Warhead: The Kinder, Gentler Crysis

I wanted to play Crysis last year. I really did. When you download a demo of the best-looking game on the market and it runs on your slightly aged PC at a barely playable frame rate on the medium detail settings, though...well, that's a little humbling. It gave me an inferiority complex. So I've sadly been passing on Crysis until such time as I invest an embarrassing amount of money and build a better PC.

Less than a year after Crysis, I've added an 8800 GT but nothing else to my otherwise outdated rig, and I'm skeptical even that will make enough of a difference. But next week it may not matter, since Crytek and its new satellite studio in Budapest will be back with Crysis Warhead, the follow-up to the original game that's somewhere between an expansion pack and a full sequel. Due to engine improvements and optimizations alone, Warhead may give me and everyone else with less-than-the-best gaming PCs another, more realistic chance to experience the frigid island shooting extravaganza of the original game.

EA was making the rounds last week with a new demo version of Warhead, so I sat down and gave it a spin. The short version: it's way Crysis. You've got the same nano-suit powers at your disposal--strength, speed, armor, and cloaking--along with the same on-the-fly weapon modding and free-wheeling ability to approach various combat scenarios with a variety of different methods. The little bit of Crysis I played reminded me a lot of Halo in that way.

Warhead takes place during the same timeframe as the original Crysis: nano-suit-wearing special forces infiltrate a tropical island occupied by the North Korean army, when a race of malevolent, ice-loving aliens set off a cold bomb that flash-freezes the entire island and everything on it. This game takes place on the other side of the island and follows a parallel set of events that will occasionally interweave with the story in the first Crysis. Last time around, you played an everyman soldier named Nomad who didn't have much of a personality. You could almost have called him a silent protagonist, since he was basically a stand-in for the player's own thoughts. But in Warhead, you're playing as one of your squadmates from that first game, a trash-talking dude named Psycho who has plenty to say and sounds a lot like Jason Statham when he says it. The guy sounds more like the sort of tough-as-nails action hero you'd want to play in a game like this. I think past badasses like John Blade and Duke Nukem have proved the usefulness of the FPS one-liner.

The demo level I played started right after the island has gone into the deep freeze. I had to fight off a few nano-suit-equipped Korean soldiers to commandeer a hovercraft and chase down a cargo vehicle that was eluding capture. Various firefights with the spindly-legged aliens ensued, and I met up with the rest of the squad I'd been separated from before we moved down into a frozen village that lay before a gated tunnel through a mountain we had to enter. That's when a massive version of the aliens I'd been fighting came over the hill and forced me to run back and forth grabbing missile launchers and grenades as I tried to shoot it in the mouth (its weak point) and take it down. It kept grabbing me, drawing me right up to its face, and shaking me vigorously throughout the fight. That was a little disorienting.

I had to rejigger a few settings at the start of this demo--it was set to that insufferable inverted mouse look, not to mention easy difficulty. The EA rep on hand dubbed this "Ocampo Mode" in honor of the demo station's previous occupant.

EA and Crytek clearly felt the burn of Crysis' original extreme system requirements, so they erected a modestly equipped gaming PC--which they dubbed the Warhead PC--in the middle of the Budapest studio and then made sure every minute of the new game would run acceptably on that system. They even conducted their milestone demos for their publisher on that machine. Apparently that idea worked out so well for them, they turned around and inked a deal with a PC maker called Ultra PC to mass-produce that very same PC. It turns out, I was playing the demo on that very same configuration, and it certainly ran at an acceptable level of fidelity and performance. I'd play through the whole game on a rig like that.

Here are the full specs of the Warhead PC.

• Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 2.66 GHz 3M CPU
• NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT 512MB GPU
• G31 mATX Motherboard
• 2 GB RAM
• 250GB 7200RPM 3G SATAII Hard Drive
• 16X DVD-ROM
• Integrated 10/100/1000 Network Adapter
• Integrated Realtek High-Def Audio
• Keyboard & Mouse Included
• Ultra X-Blaster ATX Mid-Tower Black Case
• 1 Year Parts & Labor Warranty

Crytek producer Bernd Diemer held forth on a number of Crysis-related topics in a candid Q&A after my demo session. Check back later in the week for his interview, as well as some new footage of the game EA's been promising us.