Cover HolidayM.indd

104 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC| HOLIDAY 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com

IN THE LAB^

REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

W

e liked Crysis. Despite its less-

than-stellar AI, annoying alien

baddies, and flawed final mission,

we liked it. We liked the game for its wide-

open jungle combat and the power and

flexibility the nano-suit gave us to approach

combat any way we wanted. Whether

we wanted to skulk through the jungle,

shooting enemies half a klick away with a

silenced rifle, or get up close and personal

by throwing our enemies through the near-

est wall, the game accommodated pretty

much any play style.

What was the secret sauce? It’s simple.

While Crysis was essentially a linear game

that pushed the player down a straight

path from one battle to the next, this path

was incredibly wide, giving the player a

drastically different experience from one

play-through to the next. While there were

definitely choke points in the game, gener-

ally, you could choose when and where

you wanted to fight the bad guys. Stalk-

ing the enemy and choosing the time and

place of every fight was a blast—our major

complaint was that there weren’t enough

ambush-type weapons such as Claymore

mines and detpacks.

Crysis: Warhead finally gives the player

the tools to set up elaborate ambushes, but

at the same time, the player’s path through

the game seems significantly narrower. This

limits your options as you play through the

game and transforms something that was

special into a run-of-the-mill shooter—albeit

a very pretty one.

While we’re disappointed by the

shrinking game world, we love the greatly

improved performance of the stand-alone

expansion pack. This is partially due to

the inevitable march of progress on the

hardware side; Crytek has made some seri-

ous optimizations to the default settings

as well as the auto-configuration tool. The

game automatically chose default settings

that produced a good mix of performance

and eye candy on all the systems we tested.

Naturally, the highly configurable engine

lets tweakers crank up the visual quality as

high (or low) as they want.

Aside from these changes, the core of

the single-player game is essentially the

same as the original. The weapons are al-

most all the same, the nano-suit’s the same,

and the bad guys are the same. In Warhead,

you play one of your

squadmates during

the events of the first

game. This let Crytek

reuse most of the assets

and even some of the

events from the first

game. However, while

we appreciate any

scriptwriter trying to

add depth to our vid-

eogame characters, the

voice-over flashbacks

were more confusing

than entertaining, and

ultimately unnecessary.

Crytek has also polished and rebranded

the multiplayer component of Crysis as

Crysis Wars. The framework is an interesting

blend of Enemy Territory –style gameplay

with traditional team deathmatch. Unfor-

tunately, whether it was the fault of the

servers or the game’s large scale, every time

we went online, we faced lag bad enough to

render the game unplayable, even on serv-

ers that registered low pings.

While Crysis: Warhead is a step toward a

more mass-market-friendly game, it’s a step

back in innovation and fun. Warhead strips

many of the amazing design elements that

made Crysis fun despite its fl aws, and we’re

not willing to let them go. While Warhead

brings back a lot of the fun of Crysis, especially

on the higher diffi culty settings, it’s closer to a

straight run-and-gun shooter like Call of Duty

than it is to the original. – W I L L S M I T H

Crysis: Warhead

Elegant design or good, old-fashioned fun? We prefer both

Vehicles still bring the big explosions, but beware of baddies with rocket launchers.

+ -

VERDICT

$30, http://crysiswarhead.ea.com, ESRB: M

7

Improved weapon

choices and better

performance.

Smaller game world;

bad lag on multi-

player matches.

KIERKEGAARD

CRYSIS: WARHEAD

NIETZSCHE

Our least favorite part of the game is fi ghting the alien hordes.