Crysis: Warhead is the latest game by developers Crytek, who are renown for producing first person shooters which while visually stunning and torturous for any computer short of top-of-the-line, tend to fall a little short in the actual gameplay department. Warhead is a little different in that rather than being a full game, it is an expansion pack which doesn’t require its parent title, Crysis, to run. It still requires a powerful rig, and still looks incredible, but is there more game this time?

Warhead is set on the same island as Crysis, but not in the same locations. This means that while the areas encountered are different to those in Crysis, they are incredibly similar: same look, same enemies, and the game follows the same basic premise of ‘tool around on some beaches, kill Koreans, find aliens, kill aliens’. Vehicles make a reappearance, including a new hovercraft – although they don’t feel as speedy as you’d hope for. Jungle and water have never looked so good in a game, the ice effects are very impressive, everything ourdoors looks spectacular. The indoor section is mainly comprised of a mineshaft, which is considerably less interesting, but tolerable. In essence, there are a decent variety of locations which keep the game moving along visually as well as thematically.

While your character is a different fellow than the protagonist of Crysis, you are still a soldier in a fancy nano-suit – basically adaptive body armour. The suit’s controls are accessed via the right mouse button, which allows you to concentrate the suit’s abilities on areas such as strength (jump very high, pick up enemies and throw them), cloak (invisibility), speed (run very fast) and the one I used for 95% of the game, armour (which functions similarly to Halo 2’s regenerative armour). These abilities are largely unnecessary, although parts of the maps are arbitrarily scattered with piles of rocks and whatnot which you must switch to strength mode to jump up – hardly adding anything to gameplay, but it does highlight the super-human abilities afforded to you by the suit. In-game engine cut-scenes give body to your character, and while they drag on a little sometimes, their presence does add to the game and make it more than just a run-and-gunner. The story holds together on its own, however knowing the Crysis storyline helps somewhat.

Even with ponderous cut-scenes, and even for an expansion pack, Crysis Wars is on the short side. While the action is break-neck and consistent, a mere 5 hours is plenty to complete the single player mission, and with no acheivements or unlockables there is little incentive to go back through it a second time. The maps are large and full exploration of them would be a very time-consuming proposition, but they aren’t filled with the kind of detail that would make you want to inch through them in case you missed something. The difficulty is also less than you’d expect, I highly recommend bumping it up one level more than you’d usually play at. Enemies flank you and use cover effectively, but rarely offer up a real challenge. The final boss encounter in particular is a complete joke, and was quite an anti-climax.

Aside from the single-player campaign, Crysis: Warhead also includes a multiplayer mode, dubbed ‘Crysis Wars’, on a second disc which requires a separate install. Crysis’ multiplayer never really took off, as it had a few elements which were frowned upon. Crysis Wars has been tweaked to fix some of those issues, however there is little evidence of increased multiplayer popularity. There are, for instance, no servers within New Zealand for Crysis Wars, so you’ll have to look to Australian servers – and even they are largely deserted from my experience. Those looking for a compelling and well-supported multiplayer experience would do better to search elsewhere.

Also worthy of mention is the controversial copy protection scheme employed by EA on this release (as well as on the recently released Spore). The setup procedure installs a hideous little piece of DRM software called SecuRom, which has been called everything from a rootkit to a virus – and while probably not as bad as is being made out, has caused many previous fans of the series to boycott this release. Additionally there is an activation scheme which allows a maximum of 5 activations of the software – which is primarily designed to reduce the resale of the game, but also is a pain in the neck if you upgrade regularly. What exactly triggers the need to reactivate is unclear, but the fine print indicates that even such simple acts as hardware component or operating system upgrades could require reactivation – resulting in one less time you can install the game in the future.

It’s a little hard to recommend a game which is so short, has multiplayer you’re unlikely to find much competition for, and has boycott-enducing copy protection. Crysis Wars unarguably has all these factors, but for people who can’t get enough of the Crysis formula, or need something to push their high-end computer gear with, it is a solid game and decent entertainment for an afternoon.

Tags: E3 2008

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Games, PC, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.