Gang warfare

The sight attachment for weapons is a must-have.

Crysis will sport just two multiplayer modes: instant action, aka deathmatch, and Power Struggle, aka Capture the Flag(s). We all tried the latter first, splitting the group of journos into two (very unbalanced, it turned out) teams. The basic idea is this: in the map, each team has their own base, automatically protected by machine gun turrets. Dotted across the playing area are crashed alien-thingies which serve as power sources. Once one has captured these, you'll have enough energy to drive the factories (once you've capture them too, of course).

These plants can churn out various extra powerful weapons and vehicles, such as tanks, hovercraft and jets. Once geared up, you can tackle the enemy base, taking down the turrets first before kicking them in the goolies, metaphorically speaking. Our single, one-sided match was never going to be enough to tell whether gamers will like this or not, but I guess that's the role of the current multiplayer beta. To me, it felt... okay. Nothing special but nothing poor either (but there again, I was on the losing side!)

Power Struggle Trailer

The Instant Action round was a very chaotic affair; the map was an American aircraft carrier which felt claustrophobic due the position of the spawn points. Many dumped you right next to a typical battle region and since, each time you restart, you only have a pistol, weaker players (such as myself) all too often experienced run, shoot, die, spawn, shoot, die, spawn, die, spawn, die and so on. Crytek were adamant that the nano-suit functions were really key to surviving such matches but I found their advice a bit pointless. First of all, losing any shield energy just makes you a sitting duck to enemy fire (unlike the single player mode, it's very easy to take someone down in multiplayer mode) and secondly, the confined area means that even if you do pull a successful nano-move off, within seconds repsawned nutters will be blasting your skull cap off.

Kaboom! Yes, there are plenty of high explosive barrels everywhere.

I also found the weapon pick-up system to be quite annoying; weapon racks are often placed near spawn points so getting to them is easy enough but in the heat of battle, I frequently picked up ammo boxes, rather than the actual guns, with the first grab. Those precious few seconds of delay were more than enough to be....crack! Spawn. Die. You can grab weapons off the floor that have been dropped by fallen combatants but they're typically nearly empty (forcing a reload upon picking them up, leading to crackspawndie again) and one has to stand over them, look down and press the appropriate key. This works fine for the slower Power Struggle mode but it was a right royal pain in the butt in Instant Action.

I suspect that the multiplayer mode will be rescued by the sandbox editor, which will be shipped (avec le manual) with the full version of the game. This piece of software is the exact same tool used by the developers to create their own levels and given enough time (several weeks to several months), the mod community are certain to punting out better multiplayer maps and modes.

Short version? Mad, bonkers, annoying, frustrating.