Crysis: Warhead

[Leon]

So I finished downloading this game this morning and blasted right through it. Took me 5.5 hours total. Surprisingly, it's about as long as the original. I was expecting a shorter game, since Psycho's missions take place in about 1/2 the time Nomad's missions took place.

Anyway, on to my thoughts.

Crysis set the standards pretty damn high. The attention to detail, the graphics and physics engines, the size and clever design of each level, and the interesting story were what made Crysis so great. The AI was good, but not the best. My expectations for this game were simple: improve previous imperfections, explore new situations, introduce new story elements. Overall, Warhead lived up to those expectations. They worked out some imperfections in the graphics and tried some new things; there's still work to do, but the Crytek engine still sports some of the best graphics out there, no doubt. The new weapons and new vehicles were pretty cool for the most part.

The controls are still pretty good, but one new weapon and a couple new vehicles aren't the easiest to use. Not bad, but definitely could use some revision.

The new levels are flat out awesome IMO. There's some of the good old jungle, some snow-covered jungle, and some areas inside of buildings or other major structures. But they introduce some awesome environments that were previously unexplored, and it was fun to see what was in these levels. There were a couple levels (or at least parts of levels) that were centered on vehicles. Remember that in Crysis, you drove a tank in one level and flew a VTOL in another. The new vehicle-based levels in Warhead were indeed based in new environments, but I found one consistent flaw from both games: you're moving around so much so fast that the game lags every time it loads any significant section of the map. And this could be a fault of my PC, since I'm in need of new memory anyway. But I found it annoying in both. There were also some issues with draw distances in Warhead, and maybe I didn't notice it originally in Crysis, but I definitely saw it here.

Either way, it's overall a good follow-up to Crysis, and I'm hopeful that Crytek is in the process of making a 3rd installment of this game, centered on Prophet's time captured by the aliens.

[Leon]

Oh, by the way, whenever I play a new game, I immediately play it again a 2nd time.

...

So after playing it twice today I've found a few more things that could use improvement. For one, the cutscenes skip and lag a lot for me. Granted, I'm in need of some newer better RAM, but I still have a damn good PC and it shouldn't be happening. Also, saw some minor weird graphic things here and there. Nothing major, just small things that should be fixed in the future.

Also, noticed some more graphic features I missed earlier. There's a heat wave effect on the barrel of the gun after you shoot. Don't know if that was in Crysis or not, but just noticed it and for attention to detail. Motion blur is much cooler, but it makes my PC skip a beat here and there.

Paying more attention to the story, I'm sure they'll be making a 3rd installment of the game, following Prophet's events on the island. Looking forward to it.

[SeXuAL LooGiE]

i really liked crysis, and thought it was about as fun as a single player could get.. never played it multi... i found the AI left something to be wanted, but still its better then almost any other game i've seen... i should probabyl pick this one up whenever i get a good comp again

[Leon]

Yeah the online play is mediocre. When the game came out I played online a bit and owned everyone. Got really boring really quick.

I've found that the AI gets much better as you turn up the difficulty. Still not great, but it's a good challenge at Hard or Delta difficulties.