Crysis Warhead Review
Platform: PC

Crysis was almost a hype-machine unto itself last year, gathering accolades and fanboys even before the first demos and previews were out. The game tells the story of a US soldier fighting aliens and Koreans on a small island with the aid of a nanosuit which enhances his butt-kicking ability.

The first part of a trilogy, Crysis doesn’t sell on the story at all though and, to be honest, that’s a pretty good thing. It forms nothing more than a context for the violence.

Now we have Crysis Warhead, A parallel story line to the first game with some new features, improved performance, and all from the point of view of Psycho.

The Story:
The game is a parallel story that follows Sergeant Michael ‘Psycho’ Sykes, a character from the original Crysis, as he faces his own trials and challenges on the other side of the island during the time period of the first game.

The pacing has been radically altered for the better, with the big freeze arriving far earlier, and a far more satisfying finale than the slightly hurried and abrupt conclusion of the first Crysis.

Crysis had a lot of great moments, of course – moments of real drama where the AI and environment came together to create brilliantly fraught set-pieces that looked as good as they felt. But it also had a fair amount of downtime in-between, sections when the pacing was less inspired, and enemies dribbled out at you more from a sense of politeness rather than any clever staging on the part of the designers. And at its worst, when the game promised its most interesting encounters, Crysis suddenly curtailed all of your expansive freedoms, locking you into a moving vehicle and turning into an (extremely pretty) light-gun shooter.

Warhead, though shorter, is far tighter, following each encounter with one that’s radically different, mixing driving sections with grinding shoot-outs, and making sure that, even when you’re behind the wheel of a vehicle, you can still get out and play it on foot if you want, and if you’re surrounded by heavily-armed enemies in a situation built for gunplay, there’s still a solid option to stealth your way through if that’s your kind of game.

On the inevitable occasions when Warhead shunts you into corridors, there’s a reason for it – generally to break up the pace of a gruelling openworld section, or create a claustrophobic tone before shoving you out into another giant vista. And even these more controlled environments still have options everywhere – a smattering of lightly branching paths, fights going on above and below you, and a constant stream of physics toys for you to attack with if you get tired of shooting or run out of bullets.

Gameplay:
The basic mechanics remain unchanged. Taking place within the original Crysis’ timeline, your suit powers are still the same – cloak, strength, speed, and the standard armour setting – and it’s still you against the North Korean Army, battling through the same beautifully rendered jungle and waiting for those floaty Matrix-style aliens to show up and turn everything into ice.

Both human and alien AI have been improved, too – the NKA are better than ever at flanking intelligently, deciding when to hold back and when to try and take you out from a distance, and they’re now much more willing to use cover. Equally, they no longer have that strange habit of standing around looking like they’re trying to recall the name of the actor from there favorite actor in there favorite movie. And the aliens – a real weak point in the first game – aren’t half bad themselves. In fact, if anything, they’re now a little more human in their intelligence, hiding, lurking, blasting you with freeze rays from just out of range, and far more eager to take you down with them via their post-death explosions. And without spoiling things too much, expect them to ramp up in force much earlier on this time, with certain old enemies making surprisingly snappy appearances.

Crysis Warhead is not a particularly long game – in fact, if you’re playing on normal settings, and you’re familiar with the first entry in the series, you can probably clock this at somewhere between five and seven hours.

But is that really bad news? Because although Warhead isn’t the most time-consuming initial playthrough – it’s a side-story rather than a true sequel, after all – it manages to throw in a surprising amount of variety, and, with that, a considerable degree of replayability. It may not take days of your life to complete, but it never asks you to do the same thing twice, and the chances are that, as with the original, each subsequent playthrough will reveal an unexpected side to most of the set-pieces.

Whats New:
The funny thing is though, that even though Warhead is the new expansion pack/sequel/installment in the Crysis saga, there actually isn’t a whole lot in the game that is drastically and phenomenally new.

For starters, most of the environments are the same – though that much is to be expected obviously. You won’t be running through many of the exact same levels, though there may be the tiniest bit of deliberate overlap at points. Still, the levels are similar. Even the ones which are different are the same.

Likewise, the nanosuit is the same, as are the fundamentals of the gameplay. This is the US Army that you’re being cast into, so anything radically different from the norm is frowned on – Psycho handles exactly the same and has the same abilities as Nomad from Crysis. No more, no less.

Much of this though is a limitation of the story – and yes, the writing team from Crysis has been reassembled to handle Crysis: Warhead, including Martin Lancaster. Because Psycho is from the same unit as Nomad and has the same gear and allegiances, it makes absolutely no sense for him to have a different HUD or load-out.

What there is though is a whole new set of vehicles, weapons and missions – because these parts of Psycho’s experience are different. We’ve already mentioned the ability to dual wield SMGs, though we skipped over the frustrating demand that you have to pick both guns up separately – but what else is new.

Well, sticking with weapons for the time being, we also got a chance to try our hand with a grenade launcher or two, which is one of the weapons that the original Crysis was notably absent of.

The grenade launcher is a fantastic back-up weapon and at least half our time with the game was spent simply running around finding cars to roll grenades under using it. It’s also handy for bouncing the tiny explosives round corners and through windows, dumping them among the conveniently placed pressurized canisters and explosive barrels.

There are new vehicles too, some of which are admittedly just rehashes of the existing jeeps and tanks, others of which are a little more interesting and fun to play with. We only got a chance to have a go with a new AVC armoured jeep, which unfortunately falls into the first category like a kitten with its paws tied together.

Conclusion:
I’m not going to lie, I liked this game a lot. Its everything we was promised, and It does it to a polished shine. A parallel story line to one of my favorite games of last year. New levels, new weapons, and other new features. Increased performance on different computer systems. Being able to play the game in Windows XP on the very high settings.

Really If you liked the first Crysis game, this is just more of the same and you will have more fun. This isn’t Crysis 2 but its still great fun.

Gameplay: 8
Features: 6
Graphics: 10
Replayability: 7

Overall: 7/10