Crytek’s new add-on to the famously punishing Crysis puts you in the cockney boots of Sergeant “Psycho” Sykes, and lets you run riot on the island in an alternate storyline to Nomad & Prophet’s exploits closer to the Sphere. Given new enemies, new weapons, new support characters, and stunningly beautiful new locales, you are tasked with retrieving a little something from the Koreans, led by rather irate General with bad taste in glasses.

I’ll get it out fast: This game will disappoint some people. It will also make others very happy. It is going to be very much a love hate relationship with Warhead. In many ways Warhead can be seen as a revision of Crysis, rather than an expansion. While true, it does add extra missions and add new game play elements, I found that what this expansion did was cut the crap. No more crouching like a hermit in huts hoping to god the shit-tonne of Koreans outside aren't looking your way when your Camo's energy runs out.

The game plays like a high octane remake of the original which for some people would be a bad thing, but I however beg to differ. Almost all of the jungle exploration and the non-linear mission paths have been cut. Warhead has been put on the rails. In many ways this is a good thing, almost all of the “great" FPS follow very linear paths with lots of scripted events, and Warhead has adopted much of this style while still retaining the Cryengine's open world. There's still 100's of ways to approach a situation, still 100's of hiding spots and strategies to take out enemies, but you no longer feel lost or dumped in a situation. I know this will disappoint fans of the original, but to be honest, I had a hard time finding Crysis fun. It was a lot of running around in very much indistinct and daunting areas not knowing what to do. The game touted stealth and all these other gimmicks which never actually translated in game, simply because it was too big (The AI's ungodly laser vision didn't help things either). Enemies would spot you miles off, or your genius badass strategy of infiltration couldn’t possibly work because the Dev’s almost insisted on placing funnels and choke points everywhere (Not to mention fucking land mines).

What Warhead does here is not fix these design choices, the choke points are still there, but the game now removes these expectations that never come to fruition. Now, instead of trying to second guess the developers and losing, you know where you are supposed to go, you know what’s going to happen, and you plan accordingly. The game maintains the illusion of choice while still keeping you on the straight and narrow – without this being painfully obvious. This is a hard thing to achieve. A lot of games are either so structured by design that the illusion of choice fails, the card falls out of the magicians sleeve before the trick, or they, like the original Crysis try too hard to give players choice and just leave people bewildered and frustrated.

Another thing Warhead does is iron out the kinks. The original Crysis was like a first generation Apple product – everything looked shiny but just felt wrong in tiny ways. The suit management system was a mess – the game was too sparse for you to make use of the features. Your camo would run out before you got anywhere, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to use your power mode because if you were close enough rearrange a Korean’s face you knew the fun wouldn’t last long because you’d soon be outnumbered and overpowered. Warhead solves this. There are several levels (such as the Mines, which surprisingly turned out to be my favourite [I still get chills when I think about HL:Episode 2]). The game has also, and once again this is going to disappoint the hardcore masochists in the crowd, been made easier. You are tripping over ammo and guns. Feeling swamped? Break out the mounted chain gun or jump in one of the ridiculously overpowered new vehicles (Can you has 20MM Machine gun with anti vehicle exploding rounds? Yes you can has.). The weapons are now suited to the situation, you no longer feel compelled to clutch on to a particular weapon for half the game like some kind of deadly security blanket. Many other aspects have been altered as well, too many to go into here. Put it this way - System Shock 2 was very hard and kept you in a constant state of suspense and fear, ammo was always short and you were always low on health. Bioshock rolled in and changed this. Health packs and cash were everywhere and finding ammo was seldom a problem. Veterans said it was dumber down, and they were right. But which one did I prefer? Bioshock, simply because the state SS2 kept me in was just too stressful to be fun. I focused too much on the stats than the game; the only thing I came away with was frustration. This is the difference between Crysis and Warhead.

Now, those of you who were hoping the game will run at a playable framerate will be disappointed, because those people, like me keep trying to fool ourselves that we can actually play the game with everything set to Ultra. Yes, the engine has been optimised incredibly, but only at the low end. This game still runs like an amputee. I’ve updated to the latest drivers, and I swear there has been no performance increase with the configuration I was using. So, if you want to make the most out of the stunning levels (The frozen ocean has got to be my favourite map in a game ever), you are going to need to turn it down to either Mainstream or Minimum, or face the prospect of a very pretty but unplayable slideshow. I will also concede that this may be due to my particular configuration of hardware – you can’t cater to every computer in the world, and ӝNirach has actually been able to turn on 4x antialiasing without his incredibly expensive crossfire setup belching pained clouds of blue smoke.

The graphics components may have been improved upon, but this game still has its foibles. I can find no mention in either the in game control mapper or the manual on how to change to incendiary bullets which is indicative of sloppy control design, I have problems with the surround sound (Certain sounds play almost muted, despite being “physically” closer than the background noise) and the game crashes a lot, especially during save points. I’ve managed to get stuck on several obvious pieces of geometry and I’ve managed to kill myself in a variety of improbable ways, such as getting crushed by a tank that fell on me out of thin air. There are often rendering issues and the interface is very unresponsive. This really should have been fixed since the original Crysis. Things like these make you wonder what drugs EA’s quality assurance department have been taking.

The story, as other’s have pointed out, is not great. It’s an action movie. Huge scripted set pieces, lots of explosions and impossibly large weapons, a seemingly invincible hero, and waves of disposable enemies, this game makes you wonder when Bruce Willis is going to march on screen. This, in my opinion is no bad thing. A few new elements have been thrown into the mix, including Psycho’s volatile persona and some obscure back-story about your Wingman O’Neill which I was never able to decipher, which make for interesting play. Having said that, the game still has the depth of a spoon, but I say, does that even matter? Robert Ashley of GFW Radio wrote a short story about a man returning from Vietnam, wanting nothing more than to share his experiences with the world. His choice of medium? A book? No, too cliché. He built a themed put-put course. This is in effect what trying to tell a story in a game amounts to. You can always go down the MGS road and build a game with more cutscene than play, but that’s fudging the line between game and interactive movie anyway. Ken Levine reckons trying to accomplish what is largely a linear process in a decidedly non linear format is counterproductive and stupid, and I agree with him in every way. So yes, the story does suck, but I’m fine with that.

Warhead is really just that, an action movie. Its 6 hours of outrageously entertaining stupidity and over the top action that’s shallower than a puddle that takes no real skill to play. This isn’t an art game; this isn’t even a great game. But it’s not stressful at all to play and very hard to fault at what it tries to be. This is the sort of game you slouch out and play after a day at work. It doesn’t tax the mind, but it passes the time and provides you with an excellent source of shenanigans and gunplay.

I recommend it.

Graphics: 10
Sound: 6
Controls: 6
Story: 7
Fun: 9
Replay Value: 4