Played the first mission. It plays similarly to Crysis, but it seems a lot less open ended. I'm not sure how I feel about this direction yet. I'm still having fun, of course. I enjoyed playing the original game using cloaking and silent weapons but Warhead is clearly designed for "explosive action" and ends up feeling almost Call of Duty-ish (without the rails). I do wish they had elected to stick with first person cutscenes of the original as that gave the game a unique feel. The 3rd person scenes in Warhead look somewhat akward in comparison.
I'm disappointed in the visuals, though. There's just something about the look of the game that really feels off. It looks GOOD, but not as impressive as the original (which I was just playing again this weekend). It runs a bit smoother, though, I'll give them that. I'm using Enthusiast settings in DX9 mode with edge AA upped to 2 and motion blur set to "5" (for object blur). Unfortunately, the object motion blur still glitches out a bit in DX9 mode. I suppose I'll try DX10 later, but I fear it will still hurt performance enough to prevent me from wanting to use it. Of course, I'm using 1360x768 resolution as that is the native resolution of my plasma. It makes me wonder if the latest nVidia cards could deliver this game at 60 fps while using such a resolution. I mean, my performance at that resolution on an 8800GT rarely drops below 30 fps and is generally quite a bit higher. It's very smooth. 1080p looks fantastic on this display as it has to downscale the resolution. That results in a perfectly anti-aliased image without using anti-aliasing (Crysis looks like those bullshots that were floating around). It's quite lovely (and how I play most PC games) and I think it looks smoother than a native 1080p panel (though obviously some detail is lost). 1080p is pretty sluggish at maximum settings, though (quite playable on "high", but the game loses some of its visual appeal). I guess I'll stick with 1360x768 for now as it looks razor sharp and runs beautifully.
I've tried editing various settings as I did in Crysis, but they've changed the way some of the values work and settings I used in the original cause some serious visual problems.
