For all the traffic Crysis Warhead has inadvertently given me, I might as well share my final thoughts about the game itself now that I’ve bought and completed it.

First off: I was quite a fan of the original Crysis. It wasn’t a perfectly polished game by any means, and like most people I feel the team severely dropped the ball during the last third or so, when it turned into a surprisingly conventional tunnel shooter with aliens. But until that point, Crysis delivered some of the most open, player-driven, potentially deep gameplay I’ve ever seen in a straight-up shooter. To my mind, cries of “tech demo!” ring as falsely to me now as they did a year ago.

I say “potentially deep” because if you don’t really invest yourself into the freedom of the game’s open environments and the focus added by the game’s ability-boosting nanosuit and weapon customization, I can see where Crysis could come off as more conventional. It is also a very rare case where I consider playing on a higher difficulty level to go beyond being a personal player choice and actually becoming a crucial part of experiencing the game design in a fulfilling way. Recognizing your character’s vulnerabilities and being forced to consider your tactics carefully actually coax out depth in the mechanics—and, paradoxically, highlight your character’s suit-enhanced strengths—to a higher degree than is typical.

With that preface out of the way, it appears that Crytek decided to play it a little safer with Warhead. It is a much less “pure” expression of the design ethic demonstrated in Crysis before that game’s tonal shift. Gone—or, more accurately, significantly reduced—are the hours upon hours of pure tropical openness, in which you essentially began at Point A, then were given a Point B and little else. Those experiences still occur, but they are less frequent, and generally less sprawling. Here, they are less of the main experience and more like the occasional stretches of relaxing, open-road highway freedom between rest stops—if your rest stops consist of blowing a whole lot of shit up. (more…)