In Power Struggle, you join either the Nanosuit-enhanced U.S. Delta Force, or the Nanosuit-enhanced North Korean Special Forces, as a recruit. Once you’ve chosen a side, your goal is to assist your team in capturing and holding resources and strategic points on the map, and weakening the enemy as much as possible—with the ultimate goal of building alien and/or human super weapons to obliterate the enemy headquarters which is heavily fortified and protected by a battery of devastating automated turrets that can track and destroy any armored or non-armored target. Recruits start out with basic weapons. By successfully completing objectives and scoring enemy kills, you can rise in rank and earn Prestige Points (credits) that can be used to purchase better weapons and build vehicles for your team. You can only purchase upgrades at your headquarters or factory zones that your team controls.

 

You can score vehicles for your side in two ways—capturing a zone with a factory to build them; or stealing them from the enemy. There are two ways to steal an enemy vehicle. The first way is if one of your enemies is careless enough to leave a vehicle unattended while investigating a possible threat (read: a “distraction” conveniently provided by you or one of your teammates). The stealth capabilities of your Nanosuit and an Electric Lockpick also work in a pinch. You gain points for stealing a vehicle or capturing a factory, which is good—since you’ll need a certain amount of points to build and develop vehicles for your team. While your team can have multiple vehicles, you can only manage one at a time. The rest remain in a secure area until you decide to use them. How secure they remain depends on how well you have them guarded, since the other side is just as capable of stealing your vehicles as you are theirs.

 

Unlike other multiplayer games, Crysis Power Struggle ups the realism and pucker factor by forcing you to make certain tactical and logistical choices when it comes to vehicle armaments and damage. For example, if your VTOL Jet or Attack Helicopter runs out of ammo, you’re going to have to land at the appropriate factory zone you control, retrieve the ammo and reload it yourself. If your tank suffers too many critical hits, you have several choices. Get off the battlefield and out of the line of fire and make the repairs with a Welding Torch while teammates cover you. Limp back to an armor factory zone and make the repairs (and hope you don’t get bushwhacked along the way). Or keep fighting until the next enemy missile round blows the tank out from under you.

 

You’ll need to secure and hold on to research facilities and alien crash sites to build the more advanced weapons needed to ultimately destroy the enemy base—which sounds a lot easier than it actually is. The team with the most credits, better weapons and gear, and controls the most strategic points and facilities on the map, will end up dominating the battlefield and making the other team’s life increasingly difficult. If ever there was a multiplayer game that demands teamwork and communication to win, Power Struggle in Crysis is it. Any lone wolf, cowboy or Rambo tactics that might have gotten you over in other multiplayer games will practically insure that your base will be the first to go up in a mushroom cloud before you wise-up and realize you’ve already lost.

 

Crysis servers aren’t ranked nor do they support persistent stats. Any points and rank you earn in one round are automatically reset for the next one. Higher skilled players who move up quickly in rank have more to gain individually and most importantly—for their team—by focusing their efforts against opposing players of the same rank and skill. Going on a “n00b hunt” could easily be exploited by savvy enemy team leaders out to seize valuable resources and assets you fought so hard to get. Players who take advantage of the game’s Voice-Over-IP support will have a distinct advantage over those using the traditional text-based chat via the keyboard. Fortunately, if you fall into the latter category, you won’t have to worry about getting owned by players with VoIP, as you can easily filter your server list to exclude the ones that use it. Punkbuster teamed-up with Crytek’s own in-house anti-cheating technology (which they are understandably hush-hush about), should help keep things honest for everyone. An excellent video tutorial that gives you the basics of Power Struggle is available through the Multiplayer menu, though the only real way to learn is to jump in and just do it. It’s probably quicker, easier and somewhat less intimidating getting up to speed on Power Struggle in Crysis than Enemy Territory: Quake Wars—especially for anyone new to multiplayer shooters.

