Just finished my first play-through of Crysis Warhead.  This game has been on the market for a while, so I am sure there are hundreds of reviews around the web.  I personally haven’t read any of them, and knew I would like the game when I finally picked it up.  Got it installed later on Tuesday night, and played through on Normal difficulty.  I am not sure if they made improvements to the game engine or not, but the game did play very smoothly at 1024×768 resolution with 2x AA, with the settings on “mainstream” in graphics except for shaders which were on “gamer”.  At the moment I am running on an 8600 GTS graphics card, with a Intel Core

Crysis Graphics Settings

2 Duo @ 2.66 GHz, 2 GB of Corsair RAM at standard timings on a nVidia 680i SLI chipset.

First thoughts on the game after my first run, they have made a few small but helpful improvements, and one change that became annoying throughout the game.  The storyline actually turned out to be better than I initially expected, which basically consists of chasing a container with a “special” alien in it which the North Koreans are dead set on removing from the island, while directed with a smart-ass general who you encounter often, and spend several levels pursuing him along with the container.  Throughout the game you encounter the Koreans and aliens from early levels, which is a change, but I personally hate trying to chase the little fuckers around.  While the game is harder this time around even on the lower difficulty settings, the aliens are thankfully easier to chase down and kill, which in the first game could become extremely tedious.

One thing that seemed to be lacking in the first one, but has been corrected in Warhead, are levels and situations that require you to use your suits functions rather than it being mostly optional.  There are several levels which require you to switch between functions, sometimes rather quickly, which brings me to the one thing that pissed me off throughout game play.  In the first game, you could double-tap keys (like space for strength, and shift for speed) to quickly switch suit modes, and for some reason, that has been removed from this game.  While I didn’t tear apart the options, nothing jumped out at me to enable this feature that was quite handy in the first game.  Since they have added several areas that require you to use your suit functions, and sometimes switch very quickly, this annoyance detracted from game play somewhat for me, and I become an expert at quickly switching suit modes with the keyboard hotkey. (UPDATE: Found it, just a simple checkbox under game play will enable the old quick modes.)

The difficulty on this one is noticeably harder even on normal mode.  There are a few new weapons, mainly mounted guns, and reapparance of all the ones from the first game.  There is a new vehicle with one of the new weapons mounted (a mini-gun with a lot of knockdown), and the other weapon is a 20mm armor-piercing cannon with explosive ammo.  This second weapon is badass for getting trucks to actually flip and explode in mid-air (like most of the trailers showed happening in the first game, but was exceedingly hard to pull off).  The new vehicle is what looks to be an APC, which is heavily armored, and really takes a beating before you are forced to eject, unlike the jeeps from the first game which tend to take massive damage fairly quickly.

Overall this game is as awesome as the first one.  It is fairly short however, taking me around 8 hours of play time to finish, but for an expansion you usually don’t get much more.  As in the first one, this game has a lot of re-play potential, and I plan to start a new game at a higher difficulty as soon as I get this posted in fact.  Other than the annoying as hell, missing suit quick-switch from the first one, there is nothing I would change about this game.  If you liked the first Crysis this is highly recommended and you should head out and pick it up if you haven’t already.  10 / 10 from me.