Crysis Warhead Rip For PC

June 25, 2008 - Consider the warhead, an object that is both explosive and incendiary. A warhead is about destruction, pure and simple. Recognizing that is one of the key things to understandingCrysis Warhead, a stand-alone follow-up to last year's acclaimed first-person shooter Crysis. Keep in mind that this isn't a direct continuation of Crysis; it's not one of the trilogy hinted at by Crytek's CEO Cevat Yerli. Instead, Warhead is an offshoot story that focuses on one of Crysis' supporting characters. And since that character's nickname happens to be Psycho, you could rightfully expect some crazy things to happen.

In many ways Warhead is a different game than Crysis. The easiest way to think of Warhead is that it is Crysis with the action ramped up to 11. This promises to be a much more muscular shooter, with no shortage of huge firefights and explosions. In fact, the original Crysis may come off as being a much more cerebral experience in comparison. That game was about cat-and-mouse in the jungle, whereas Warhead is going to be about blowing that jungle up.

Warhead is set during the timeline of its predecessor. You play as Sergeant Michael Sykes, aka Psycho, the British-accented commando who goes off on a mission midway through Crysis only to reappear at the end, standing atop the flight deck of the aircraft carrier with a captured alien war machine. What happened to Psycho and how he comes home with such an oversized trophy is going to be the story of Warhead in a campaign that the developers say will be about the length of Crysis'. And before you can ask, since this is a one-off from the core franchise, the designers say that Warhead will pack a fitting finale.

While Crysis has sold more than a million copies and garnered many awards and accolades, Yerli said that there's was also plenty of room for improvement, and that Warhead will address quite a number of issues. "Some people had some concerns about the ending of the game and the linearity of some sections, or could it be a bit more scripted with the environment? We tried to make with Warhead something that is a bit more accessible and mainstream in that regards."

The fact that Warhead is built around Sykes also helps with telling a better story. In Crysis you played the faceless protagonist, and everything that happened in the game occurred from a first-person perspective. In Warhead, the designers can shift to more standard third-person cutscenes that have Sykes in them. Plus, it also helps that Sykes is a very colorful character. "He's kind of a rough diamond, an unpolished diamond," noted senior game designer Bernd Diemer. "He's the guy who likes to blow up stuff, he's the guy who likes to the cut to the point very, very fast. He doesn't have time for chit-chat or doubts."

One of the new vehicles in action, and it's blowing up stuff.

"You tell him to go over there and take out that pillbox, he goes at it with a butter knife or C4 or whatever he has. That's kind of his characteristic, and that's where the name Warhead comes from. That's him, basically. He's explosive, he's aggressive, and we wanted the game to portray that in interesting ways."

The designers gave us a view of one of early levels in the game, Ambush. Right off the bat it's intense. VTOL transports are coming in to drop off Marines, the radio is full of chatter, and jet fighters are dropping bombs left and right. Think of the opening of the Crysis level Assault, but with that amount of energy sustained throughout. It's all very loud and frantic, but this isn't an attempt to make a linear-game like Call of Duty. Warhead still embraces the series' philosophy of the nanosuit, the high-tech power suit that lets you alter your strategy and tactics on the fly. The battlefields are still large and open, and this gives you an incredible number of options when in a fight. You can stealth and hide to restore your health or ambush an opponent. Use strength to leap atop buildings and hit your enemy from above. Or you can use speed to zip from one location to another. "The core gameplay is still Veni, Vidi, Vici," Yerli said, referring to the Latin term "I came, I saw, I conquered."