 

So far, Power Struggle looks and sounds promising for gamers looking to get the most out of their Crysis multiplayer experience without the usual hassles and aggravation associated with cheating and unbalanced gameplay. It can only get better with enhancements that Crytek could include with future updates to the game, and more user-created maps. We’ll see…

 

Crysis ships in a Standard and Special Edition version. The Special Edition includes a “bonus” DVD with the “Making of Crysis” and other related videos; art, screenshots, storyboards, and a 16-page art concept book. The Crysis soundtrack composed by Inon Zur is also included on a CD audio disc. A Crysis poster and an exclusive, unlockable Amphibious APC vehicle for multiplayer was an added bonus offered by EB Games and GameSpot for preorders of the game. All-in-all, a nice little bundle for the extra bucks—though I think the poster should have been larger.

 

The single-player campaign, depending on skill level selected, takes about 10-15 hours to complete—although the irresistible urge to retry levels taking different approaches to a mission could easily stretch it out longer. Fighting against the North Koreans is actually the high point of the Crysis single-player campaign. Their sheer numbers, strength and tenacity provide a first-rate and enjoyable challenge that forces the player to constantly evaluate and adapt to each new threat and situation, while the Nanosuit’s abilities allows them the flexibility of dealing with those threats and situations using the playing style that they prefer. Do I use the cloak to slip into the enemy encampment to disable the jammer, gather intel and any extra weapons and ammo? Or create a distraction that will lure most of the soldiers away by blowing up the fuel tanks in the motor pool, improving my chances of slipping in undetected? With my missile launcher one missile shy of being spent, what if that KPA Gunship flying CAP close by decides to join the party? After playing far too many shooters that funnel you through one gauntlet of utterly clueless enemies after the next, it’s refreshing to play a game like Crysis that lets you think on your feet and take more than one approach to a combat situation. Too bad it doesn’t carry all the way through to the end of the game.

 

What appears to be an earthquake suddenly causes the largest mountain at the center of the island to crumble away, revealing a massive structure similar in design to the artifacts discovered by Dr. Rosenthal and his team. The structure turns out to be a ship, and it’s where you finally come face to face (assuming you could call them faces) with its malevolent alien occupants. As you fight your way through the frigid, sinisterly beautiful and disorienting zero-gravity interior of the alien vessel, you witness the gelatinous creatures preparing an invasion-sized force of the same deadly, flying octopus-tentacled “living machines” that have begun attacking U.S. and North Korean forces and have recently claimed the lives of most of Raptor Team. Although it’s more linear that the previous Crysis levels, it's definitely the best alien level in the entire game.

 

Once you escape the alien ship, it generates a huge dome of ice around itself, killing everything inside of it—except you of course (nope, you don’t get off that easy, unfortunately). Crysis suddenly does a complete 360. For the remainder of the game, instead of giving you the opportunity to engage in the final, last-ditch battles against the alien menace with the same creativity and brilliance as the previous North Koreans levels—it all deteriorates into an atypical series of ridiculously linear and tedious “run-gun-die-reload-rinse-repeat” action you can get in any two-bit, bargain-bin shooter.

 

The whole thing gave me a feeling of déjà vu. Three years ago, it was Far Cry’s murderous mercenary army who were really responsible for the game’s resounding success—not those mutant chimpanzees or mercenaries with the Frankenstein makeover (A.K.A. the Trigens), or their mad scientist creator whose idea of improving humanity was to build a better freak-show. The best levels of Far Cry were the ones where the player squared off against increasingly tougher mercenaries with their vehicles, helicopters, gunboats and wide array of weaponry and tactics; while the levels where the Trigens were the predominant enemies had all the impact of a “been-there-done-that-insert-your-favorite-monster” shooter. While this would have sank any other game, the fact that Far Cry was way ahead of its time in the looks department, certainly didn’t hurt.

 

But that was then and this is now. Although there are times when it doesn’t seem like it—thanks to the over-hyped and underwhelming titles and trashy console ports that unfortunately will probably always be with us—PC games have evolved—and so have the expectations of the people who play them.

 

It’s clear that Crytek didn’t stray too far from their Far Cry roots with Crysis. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. When you have a winning formula, you obviously want to stick with it and tweak it as needed—while leaving out the stuff that doesn’t add to or weakens the gameplay. Still, if you’re going to go all out and revolutionize a game’s visuals, why not go all the way with every single aspect of the game?

