Crysis Multi-Player

Developer Crytek's first game, the 2004 released first person shooter Far Cry, was without a doubt an incredible gameplay experience....in single player. The graphics, the huge outdoor levels and the solid enemy AI made Far Cry one of the best action games released in recent years....in single player. However Far Cry's multiplayer, while fully featured and ambitious, was filled with bugs and lags. As a result the game wasn't a crowd favorite
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For their next game, the sci-fi first person shooter Crysis, it's already looking like the single player game will also be an entertaining and visually arresting experience. We've seen and played the single player portion of Crysis a number of times at press events held by the game's publisher Electronic Arts as well as CES, E3 and GDC. However, we have never actually played the game on our home computer and have never experienced the multiplayer portion of Crysis. That is until EA allowed FiringSquad to check out the currently running closed multiplayer test of Crysis. While they have allowed us to write about the experience we have not yet been allowed to take screenshots, videos or do benchmark testing on the test (the screen shots included in this article were provided by EA).

Crytek's new approach to FPS multiplayer has been labeled by them as Power Struggle, a team based game play mode that combined elements of Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2142's Titan mode and Unreal Tournament's Assault mode. The multiplayer beta test is just one map at the moment, but its easily one of the biggest multiplayer maps ever made for a first person shooter. It takes place on a tropical island setting where the US and North Korean forces are fighting it out for control of both the island and the alien technology that they can access.

The multiplayer beta starts you out with a tutorial that gets you up to speed. Veterans of first person shooter games may try to bypass it but that would be a mistake; Power Struggle has so much going on around it (maybe a bit too much) that it can be quite confusing if you just start out. Basically you begin by loading out your character with weapons, equipment and other items. While you can customise your load out if you wish there are some pre-loaded characters that you can try out with different styles of gameplay (Assault, Scientist, Driver, etc). For once even if you don't have any weapons you are not completely defenseless. The game allows you to fire up the Nanosuit from Crysis's single player game to handle things like super speed, strengh, cloaking yourself and more.