The grenade launcher is your new best
Warhead is a companion game to Crysis, with a story that runs concurrently to that in the first game. An alien artifact has been discovered on a tropical island, and after the United States and North Korea race to seize it, an alien invasion erupts, flash freezing the island and putting the world at risk. The difference is in perspective; you now get to play as British Sergeant Michael Sykes, aka Psycho, the blowhard from the first game. Warhead takes place on "the other side of the island" that Crysis takes place on. If you played that game you already know the beginning and the end, so what matters here is the journey.
The opening cinematic establishes the kind of character Psycho is, and the kind of game Warhead will be. With aplomb, he leaps off of cliffs into moving trucks, manhandles North Koreans, and generally sneers at danger. Warhead is a much more cinematic game than its predecessor, partly due to third-person cutscenes (they were totally absent in Crysis), but also because it feels like Crytek openly borrowed a page or two from director Michael Bay. This goes right down to the overwrought emotional scenes to the driving musical score full of Japanese takio drums and soaring movements.
Like Crysis, the heart of Warhead is its combination of sandbox gameplay with the nanosuit, the high-tech body armor that can give you superhuman strength or speed, or cloak you from detection. Used correctly, the nanosuit lets you basically be the alien Predator from the movies, and the open nature of the levels means that you can dictate the terms of the battle. It's a blast to hurl grenades at long range at a squad of bad guys, then use speed to close the distance, strength to pick up a survivor and hurl him into his buddies, and then to finish them off with a few rounds of rifle fire. You can cloak and sneak right up to your opponents, or have them follow you only to cloak and then change direction. It's all up to you. Combine that ad lib style of gameplay with the generally smart AI, and each play-through of Warhead can be completely different.
Seriously.The emphasis is on large battles, whether you're assaulting a beach resort full of North Korean troops, barreling down a road in an APC and shooting up the villages you drive through, or defending a group of soldiers from alien assault. Crytek reduced the downtime between battles to a bare minimum; you're often no sooner out of a fight before stumbling into another one. And sometimes, you might even drag one fight into another. That happened quite a bit during the alien levels, when the aliens attacked me with numbers that forced me to engage in a running battle. I'd have one group chasing me only to stumble into another. And, yes, the alien battles in Warhead are a lot tougher than they are in Crysis. Gone are the short, linear sequences; now you're in the sandbox with the aliens, so it's a fast-paced cat-and-mouse game of shoot, move, and cover. The aliens dart around; they like to pelt you from a distance. There are also some new alien types, including a new shield alien that protects his buddies; you have to take him out first in a fight, which isn't easy.
You get some new toys; my favorite is the six-shot grenade launcher that provides some personal artillery, as well as a submachine gun and equipment like antitank mines. Still, for the most part, many of the weapons remain the same, though the lower difficulty levels now allow you to automatically pick up ammo by walking over it, which is more user friendly. And your most potent weapon remains your nanosuit; used smartly, you can survive just about any situation.
While shorter and slightly less epic than Crysis, Warhead still provides a fun ride. Crytek definitely learned some lessons and have applied them to Warhead. I also like how Crytek has a lot more fun with the frozen paradise that the island becomes once the aliens freeze it. There are definitely some memorable scenes, like when you're piloting a hovercraft and hitting jumps off of frozen waves. Or how the brittle, iced-over jungle shatters when the bullets fly in a firefight.