Crysis: Warhead

8/10

Take on the fight as the volatile Sergeant “Psycho” Sykes in a new parallel story taking place during the events of Crysis. Psycho’s secret mission will take him to the other side of the island on a ruthless pursuit of a North Korean general hell-bent on obtaining powerful technology.

With the versatile powers of his Nanosuit and an arsenal of fully customisable weapons and vehicles at his disposal, Sykes will do whatever it takes to carry out his top-secret objective.

Action on the other side of the island is more intense, the battles are fierce, and the mission protocol is no longer “Adapt to Survive.” As Sergeant Sykes, now you must adapt to dominate the battle. Twin SMG’s blazing, seizing new vehicles, or going stealth, the action and the victory is on your terms.

Crysis: Warhead is the latest pulse-racing instalment of 2007’s PC Game of the Year. This time round you play as Sergeant Sykes, with a vital mission to recover the technology that an enemy general wishes to own, at any cost.

This time round there are more dynamic gameplay elements, customisable weapons, new vehicles, more locations and a fully interactive war zone to dominate – whether you want to play in a guns-out way or you’re more of a stealth merchant.

Warhead is an extremely clever and very exciting stand-alone expansion pack, meaning that you don’t need the original Crysis in order to play it. What makes it even better though is the reverse-engineered and altered graphical engine – it will now play on more machines than the original Crysis (which, let’s face it, even with a hugely powerful PC, you might not be able to crank it to full settings graphically).

This should mean that a wider audience can access the fun of Crysis – and it really is a lot of fun. The physics aspects remain (picking up soldiers, throwing them into rocks, other soldiers etc, punching vehicles and so on) and the nano-suit remains integral in the battle scenario.

Exactly how do you want to target that Korean base up ahead? Go stealth like the predator, sneak up and take them out? Or would you rather engage your strength suit to neutralise any weapon kick-back and go all out? Ii really does make a difference to the strategic play.

Unfortunately, the game suffers from being extremely short – there are perhaps only around six hours gameplay to be had here. However, there are a bunch of multiplayer options (that now brilliantly includes team deathmatch), with some new online modes and 21 maps – seven of which are new.

Perhaps the only real gripes that I have with the game are that firstly it can be a little too linear (I actually found places in Crysis where you couldn’t access and these became more apparent in Warhead) and the enemy AI – which at times reacted a little too oddly to what I was up to. Nonetheless, Crysis Warhead is an absolutely solid title and the parallel storyline adds to the original game if you’ve played it.

If you liked Crysis, or even if you like first person shooters in general, then you’ll probably want to play this. It’s well worth a look.