Warhead is significantly cheaper than the original Crysis, and that shows in the length of the single-player campaign, which can be finished in about 5 hours on a decent difficulty level. During the campaign however, the parts where you just relaxed and admired the view have been significantly reduced. Most of the levels have been “channeled” on a narrower path, with less choices to tackle an objective, more scripted events, and a huge number of enemies, vehicles and explosions per square inch. If you stop moving, you die.

If there isn’t someone shooting at you at any given time, you must be doing something wrong. So, you’re constantly pushed towards the level conclusion by the endless hordes of aliens or Koreans, or by the linear vehicle levels, thus lowering the time spent on each individual level.

The game mechanics however remain pretty much unchanged. The nanosuit has the same “powers” like before, and with a few notable exceptions the arsenal at your disposal remains the same. There are additions though, like the EMP grenades (extremely useful against Koreans in nanosuits), C4 charges, grenade launchers, anti-personal mines and such.

A new concept in regards of how you fight is introduced: you’re not alone, most of the time. Your team cannot be controlled directly, and they’re not extremely useful either, so you just as well ignore them, as they can’t die, or get left behind. Unless it’s a scripted event of sorts. Still, the radio chatter is ok, and their AI isn’t completely brain dead.

So, the single-player part is shorter, more intense, with a lot of very, very pretty cut scenes. It does end though (sooner, rather than later), so the multiplayer component is quite useful at this point. It’s called Crysis Wars, and comes as a standalone package from the single-player. It has a different executable, a different installer, and can be played without having to bother with the main campaign.

It features 7 new maps (for a total of 21), and the newly added Team Instant Action mode, alongside the “classic” Power Struggle. As usual, without an organized team, the Power Struggle mode is completely chaotic; if, however there is a vague amount of team work involved, the fun factor goes way up.

The nanosuit powers have been adjusted for the multiplayer this time around. For example, you can actually use the invisibility mode, as its energy runs out at a much lower pace this time, generating quite a number of tactical opportunities for the stealthy player.

Crysis Wars is fun, and although it didn’t keep me glued to the monitor like the multiplayer component in Call of Duty 4 did, I do appreciate its merits. It’s cool that we finally get team deathmatch, a more balanced experience and better performance, compared to the original. Crysis Wars runs much better than the single-player mode at the same graphical settings, with no immediately noticeable graphical degradation.

That’s not to say that the single-player doesn’t run better either. Texture streaming has been introduced, which increases the performance, but generates texture pop-in on occasion, like in the Unreal engine games, and the graphical options have been tweak to reflect what type of computer they will run on.