War(head), what's it good for?
There are those who said that Crysis was just a glorified tech demo that doesn't do anything new for shooters. Those people, in my opinion, are wrong. If they were to say the same thing about Warhead, the stand-alone expansion to Crysis, however, I wouldn't really fault them for saying so.
In the original Crysis, the emphasis was on emergent gameplay, which basically means you can approach a given situation however you see fit, within the game's ruleset. The environments were massive and expansive, with many different paths to your objectives. Until the aliens arrived, that is, and the game became a much more linear shooter. Most people, myself included, vastly preferred the first two thirds of the game, which focused on the open-ended gameplay. Crysis Warhead, however, chooses to focus on the more linear aspects of the original, to its detriment. Only the first two levels in the game let you just explore and pick your own path, and even then, your options are far more limited than in most of the original game's maps. Instead, Warhead often funnels you down a very narrow path, and basically becomes a lot more like a Halo game in structure.
Technically, the game has also been scaled down from the original. Sure, it's less demanding, but the tradeoff is that textures sometimes look incredibly blurry even from relatively close, and you can actually see the detail pop in as you approach them. The original had none of this. It also had none of the crashes back to my desktop that I experienced twice in Warhead, or the weird physics bugs that caused me to suddenly die when walking into a stationary object or, bizarrely, teleported me on top of a building whilst backpedalling into it.
On the bright side, Warhead contains several vehicle sections that are a lot of fun, as you get to blow up a lot of stuff in high tempo and the action remains plentiful. They almost make up for the lack of freedom in the game's level design.
By removing the element that made the original Crysis so unique and appealing, Crytek has simply made a competent, albeit still incredibly pretty, shooter. At its best, it brings to mind the better parts of Halo 3, but therein also lies the problem: It feels derivative and uninspired, even if the action is satisfying, and that ultimately dilutes what made Crysis so special.
