Crysis Warhead....

Again, i know i'm late to the party but it seemed like a good idea to follow on from Crysis with its "offshoot"/expansion, Warhead. While i enjoyed Crysis overall (including the zero-G sections) i found that the disparity between what was shown in cutscenes and the actual powers of the nanosuits really bothered me. I also felt that the balance between the power of the normal Korean footsoldiers and the player was leaning towards the wrong side, however, after playing through the rest of the game i realised that the nanosuit and weapons seemed to mainly be balanced against the aliens.... which is great for the last third of the game but not ideal for the first two thirds.

Warhead continues on with this trend. The opening cutscenes vastly overstate the power of the nanosuit which is still very annoying and completely breaks the immersion for me. It seems that the balance between the Koreans and the player has been changed - it now takes significantly fewer shots to down a Korean soldier which is what i was annoyed about in the original game, however your "armour mode" has also been significantly reduced in power meaning that a few stray shots from 100 metres or more away can pretty much kill you. (This is as of patch 1.1) It's a shame because the suit powers still lack any real "punch", each draining in under a few seconds, which combined with the pause between switching modes leaves the dream of being able to run, jump and punch people to a pulp a remote possibility (or fluke).

Again, not far into the game the cutscenes belie the actual game mechanics, with "Psycho" jumping down a cliff after engaging the strength mode, which results in a direct loss of health "in game" as compared to armour mode which drains armour first. The cutscene is a logical extention of real-world physics which unfortunately does not translate to the game world.

I'm not particularly far into the game as yet but it appears to be as enjoyable as the original which is no bad thing. Shame about the DRM and limited activations though and i certainly would never have bought this game if they had been known about before the release date.