EA Crysis: Warhead review

In the original Crysis, your character, Nomad, occasionally teamed up with a lovable Cockney named Sergeant Sykes, or Psycho to his friends.

While Nomad battled the alien menace on one side of the island, Psycho was fighting the war somewhere else. Crysis: Warhead fills you in on those missing hours.

Warhead is a standalone expansion pack, so you don't need the original Crysis to play it. It's around half the price of a normal PC game, although it's also half the length. Most people should be able to finish it in five hours, but it's an entertaining five hours. Warhead slips from one thrilling set-piece to another, and the gaps are filled with plenty of varied action.

As in Crysis, your character wears a nanosuit with four main modes: strength, speed, armour and stealth. Strength lets you jump higher and throw grenades further, speed lets you run like a gazelle, armour protects you from gunfire and stealth makes you all but invisible. The different modes give you two main ways of approaching a situation: you can run in with all guns blazing or sneak about planting mines. The game doesn't reward any particular style, but you'll need to adapt to situations to survive. Couple this with the ability to modify the weapons you carry and you have the ingredients for a varied and intense first-person shooter.

Crysis: Warhead's graphics are just as beautiful as those of the original, and you'll need a fast PC to play it. A current mid-range graphics card such as ATI's Radeon HD 4850 will suffice for high detail levels, but you'll need a fast dual-core processor, too - especially if you're running Vista. We had no problems with a Core 2 Duo E6600, but the game struggled on an AMD Athlon X2 4200+.

Crysis: Warhead isn't radically different to its predecessor, but it's a worthy expansion to a superb game and well worth £15.

Author: Chris Finnamore