Crysis Warhead

I took a chance and decided to try Crysis Warhead. I didn't think it would really be any better than Crysis but they seem to have tuned the engine better this time, in that it doesn't crash as often and doesn't have weird textural problems. Or then it's because I'm now running Vista and DX10 instead of XP, otherwise the system is the same.

The guns sound good, there are lots of interesting choices and just enough room on your character to carry a few (not too few, not too many) while making it possible to choose the ones you like best but also keeping it limited enough to make you take the best ones for the current situation. The suit enhancements are great and all can be used to create your own way of playing, run through fast, jump to high places, go invisible.. And by the way the sounds muting down a bit when going into invisible mode is a very nice touch.

The levels are nice and cut-scenes are done very well this time round. Last time it paled in comparison to Call of Duty 4. This time the action and tasks you are set out to do are a bit more interesting but still mostly generic it they don't really put the levels to good use. There's still the freedom to choose which direction you want to approach from but in a game that people generally only play through once what's the point? Maybe add some better side missions, like hacking into computers or sniping an important sergeant, that you get great rewards from like UI modifications that give you a different color and layout or add a radar that shows hidden areas or something. The lead character's British tough guy accent annoyed me. The enemies see you from way too far and I don't think occlusion is handled very well. In Unreal Engine 3 even a leaf from a tree in front of your view will cause the background to be occluded and thus making the whole thing faster, whilst in Crysis Warhead you can experience insane framerate drops even inside small huts that have nothing but a few walls and a chair.

I had some fun in the first few forest sections with 1280x960 resolution (usually all games run at 1600x1200 fine on my top of the line Geforce 8 series, Core 2 system with 4gb RAM), and with graphics set to "Gamer". Try to put these in order by the way: Gamer, Minimum, Enthusiast and Mainstream. That's how Crysis Warhead lists the graphical settings for Low, Medium, High and Very High in whatever odd order it was. Quite silly and not really needed. It doesn't simplify it for anyone and neither does it make it "fun".

Anyway, the game was running OK until the first snow mission. Then everything slowed down to around 5 fps. Turns out it was the effect above the mountain basically and turning down the shader quality helped a bit because of the ultra complex shaders used in the scene. The problem is that stupid mountain shows all through the snow areas and thus you get an insane drop of framerate for quite a few levels. Sure it looks nice but Crysis Warhead is once again nothing more than a complete and utter mess regarding performance optimization. At one moment your system runs the game fine and the next you suffer lag like no other. If you want a game to feel consistent then you need to optimize your levels and make sure it runs the same way throughout the experience. I don't want to go and tweak every little graphic setting separately for each section of the game.

Crysis Warhead looks good but is optimized like shit. Seems like a fairly fun game too, just not worth getting until computers have advanced a year or two. Or if you want another take on benchmarking to complement your Futuremark Vantage software.

It gets even more ridiculous when during an extremely visually complex area you have to stay and defend against a swarm of monsters coming at you with 5 fps instead of running through with Maximum Speed on like I tend to do and just hope for the best. Sure you can tweak your graphics down again but Crysis is all about looking good (in outside tropical areas, because inside it looks generic, boring and simple) and with your graphics down it looks like Duke Nukem 3D. With gameplay that's not even close to Duke Nukem 3D why not just download the old classic on XBOX Live Arcade and play that instead.