Crysis Heads to War In September

So we've got a release date for Crysis Warhead, the... yep, I'm gonna say it. You can't stop me from saying it... expandalone for last year's system-eating FPS. It's September 16th - in America. In Europe, it's September 12th.

Which is a) great news for we oft-second-fiddle Eurotrash and b) steeeeeeeyoooooooooopid - or at least it is so long as you subscribe to the theory that staggered release dates can increase piracy. It'll be an interesting situation to watch, at any rate.

Warhead, if you didn't know, chronicles the exploits of cockerneeee geeza Psycho (Jason Statham with worse teeth, essentially) while Nomad, the characterless player character from Crysis, is off running into annoying aliens and awful helicopter levels in the first game. There have been hints it'll be a lot more immediate than Crysis was - which probably means more direct action and less hiding in the bushes waiting for your suit to recharge. Plus more explosions. It's also supposed to run a little more smoothly, which would be nice. I managed a few minutes of juddery Crysis at its higher settings for curiosity value, but soon had to resort to mostly Medium settings (on an 8800 GTS), which felt horribly disappointing despite my attempts not to a be a graphics junkie. Admittedly I haven't revisited it since the patch, which I believe improved performance a little.

Also included is Crysis Wars, a new multiplayer component. I'm going to quite the press release here as I won't really have a good sense of this until I see it:

Crysis Wars features three multiplayer modes, including TeamInstantAction, a new match type that mixes fast-paced action in a team-based environment, in addition to the insanely frenetic gameplay style of InstantAction and the hardcore team-based PowerStruggle, both of which return from Crysis. The game will include 21 maps, six new maps for TeamInstantAction and InstantAction, and one for PowerStruggle and Crytek will also have a support team dedicated to meeting the needs of the Crysis Wars community.

So there you go. Jim really dug Crysis but I have to say I didn't particularly get on with it, bar milking the demo for all it was worth. While I'm not expecting great changes from Warhead, I'm hoping this time I'll feel more like SuperGuy and not just ABitBetterThanSomeKoreansoldiersGuy.

Oh, there will be aliens in it, which may cause some of you to howl in despair, but I'm sure lessons will have been learned this time around.

More info on the official site.