First Play Review: Crysis Warhead

As I recently replayed Crysis, I decided it was time to try out Crysis Warhead for the first time. Crysis Warhead was a standalone expansion for the original Crysis that was released in 2008, a year after Crysis itself. It's purpose was not so much to extend the Crysis story but to enhance it by showing you the same story from a different perspective as well as address some of the critical concerns with the game.

Firstly, as this is not a sequel, but an expansion, one must never expect too much by way of evolution to the game engine or its features. Crysis Warhead delivers much the same experience in terms of gameplay and features as Crysis with a few additions in the form of some new weapons to play with, some new vehicles and a couple of new alien types but nothing so overt as to break the immersion that this is basically the same time-frame as the parent game just experienced differently. The Nanosuit, Crysis' main 'gimmick' is still as awesome as ever, so once you remaster it's settings and controls you'll have few issues with the game.

The game engine is the same, but according to the developers at the time, it went under some significant optimisation to address most reviewers concerns about needing an impossibly specced PC to run it. I can't say it runs any differently to Crysis as far as I'm concerned, I still kept the resolution at 2K (1440p) as 4K was too much for my GPU to render Crysis at so I presumed there would be no change. I did notice a better use of volumetric smoke for smoke grenades, but lighting, shadows and reflections were as awesome as before.

Playing a different part of the game through the eyes of another is not new. Valve in fact did this with great results by releasing Half-Life: Opposing Force and Half-Life: Blue Shift where you played from the perspective of one of the Marines sent to Black Mesa or Barney, one of Black Mesa's security guards respectively. In Crysis Warhead you play as Sgt. "Psycho" Sykes, one of your player character (Nomad)'s team mates from Crysis, and you now follow Psycho's adventures on "the other side" of the island to Nomad and you fill in some of the blanks left by Crysis - such as the big obvious one where at the end of Crysis, Psycho is on the flight deck of the USS Constitution with his captured an alien! Little things like that.

Psycho is voiced by Sean Chapman (whom movie buffs will know as the guy who first opened the Hellraiser puzzle box) and his East-end of London accent is as thick as Jason Statham's. While the original score to Crysis was produced by veteran video-game Israeli composer Inon Zur, for Warhead, Crytek enlisted Peter Antovszki who would go on to compose music for Sudden Strike IV, Ryse: Son of Rome and subsequent Crysis games. His score here certainly seems more intrusive than Zur's and it probably overuses the Japanese takio drum a bit but it's still excellent and I think fits the pace of this game more than reusing Zur's sore would have.

Much of the story is told through 3rd person perspective movie-style cutscenes. This serves to flesh out the character of Psycho to a far greater degree than Nomad's character ever way and even you eventually feel more connected to Psycho. There is a cinematic quality here that would not be lost in a Michael Bay movie and this quality actually works much better even though Psycho's 'choices' in the cutscene are taken away from you; but even this accepted as this is not a free-open-world RPG though, this is a linear shooter, although you don't feel as confined as in liner shooters such as Half-Life.

 

The pace of Warhead is quite different from Crysis. The original game had long periods of wandering though the jungle or alien ships where you weren't shooting, but Warhead has you in a firefight almost every 60 seconds. It's possible to be evading a group of pursuing enemies and running into another group. There's not a great deal of taking in the scenery - as here the scenery is pretty much identical to Crysis, I guess Crytek assumed you already did your sightseeing there, and they were right. Now is the time for shooting!

All in all this is a fun diversion that expands the Crysis saga by about 5 hours and gives you some new toys to play with in Crytek's world while you kill North Koreans or Aliens.

Crysis Warhead is strangely €19.99 on GOG, but much cheaper on Steam for €9.99, or on Origin for €7.99 , but as always watch out for frequent sales and bundles as this is now over 10 years old and no reason to not get it when it's below €5.