Crysis Warhead

[liambl]

As I had some cash left over from my 3 week educational holiday to France (which I'm still jet-lagged over), I picked up a copy of Crysis Warhead for 29 Euros because it has yet to be released in Australasia and will probably cost $89.99. My first impression is that the installer is taken straight from the Windows XP installation procedure, wonder what Microsoft thinks. Installation took a whole 15 minutes, and when it completed it came to the activation stage. I knew this because I was confronted with a pleasing "crysis_activation.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close" dialog. Without activation the game is unplayable. I tried 3 times with the same result. I was pretty pissed by this time and needed to relax with some GH3 and halfway through a song my screen goes black and I get the EA logo. The game actually started. I created a new game and it began to load the first mission. That took a whole 10 minutes, and there were long pauses where there was no HDD activity. When the progress came to 100% and I pressed the any key, I was presented with a black screen accompanied by HDD thrashing for a good minute. When the actual play screen appeared, the textures were all burry and undetailed for a few seconds, and over that time they slowly loaded to their full quality, WTH? Next problem was the stutterng and pauses, really bad. This was caused by insufficient RAM I found, as the game was thrashing the hard disk each time there was a stutter or pause, and closing the game took an achingly long time and left the PC very slow. I have run a PF2008 defrag and its better but no where near gone. I thought Warhead was supposed to be optimised over Crysis, yet it runs far more poorly. I'm torn in between of waiting for an update which may fix the problem or go and get a Corsair 2x2GB kit which should sort it out, yet all I can find ilocally is a Dominator PC-6400 kit for $120.

Rant over.

[Hi Ho]

I bought Warhead on Steam and there was no activation. It took a bit of time to download 12 GB but it has run flawlessly. Performance on my machine has been much improved over the original game and the multiplayer is far better.

[liambl]

The activation is done in the background and you only know about it if it errors out like it did for me. It states clearly on the box (attached). If you can't read French, it says: Internet connection required in order to activate the product.

I think you get better performance because of your 4GB of RAM, 2 GB used to cut it but not anymore.

[Hi Ho]

I only recently upgraded the RAM and I can only use about 3 GB because I only have 32bit Windows but performance of the original game increased substantially after adding the RAM. I think a RAM upgrade is your best bet.

It took some to install for me to and I also had to activate but the game runs flawlessly.

[David M]

Crysis Warhead ran flawlessly for me. Its a great game! I did notice that the graphics are better than regular Crysis. Perhaps they streamlined the code so the graphics cards are not so overworked? I'm looking forward to playing through it a second time but at the hard level.

[liambl]

I find it more demanding on the RAM than the original Crysis. Far Cry 2 on the other hand is very light on the hardware yet still looks the same or better than Crysis. Only problem is the physics, or lack thereof.