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. The grenade launcher is your new best friend. Combine that ad lib style of gameplay with the generally smart AI, and each play-through of Warhead can be completely different.

You can cloak and sneak right up to your opponents, or have them follow you only to cloak and then change direction. 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. 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. 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. This goes right down to the overwrought emotional scenes to the driving musical score full of Japanese takio drums and soaring movements. 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. With aplomb, he leaps off of cliffs into moving trucks, manhandles North Koreans, and generally sneers at danger. The opening cinematic establishes the kind of character Psycho is, and the kind of game Warhead will be. If you played that game you already know the beginning and the end, so what matters here is the journey. Warhead takes place on 'the other side of the island' that Crysis takes place on.

The difference is in perspective you now get to play as British Sergeant Michael Sykes, aka Psycho, the blowhard from 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. Warhead is a companion game to Crysis, with a story that runs concurrently to that in the first game.

Crysis warhead gameplay