The hype around Crysis from its announcement to its final release raised a lot of those expectations that boundaries would be pushed in new and exciting ways; not just visually, but in content and gameplay as well. As expected, Crytek has nailed the visual part and then some, even if drivers and hardware have some catching up to do before the full potential of the game's next-generation visuals can be realized. But next-generation visuals alone don't mean much without the gameplay to back it up. And it's part of the gameplay in Crysis that's still stuck back in 2004 with Jack Carver and those bloody Trigens. 

I was disappointed that vehicle control in Crysis is the same as it was in Far Cry. I still think steering with the mouse is more fluid and natural than with the keyboard—and still stand behind my view that Halo for the PC has the best vehicle control thanks to the excellent job Gearbox did for Bungie with the game’s mouse-steering (which unfortunately was not repeated in Halo 2 for Windows Vista). Cleary the worse vehicle in Crysis was the VTOL Jet. Slow and sluggish—a bad combination with the already klutzy keyboard steering—the VTOL was no match for the game’s fast-moving, highly maneuverable aliens with their freeze rays and armor-piercing ice shard weapons—or the high-wind conditions it had to fly and fight in—making the “Ascension” level in Crysis the most torturous of the entire game. Being able to maneuver with the mouse rather than the keyboard definitely would have made things more tolerable, though this was one mission where having the AI fly while I did the shooting, would have been a real relief.

 

It’s also a shame that the initial plans for the player to fight alongside Raptor team members throughout the game; having your actions determine which way the storyline in Crysis would branch, and even determine if certain teammates lived or not—as well U.S. and North Korean forces putting aside their hostilities to deal with the alien threat that had been unleashed on the island, ended up on Crytek’s cutting room floor. I also would have liked to have seen the ability to make more granular changes to the game's difficulty level—like the ability to set the KPA to speak Korean, toggle the enemy awareness aura, and so on—regardless of the difficulty level set.

 

I really liked the Nanosuit abilities, though it would have been helpful if the Cloaking ability (and Night Vision) didn’t deplete so quickly. The ability to mod weapons was another of my favorite features, even though it does allow for some rather bizarre and improbable upgrades. You can attach a Sniper Score to the Shotgun if you wanted to, for example—though I don’t know why anyone would, considering that shotguns are best suited for close-range combat.

 

The AI for the North Koreans in Crysis is noticeably better than that of the mercenaries in Far Cry. Their combat animations and facial expressions from boredom and surprise to suspicion and anger make them much more life-like. At the higher difficulty levels they are much more alert, better shots, and tenacious about pursing and hunting you down, and calling reinforcements. They lay down covering fire for one another while trying to flank, use cover effectively, and have no problem jumping over and clearing obstacles. They love tossing grenades to either nail you on the spot or drive you out into the open—and don’t mind resorting to their rifle butts at close range. When they aren’t actively trying to kill you, they smoke cigarettes, check supplies on trucks, chat, and perform other activities. They even slip away once in awhile to take a leak! I ran across one pair of KPA soldiers chillin’ on the beach near a palm tree. It was almost a shame to slip up behind them cloaked and pop them with my silenced pistol—almost.

 

I’ll admit to being annoyed at the ending of the game thinking “not another Halo 2!” But that was until I discovered that Crysis is going to be part of a trilogy—which is encouraging. With the visuals already nailed down, this will give Crytek plenty of opportunity to do things that are even more compelling and spectacular with character development, NPC interaction, storyline and overall gameplay. I think Crysis would have been just as exciting—if not more so—had the game focused solely on battling the North Koreans and rescuing the scientists they took hostage while hinting at the alien presence on the island, to be revealed in greater detail in the second installment of the trilogy. This would at least squash the perception and criticisms that Crysis is little more than a prettier rehash of Far Cry. There’s no denying that the Crysis franchise certainly has the potential of being so much more than that. Time will tell…

 

Hefty system requirements aside, and in spite of the first half of the game playing like lapping the Nürburgring in the new Nissan GT-R only to have the final missions leading up to the finale play more like being stuck in New York City traffic in a Chevrolet Aveo, Crysis does live up to most of the hype, will serve as the benchmark (both literally and figuratively) for cutting-edge visuals and gameplay for some time to come, and was well worth the wait.