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Crysis: Warhead first impressions
Yeah yeah, I know I said I wasn't gonna buy it, but the 29$ price tag made me change my mind, so I cracked and bought a copy today. Played for the last 3 hours or so - granted about 30 minutes of that was toying with graphics settings to get the best performance.
Other than the new campaign, the game doesn't seem to offer much in terms of new content. There are a couple of new vehicles - one of them somesort of heavy APC. I had a lot of fun with that one. The devs seem to have cought on that jumping into a badass tank only to have it destroyed in a matter of seconds was not fun, so this particular vehicle section involved taking lots of hits and blowing tons of shit up, which always makes me happy. The other new vehicle I've seen so far was a shitty hovercraft. It's incredibly unresponsive, goes flying at the slightest provocation, constantly gets stuck under random obstacles (requiring you to load a quicksave), and if that wasn't enough, the camera is constantly shaking in a chaotic, unpredictable fashion, making it next to impossible to see where the fuck you're going with it. Truly this was the worst vehicle section I've ever had the displeasure of going through. Thankfully it didn't last too long.
On top of that you get some new weapons that you'll never use because using a machine-pistol designed for close range in a wide open outdoor area is a dumb idea. When dual-wielded, the only way to fire the offhand pistol is to use right mouse, despite having rebound the fire2 key to something else. This sort of thing makes me wonder if this game was even tested before release. Speaking of bugs, there were also a number of minor glitches (weird animations, frozen corpses, etc), and I also experienced a random crash (something I never experienced running crysis before).
Another thing that greatly annoyed me was how the first person POV short-and-sweet cutscenes of crysis have been replaced by long, bad, cheesy in-game 3rd person cutscenes - which comepletely kills the immersion that made the original so fun.
It's not all bad though. Once you get past all the quirks, the gameplay is a lot of fun. It's definately more fast-paced and action-oriented than Crysis. The graphics look stunning as always, and the overall atmosphere is fantastic. On top of that, I've noticed a significant increase in explosive barrels and fuel tanks, which immediately gave me a massive hard on.
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When bread becomes toast, it can never go back to being bread again.
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