Multi-Player Gameplay

Once you outfit your character you and your team can begin to capture spawn points and more importantly installations where you can create new weapons and vehicles to take the enemy down in all sorts of ways. If you capture a vehicle assembly building you can build things like the Gauss Tank, a two seater job that has a powerful but slow loading primary cannon and a less powerful but faster-to-reload gun. Experimental weapons include (wait for it) the portable nuclear launcher. Yes you can fire up your very own personal nuclear explosive device on the map and on the couple of times we actually saw it go off it's a pretty impressive site. Holding onto energy sources on the map gains power for your team and give access to more weapons. The ultimate goal in Power Struggle is to blow up the base of the other team which is guarded by turrets.

Crytek gave players in Power Struggle a lot to do, so much so that this time the amount of stuff to keep track of can be rather daunting at times. You have vehicles you can drive (including unarmed trucks and armed hovercraft) are numerous and you will need them; trying to run around the massive map we played took forever on our own. The multiplayer beta's visuals at this stage are also somewhat below what we have expected from Crysis. Textures are more bland and visual effects like weapons fire are a tad disappointing (except for the nuclear explosion effect; that never gets old) The biggest problem with the game is that it's still in beta which means slow frame rates and laggy gameplay. While the game still has a little over two months to ship we hope that's enough time for Crytek to polish up the visuals and optimise the net code to avoid what happened to Far Cry's multiplayer.

Hopefully more versions of Crytek's Power Struggle multiplayer mode will address our major concerns about this part of the game but there's no doubt that this gameplay design is a lot more detailed than what we are used to seeing in a first persons shooter game. We hope to have more info and hands-on time with the game before Crysis ships to stores in mid-November.