In our minds there are two major faults in Crysis Warhead's single-player experience. The first is that it's very short; we blew though it on Normal setting in less than six hours. While we know that the game was designed to be a stand alone expansion rather than give the experience of a full game but an extra hour or two might have helped flesh out the campaign a bit more.

The second fault is the game's final battle. Again we aren't going to reveal any specifics but let's just say that it's way too easy to beat when you have the right equipment in hand. It's a definite letdown to a game that before the final sequence was chock full of fun and challenging battles; from a beach-side resort fire fight with the North Koreans to a frantic stand-off against the aliens with some AI buddies to a sometimes scary underground sequence.
Crytek is known for making fun single-player experiences with the original Far Cry, Crysis and now Crysis Warhead. Their track record for multiplayer isn't as good, however. Crytek has made some definite improvements in this area with Crysis Warhead's multiplayer component, Crysis Wars. Indeed it's basically a separate game contained on a second disk apart from the single player campaign. While the very complex (perhaps too complex) Power Struggle mode from the original Crysis is back for Crysis Wars, we figure most players will gravitate to the new Team Instant Action mode which is just another name for the always fun Team Deathmatch experience.

The new maps included in Crysis Wars are certainly varied (several older maps held over from the original Crysis are present as well) and we think people should enjoy being able to use the nano-suit's special abilities to cloak themselves, jump higher, run faster and more in the Team Deathmatch mode. There is also a fun vehicle-only level added and quite frankly we would have appreciate one or two more of these set-ups (we are sure third party mod makers will be eager to make some). There are none of the persistent stats or leveling up in experience that the Battlefield series and Call of Duty 4 have made popular but fans of fun and simple multiplayer FPS experience should enjoy the Team Instant Action mode here. One thing we would have liked is a way for players of the first game to play multiplayer with anyone playing on a Crysis Wars server but that's not an option.
And what about the graphics, you might be asking? Well, Crytek's Cryengine 2 is still impressive a year after its debut in the first Crysis game. Water effects, explosions, alien attack visual, character modeling and animation ...all of this and more makes Crysis Warhead the likely choice for the sexiest looking FPS of 2008. There are also some impressive cut-scenes in the single player campaign that were handled in the title's engine that not only look great but really give the game more of an emotional hook. There's one sequence near the end that actually gave us some chills. Sound effects are first rate and the musical score has an appropriate fast action movie style pace.

We played Crysis Warhead on the same PC we used to play the original Crysis (with 2 Gigs of RAM, an Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor and an Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra in SLI). In 2007 Crysis had trouble keeping up a decent frame rate on high settings and running on DirectX10 with this PC rig but in 2008 Crysis Warhead had no trouble at all in this area. People scared of picking this title up and afraid they won't be able to run it shouldn't worry as much as they might have one year ago.

With the price of just $29.99, Crysis Warhead gives a lot for the money. The single-player campaign, while brief, is mostly a fun thrill ride akin to the best Michael Bay-directed action film. The Crysis Wars multiplayer component is notable mostly for adding some fun maps and a more manageable team deathmatch style mode. Finally, you just won't find a FPS game that looks better than Crysis Warhead. All of these factors combine to make Crytek's latest game an easy recommendation for any first person shooter fan.