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Ordinarily there would be a spirited competition in the office over who gets to play the new Crysis title, generally settled by throwing the loser off the roof of the building but by happy chance, Grandma's Boy was asked to review it. Bloodshed averted, we slammed Crysis: Warhead and played to our hearts content while everyone else sweated over deadlines.
Anyone who laid hands on the first Crysis and had a machine that could actually handle the bleeding thing will know what to expect from Crysis: Warhead. It looks and feels stunningly like the original but seems to be free of many of the same bugs that required much patching by Crytek after Crysis' release. We played the completely unpatched version of Warhead and had nary a stutter or hint of trouble right up until we ran into that monstrous Exosuit creature. Even that was a result of our shoddy playing skills and blindness to the fact that a creature that large will blow a hole even in a lanosuit within moments. Having slightly cheated our way past said monstrous beastie by way of a conveniently placed frozen tank out of the creatures range, we moved on with the review.
Running through iced-up caverns and hearing the ice crackle underfoot and creak overhead as something above you shifts is truly awesome. Beginning in the tropical section of the island and moving over to the frozen wasteland for some weird reason feels completely natural, it is a few minutes before the landscape conditions are noticed. The way that the differing terrains are created is amazing more than once we had our fearless editor peeking over our shoulder and commenting on how real the game world looked.
The menu systems remain largely unchanged from the first title, with only the across-the-board settings getting a slight name change. Control configuration is fairly simple to tweak though it helps having a little experience changing everything to suit a lefty in this reviewer's case. We skipped anything that may have taught us how to play the game effectively, preferring a little on-the-job training to the spoon feeding that Warhead attempts. Veterans of Crysis will find gameplay near-identical to the first title. First-timers will have little difficulty acclimatizing to the gameplay mechanic. There is a learning curve of sorts which does not escalate too sharply to discourage total noobs from trying to get on with the game.
Fitting into the run-and-gun gameplay somewhere is the storyline. It is unobtrusive and constant, feeling like battlefield updates rather than pauses in the action. The few end and beginning level cut scenes only serve to enhance the storyline and don't really intrude on the game as whole. The story really is a stand-alone affair. There is no need to have even heard of Crysis before getting into Warhead. There is a little disorientation at first but this is quickly fleshed out via radio updates as the first level is traversed.
Driving Onward
Crysis' engine is known for crippling hardcore systems and while Warhead is no different it does use resources a little better than its predecessor and is a little more forgiving for lower specs. Keep in mind that it is not much more forgiving but we'll take anything we can get. Warhead looks stunning in its rendering of the living breathing world around players. On the first play-through of a section the triggered actions appear very natural but running through a section again does tend to shatter this illusion. The scripted bits are very scripted. Noticeably so but the enemy Al does make up for this a little, ducking under cover and flanking players who think they are immortal behind a .50 Cal mounted weapon.
It really does keep players on their toes when the realization hits that the enemy units you like to gun down are a little more tactically gifted than the player, forcing a rethink and possible upgrade of playing styles. Warhead likes to push just a little further than player's capabilities would really allow and forces them to adapt to the situation at hand. The manner in which this is achieved is never in-your-face obvious and that earns Warhead a special place in our hearts.
We were delighted with the vehicles available in the game and at how well they handle. Unless of course it was poor old us on the receiving end of heavy machine gun fire from an APC in which case we cursed the vehicles from here to next week. The hovercraft chase over ice flats with Exos popping up out of the ice is quite thrilling and vehicular manslaughter almost became a way of life for us in general. We were quite keen to hop into one of those fighters we kept spotting wrecked all over the island, sadly, we never got the chance.
For a newly released high-end title, there are surprisingly few teething problems. Most kinks were ironed out after the release of Crysis and the developer's improvements show in Warhead. While the similarities between the first and second title cannot be denied, Warhead is just as good, if not better, than Crysis the First. It does feel a little abrupt at times but there is always the Crysis Wars disc to lengthen the life of Warhead.
The second in the franchise looks to be just as successful as the first but the inclusion of a far more hectic version of copy protection from the first mars what would have been a near-perfect example of what a First Person Shooter should be about.
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