So. Warhead hit not so long ago. I don't know the exact date, because frankly, I was paying no attention after the sinking ship that was Crysis.

Talking about Warhead, for me, isn't going to work unless I briefly cover the issues I had with the original game.

It was poorly written, it made next to no sense. The words 'Stunning' and 'Epic' appeared on the box art - Two words certain to make me shun the game. It was fantastically pretty, no doubt, but it ran (Still does, as far as I know) like a dog on pretty much everything but computers made from parts from Space cooled by liquid nitrogen, and clocked to the heavens. The developers, Crytek, didn't help my tolerance of them when they announced that the poor sales of the game wasn't down to the fact that the game was awful, but because of Piracy. It was an awful move by them, and has stuck them on my blacklist for a good while.

Anyway. Onto Warhead.

First off, it seems to be a bit buggy. In my experience, anything that became active in the background, say a Messaging window, pulled the game out of full screen, either into a window, or just cutting ~200 pixels off the top and bottom. Both were very annoying. However, once the messengers were set to the appropriate settings, and the fullscreen option restored, I had no problems. I played it at 1920x1200, 'Enthusiast' settings, with 4x AA, (Hardware: Phenom X4 9950 BE, 2x4870's, 8gb RAM. Software: Vista x64, Firefox running Napalm Chat, Skype, MSN, Thunderbird were the main background apps). I was shocked, actually shocked, to find that this ran smoothly. It took a massive hit at 8x AA (Which is the next option, and the last option in the list) and ran ~10fps, which was useless. The difference between 4x and 8x is negligable, though, for the FPS improvement. Whatever optimisations the Crytek team put this game through should have been applied to Crysis the first time around - It would have saved a hell of a lot of problems. The explosions and water are still phenomenally pretty, as soon as I can get some decent screen shots I'll upload them.

The story was still phenomenally bad, and the voice acting no better. 'Psycho' sounds like Ross Kemp with a sore throat, and everyone else sounds like an American with some sound effects. Even the Koreans, which was odd. Maybe they just had the voice cast do some really pathetic Korean accents rather than pay some Koreans.. Nevermind. It was poor quality, however you look at it. The music, though, wasn't bad. I found the menu music listenable - The only other Menu music that I've had that with has been Doom III - which made a nice change.

There is no replayability in the Story for me, and I haven't even completed it yet. I will be testing the online and LAN options out when I get the chance, but until then, I don't see me playing it more than once or twice a week.

It's an average game with some really nice visuals - Nothing that can't be bettered though. Buy it if you want to stress-test your PC and get more interaction out of it than Super-Pi or Futuremark 3D. Otherwise? You're not missing a fat lot.