Crysis is legendary, seared into the mind of a PC generation - but one chapter of the saga is at best neglected, at worst all but forgotten. Crysis Warhead is a PC exclusive standalone, released just under a year after the original, unclouded by the change of ambition and setting brought about by the multi-platform orientated Crysis 2. With Crysis Remastered looming on the horizon, we wanted to look back at the game, to get a handle on its successes and failures and to answer the question: why is Crysis Warhead so often overlooked?
Warhead is both a continuation and an expansion for the original release but also a response to its many criticisms. Firstly, in terms of design, it attempts to address core criticisms to the gameplay of Crysis itself. While I may personally look back at the original game in its entirety rather fondly, a number of players and reviewers disliked the last third of the game, where you engage the alien threat in a more linear fashion. The freeform 'wide linear' gameplay Crysis was feted for was all but forgotten, while the aliens themselves were perhaps rather one-note.
Then there were the technical challenges in running the game that became the series' hallmark. Beyond gameplay critiques, Crysis' lofty system requirements and ultra-high end graphics didn't go down well with users and reviewers of the time, to the point where even one of the best cards of the era - the GeForce 8800 GT - could struggle. Indeed, even turning up graphics to very high didn't deliver a playable experience on any but the most powerful 8800 GTX or SLI set-ups back in 2007. Even then, a number of levels strained the CPU due to Crysis being a very single-threaded game - even with overclocks, CPUs like the Q6600 would struggle to do much on the highest settings in levels like Ascension. Indeed, as we've demonstrated in the past, even modern PCs with top-tier processors have a hard time delivering consistent performance.