Multiplayer

Multiplayer is another area that has been re-vamped in Crysis Warhead, though not dramatically as some might want you to think actually. There’s been a lot of fuss made over the new Crysis Wars game, which has been billed as pretty much a game in its own right.

Which isn’t exactly true as the only real addition to the multiplayer experience over that of Crysis is that there’s now team deathmatch mode.

It’s weird, really. Crytek and Electronic Arts have always tried to make an understandably big deal out of the multiplayer side of Crysis, but it’s always been something where the reality had definitely failed to live up to the hype of it all. They call it Crysis Wars, but the reality is that it’s just the standard set of multiplayer game modes.

In fact, it’s not even a complete set of game modes – there’s Instant Action (deathmatch), Power Struggle (a capture-based team game) and now, in Warhead, there’s Instant Team Action. It’s essentially team deathmatch.


Crytek can’t be faulted too much for this rather meagre selection of course – when the levels are as huge and open as they are in Crysis then the standard game modes do tend to get a little bit broken. Capture the Flag just doesn’t feel fun when you have 32 players just swarming around, crashing helicopters into the ground.

To try and make the multiplayer game a bit more beefy then, Crytek has always focused on using game modes that are built around this idea of freedom and exploration - a ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ kind of approach, which seems to work to an extent.

The Instant Team Action gameplay doesn’t really bear going into in too much details as it really is just a score-based game where your team gets points per kill and the most points wins. Kept Simple, Stupid.

What does merit a few more words though is the sheer possibility of this mode from a squad-tactics level, which is something that will obviously depend very much on who you are playing with. If you’re on a familiar team and you’re all hooked up with microphones then Instant Team Action can be a phenomenally rewarding experience; three or four guys literally crawling through the forest with rifles and rocket launchers can have a heck of time playing guerilla tactics with a tank-bound enemy.


Naturally though, this isn’t always the experience that you’ll get and most of the time you’ll more than likely be the uncoordinated loner in the map – walking down a track or driving along in your jeep when from nowhere a bullet comes and kills you. Over and over again, this can be a frustrating thing and the wide open spaces do unfortunately mean that it is likely. Forests are a camper's playground.

So, the multiplayer game is still a little under-developed and fickle at times, though immensely enjoyable at others, but it’s good to see that Electronic Arts and Crytek have at least added in new maps. Instant Team Action can be played on any of the existing Instant Action maps, but it does have six more levels on top; Battleground, Treehouse, Coast, Graveyard, Stranded and our favourite, Peak. There’s also a new map called Tarmac for the Power Struggle mode.

In the end, Crysis Wars isn’t the totally complete multiplayer package it might present itself by going so far as to have a separate executable, disc and install, but it isn’t a bad game and the optional install means you can ignore it if you want to. It’s better than the original multiplayer set-up, offering a whole load of fixes and tweaks to how vehicles handle and so on, but the benefit is a bit more incremental than anyone at Crytek would have you believe, we suspect.