14 DAY TRIAL // After playing quite a lot of the first game, I really had high expectations from the second one. But most of them were shot down by my first experience with this new shooter. First of all, it develops the story of Psycho, one of your fellow squad mates from the first game, and his chase after the North Korean General Lee. But let's just say that Nomad's adventure from the first game was the best story. The first hour of the game is filled with cliché missions classic to all shooters. But here is the first hour of those events.
15:00 The opening cinematic is gorgeous as always, with stunning beauty.
15:02 As any hardcore gamer, I started fiddling with the options of the game. A pretty useful improvement is the naming of the graphic intensity levels, Minimum, Mainstream, Gamer and Enthusiast. Although the game's recommendation was that my PC should be Mainstream, I chose Gamer as the preferred setting.
15:05 After a few cut scenes in which you are introduced with the events of the game, you're thrown into action. After a few brief tutorial encounters, you are set to go.
15:15 Day breaks and the sun unveils the stunning beauty of this island. The game looks fantastic on the Gamer setting.
15:20 A couple of new things, first of all, now you can lay out mines against tanks or other vehicles in the game. Also, for the infantry, you can set up claymores.
15:30 After a pretty intense encounter with a couple of Korean soldier platoons, I hack into their data base. All the data tells me that a downed aircraft pilot has information regarding the General. Guess who's going to save him?
15:40 Some pretty rough surroundings, but the burning trees tell me that a plane crashed around here. Although it was supposed to be Korean free, the place was full of those soldiers. In the end, I made it out alive and met up with the pilot. One of the most cliché moments of the game followed, an escort mission. But not just any old escort mission, one with vehicles. He went out ahead in a jeep and I followed in an Armored Personnel Carrier. I don't know why he didn't just stay in my vehicle.
15:50 This is it for the escort mission and I must admit, I was really sweating during the last moments. Although the APC has some very fun weapons, it took a lot of hits and was close to blowing up. But no time to rest, another classic FPS type mission followed, cleared a wide area of enemies before a chopper could take off.
16:00 I killed off the last enemy and now I need to go to a harbor where the General is hiding on his submarine.
All in all, it was a pretty decent experience. I would have said very good if it hadn't been for the cliché missions; it's time for shooters to move on and innovate, not just employ old types of missions which most of the time are extremely annoying. There were definitely a couple of times when the person I was tasked with escorting died in the last moments, and in those situations, you really wish for “all the best” to the developers. Crysis: Warhead is still a pretty good game, definitely worth playing by those interested in good looking games. A full review will be up in a few days.