Gaming: Crysis WarHEAD | Frontlines Fuel of War

Crysis WARHEAD

As in last year's game, expect to encounter dense jungle environments, barren ice fields, Korean soldiers and plenty of flying aliens. There's no denying that this is more of the same, except here it's a more tightly woven experience with a little less freedom to explore.

With a top-end PC (although Warhead has supposedly benefited from an improved game engine you'll still need a fairly beefy system). But rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine.

Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.

Crysis Warhead has good looks. As mentioned before, the game looks better than Crysis, and it runs better too. Our test machine that struggled a bit to run the original at high settings ran Warhead smoothly with the same settings. Yet as much as you may have heard about Crysis' technical prowess, you'll still be impressed when you feast your eyes on the swaying vegetation, surging water, and expressive animations. Outstanding graphics. Couldn't say more here.

Crysis Warhead is new in our benchmark suite -- Our image quality settings. We opt the gamers mode. However, we select DirectX 10 mode as well to allow way more heft shader code which will take a hefty toll on the GPU, yet also frame buffer utilization.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti aliasing 2xMSAA
• Ingame Quality mode Gamer

This setting equals "High" quality mode in the old Crysis. We up the ante a little more though, and apply 2 levels of anti-aliasing. Though we really wanted to push 4x AA here, we notice that current day graphics cards run out of frame buffer and you'll notice the HDD activity going up a a lot.

That would effect the frame rate dramatically disallowing an objective measurement of our time demo. So 2xAA in combo with the gamers quality mode is what we test with.

Frontlines: Fuel of War

This is a game that's got a couple of big ambitions. The first is to provide a large-scale multiplayer experience along the lines of Battlefield: Modern Combat. That means in addition to running around on foot, you can jump in and control a variety of vehicles on the battlefield. However, it also wants to add what Battlefield sorely lacks, which is a compelling single-player experience. Perhaps the most impressive level is a completely war-torn cityscape that has gutted skyscrapers everywhere. Even more startling is that you can actually get into some of these towering husks, which gives you an incredibly high perch. While that might seem a bit unfair, keep in mind that there are many ways for other players to get at you, such as the remote-controlled air drones that can fly up and shred you with guns or rockets.

Frontlines: Fuel of War is a great title we recently added to our benchmark suite. We probably won't be using Frontlines much longer as that framerate bottleneck is starting to get a big hinder. But 53 FPS at 2560x1600 obviously is smokin' hot.