Crysis Multiplayer Beta Impressions

What not to wear in a warzone

It didn’t take me too long to get used to controls of Crysis. In fact, the whole thing is pretty rudimentary and easy to grasp. You’ve got the usual buttons for shooting, moving, interacting and the like, plus a few extras for some suit and vehicle specific controls.

The suit is, in my opinion, a massively and woefully neglected part of the game’s advertising campaign. It seems that everywhere I go on the Internet I end up seeing a picture of Crysis, nearly all of which involve the nano-muscle suit in some way. It’s my general impression though that most people don’t associate this suit with the gameplay anyway – some not even realising that the gentleman wearing the suit is actually the main character.

The suit is actually a very important part of the game and using it correctly is critical to playing and winning a team game like Power Struggle. The suit can be used to give players a series of power-ups and advantages, all of which can be switched through by pressing and holding the middle mouse button down and then selecting the suit mode you want to use from the radial menu that appears on-screen.


The suit’s modes include an armour mode – which is the default setting and which doesn’t consume any power, a stealth mode which renders the player nigh-invisible but eats through power like Tim eats through graphics cards, a weapon mode which lets you customise your weapons, a speed mode for chasing trucks and a strength mode.

In our last preview, it was the strength mode which drew the most critiscism. The general feeling was that the game was made a little dull and repetitive as players switched from speed mode into strength mode, killed enemies with one punch and then retreated to let their energy automatically recharge. Personally, I get the idea a lot of that may be less to do with the suit and more to do with the A.I being unable to cope with that tactic effectively in an open area.

In multiplayer, abuse of the strength mode is much less of an issue it seems, mainly because real human players aren’t above running backwards in circles, emptying their shotguns at you. Even in stealth mode you need to be careful when trying to close the distance on an enemy.


It’s still possible to do though and by far the highlight of my beta experience involved a melee kill with the strength mode. Basically, there was another player up on top of a hill and who was sniping down on everyone below. Either nobody could pinpoint his location or nobody could get close to him, or at least until I managed it. I grabbed a nearby hovercraft and charged up the hill at full speed, taking full advantage of the vehicle's speed boost power. Unfortunately, the hovercrafts are very hard to control and the vehicle physics don’t feel entirely complete, so when I clipped a rock on my ascent I was quickly launched into what I think might have been a triple barrel roll over his head.

Unruffled, I ejected from the hovercraft in midair and enabled stealth mode before I hit the ground. The hovercraft blew up seconds later and the other player must have assumed I was dead because he never even turned around. I switched from stealth to strength mode, planted a punch in the back of his skull and watched him fly off, apparently desperate to kiss the sunrise.

It was an awesome moment in the game and shows that once players have mastered the different tools available to them then they can very quickly manage some rather impressive feats – even if they are very quickly ruined by the realisation that you’ve just killed somebody on your own team and your team-mates quickly turn on you. Turns out, the reason that nobody could get up the hill was because the rest of your team was busy defending the base of it.