the franchise with a lot of cool additional information. It doesn’t follow one story – it’s a collection of events/tales of the land, eventually leading up to the start of Crysis 3.
Dystopia R us
Crysis: Escalation consists of several mini-novels, some with characters you have heard about before, like Psycho, Prophet, and Chino. The stories range from a time before the events of Crysis, to just moments before Crysis 3 taking place. These tales are also interconnected, as many of them have characters popping in from other stories. It’s rather engaging, actually, but what elevates this book is the focus on providing even more lore to the Crysis setting. Beyond just being stories told in the background of past events, you now get a chance to experience a few of the more important happenings of the series.
I will try not to spoil too much, but you get to follow a couple of C.E.L.L. operatives. Very interesting, providing insight into the structure of C.E.L.L, with the book also humanizing them further. There are also a couple of stories about the military world over. It’s in such a dire state that they have been forced to sell out parts of their military to private concerns. For example, the American Marines and the Royal Navy now operate under C.E.L.L. This naturally comes with a lot of unhappy faces, especially among career military folk. It’s all very fascinating, and if the state of the world wasn’t bad before Crysis 2, it sure as hell is now.
With the defeat of Ceph, C.E.L.L. has had free rein to the alien tech in New York. This has elevated them from a big corporation to gods in the form of riches and control, basically making them a part of everyday life. They control the energy supply and manufacture everything. As the book describes it: uncontrolled, unregulated capitalism, just like a virus it gobbles up everything until nothing is left to oppose it. Talk about a dystopian future! Corporations now stand far above governments – now it’s they who dictate life, with soldiers pressed into service because there is no other choice for the men and women living in this bleak future. And then not to forget the overhanging threat of aliens, deadly plague-like virus outbreaks, and who knows what other kinds of horrors. Very entertaining, even if it feels that we might end up there ourselves one day. The overwhelming corporations, that is.
Prophet & Alcatraz
Another part of the book that I liked is that it explains what happens to Alcatraz, the protagonist of Crysis 2. It’s a sad tale, but a crucial one because I remember starting Crysis 3 back in the day; wondering why we were playing Prophet again. Didn’t that guy blast his head off in the opening of Crysis 2? What gives? Well, now you get to know. What’s more, a couple of stories involve Prophet and Psycho in modern times, telling us what they have been up to between the games. They have essentially formed an anti-Ceph, anti-C.E.L.L. collation that operates in the dark, assassinating people, investigating supposed alien locations, and disrupting C.E.L.L. activity – very hush-hush, and extremely brutal.
Conclusion
I found Crysis: Escalation to be very enjoyable, since it hits all the notes I want from a gaming-related book. It extends the history and the lore of the setting and explains things that happened in between the games. To be fair, I prefer when the games do that themselves, as requiring extra reading to understand the plot is not ideal. One more thing that I thought was missing from Crysis: Legion – is well-written action segments, with a lot of cool stuff going on. In this novel, people will be losing legs and arms, and explosions will turn men into ash and chunks of meat. The pacing is also good, by keeping the tempo and tension of the plot high at all times. Overall, this was much better than I expected, because I don’t usually like short story collections. In the case of Crysis, it worked. A serious effort went into connecting these stories, which is a pretty big plus. Seeing as creating a narrative thread that holds up even in retrospect is not an easy thing.
Thanks for reading.
/Thomas
Tom's Gaming Vault 