It’s been a year since the last Crysis game was released. It was a rare treat for PC gaming fans in 2007. At the time it did set a new benchmark for gaming graphics, demanding hardware and of course featured some impressive FPS action. A year later and we already have a new entry in the series, Crysis Warhead.
The good news is it’s still quintessential Crysis which means it’s still picture postcard pretty and still features some top notch action set pieces. The sad news is on the single player side it’s all over rather too quickly.
Despite Crytek’s claims that Warhead would be optimized for mid range PCs, it is still demands some meaty hardware to look its best. Also even though Crysis Warhead is budget priced outside India, EA for some reason priced this standalone expansion the same as the original Crysis i.e Rs 999.
So Warhead is basically a standalone expansion to last year’s Crysis. For those who haven’t played the original Crysis, the game starts off with an opening cinematic that shows off your nanosuit’s various abilities. Then it all ends with the all too familiar aircraft crash. You wake up gain your bearings run a few steps and almost jarringly you find yourself firing away at your first enemy.
Crysis: Warhead wastes no time on any story exposition. It simply hits the ground running right from the moment you gain control of your character and never lets up until the very end. Warhead was designed from ground up to be an experience equivalent to that of a fast paced action movie. So from the pacing of the action to the enemy placements, the sheer numbers thrown at you and the destructible objects and vehicles placed all around, it lends itself well to a fast paced variety of game play.
It follows a storyline that runs to parallel to that of the original. You play a British Sergeant called Psycho who I thought had a personality a little more interesting than Nomad whom you played in the original. Warhead like the original Crysis elevates its run of the mill FPS gameplay by giving you a sandbox environment to play around in, with the addition of its proprietary nanosuit element.
The nanosuit gives you the four abilities of invisibility, super speed, super strength and maximum armor. These are abilities that really give you the flexibility to switch around between different styles of gameplay almost on the fly. You could choose the stealthy approach by using invisibility to sneak up close to enemies and pick them off one by one.
You could go in guns blazing and cap off a few enemies and once things start getting heated up, you could super speed your way to safety. Use super strength to jump on top of buildings and vehicles or hurl one enemy against the other. If all else fails just whip out your grenade launcher, setup a fantastic chain of explosions and just tear the landscape asunder.
Whichever way you choose, Crysis Warhead is immensely satisfying and glorious to behold, thanks to some smart and challenging AI and the general layout of environmental objects in each of the levels. This is what makes each of Warhead’s levels so repayable. The AI in the game definitely seems to have been kicked up a notch from Crysis.
Enemies will now feign death, flank you often, use the environment intelligently and those that don nanosuits can offer a much stiffer challenge. Alien AI has also improved. They come at you in greater numbers, pummel you with ice pellets constantly from different directions and shift around constantly. Your encounters with them now also take place in more open levels than Crysis.
So the aliens are more maneuverable and will often shoot at you, take cover and zip around the environment and in general will send you into a tizzy. Often you step into the middle of battles between the Koreans and the Aliens. Letting the battles between enemies run their course before you pick off the leftovers is usually a good idea.
A year after Crysis, Warhead is perhaps the only game yet that manages to look better than it. It’s still a technical marvel. This time around Crytek has really taken the art and level design further. The first time you lay eyes on the beach resort or when you come across the enemy carrier and waves that have frozen mid roll are truly unforgettable.
All this, together with the incredible lighting and weather effects manage to render Warhead an incredibly atmospheric game. It also has some of the most impressive explosion effects I have seen in any game ever. Crysis Warhead’s single player consists of seven levels in all. Environments range from a beach resort, frozen island, submarines, airfields, mines and one sequence atop a train running through a marsh.
Most levels are a little smaller in scope than Crysis and populated with a greater volume of enemies. This however also translates into more focused action sequences and a better paced game. Some levels like The Mine seem a little uninspired compared to the others.
The assault on the beach resort, the frenetic hovercraft ride that takes you through ensuing alien versus human battles raging all around you and the level that has you shooting away from top of train running through a marsh really mange pump up the excitement levels.
The cut scenes are now in third person perspective this time, feel more dramatic and are usually accompanied by some music to help give them a more cinematic appeal. Simply put cut scenes are a lot more fun to watch this time around. Sound design also plays an integral role in Warhead.
Besides the epic score that plays at the appropriate sequences in the game play there is the tribal drums filled theme that seems to play when in proximity of enemies. It’s one the aspects of its sound that really helps to ratchet up the tension during such encounters. The voice acting and the environmental sounds are also great.
Multiplayer in Crysis has been rebranded. It is now called Crysis Wars and comes on its own separate install DVD. It can be installed and played independent of the single player portion. In addition to the Power Struggle and Instant Action from the original, we also now have a Team Instant Action mode, which is analogous to the Team Deathmatch mode in other games.
Again the added element of every player being able to wield the nanosuit’s abilities and the massive sized maps helps mix things up nicely instead of everything being just a twitchy fragfest. There is a good selection of varied maps to play around in. Crysis should definitely develop a better multiplayer community this time around.
One of the other things that I must mention is that Crysis Warhead crashed on me several times. Not just a crash to the desktop but a cold hard reboot was needed every time. This happened to me on both Windows XP and Vista. This was very disappointing as this was a problem I never faced in Crysis. Only after spending a good time tweaking around with all the graphics settings I managed to have a stable play through to the end of the game.
In conclusion, Crysis Warhead is a worthy successor to Crysis in every respect and manages to raise the action and graphical benchmarks to even greater heights thanks to improved AI, level design, pacing and graphical tweaks.
The single player campaign will last you about 6-7 hrs. It’s short but has a extremely sweet single player experience. Its inherent design however lends itself to a good amount of replay ability. An improved multiplayer also helps round up the tweaks made to Warhead to consider it a definitive improvement over Crysis. A must have for PC gamers.
Rating: 8.8 out of 10.
Price: Rs 999.
Developer: Crytek.
Publisher: Electronic Arts.
Platform: Windows XP / Vista.
- By Shantesh Patil