Review Crysis Warhead / Crysis Wars

Mike Bantick
Friday, 17 October 2008 07:04

Opinion and Analysis

Once the smoke clears from your smoking CPU, will you appreciate the latest tech-pushing offering from Crytek.  Break out the water cooled memory sticks, its time to stick Crysis Warhead in your DVD tray.

I played the original Crysis for a short time’ it was a choppy low frame rate experience on a machine that was supposedly built for the experience, this was November last year.

Crysis Warhead
	Developer	Crytek
	Publisher	EA
	Rating	MA 15+
PC

Here we are almost a year later and Crytek have pumped out a kinda sequel, in Crysis Warhead as well as an extra disc titled Crysis Wars – more on that later.

It is “kinda sequel” because of a number of reasons.  Firstly, the storyline takes place in parallel to that of the original.  This time around however you play the part of Sergeant Michael Sykes, Psycho on the opposite side of Crysis island as your buddies battle it out against KPA soldiers and aliens to control they mysterious artifact.

Secondly, though the graphics are still pumped to the max, CryTek tell us that the code has been optimised from the original, allowing it to run on a broader (and cheaper) range of equipment.

I ran this game on a Core 2 Quad, with 4G RAM (though in this case the rig was running Windows XP so not all of that is addressable) and an ATI Radeon HD 3870.  In general the game ran quite well, on tweaked ‘gamer’ settings.  Ramp things up to ‘enthusiast’ and the frame rate dropped considerably.

Even on less than top notch settings and under DirectX 9 rather than 10 this is a gorgeous game. 

Jungle foliage gets cut up during firefights, you can almost feel the heat of the explosions and subsequently feel a longing for the cool water that makes up the bulk of Crysis island.

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