Essentially, each team vies for control of a factory, which allows production of a nuke-equipped tank capable of destroying the enemy team's headquarters. To make the battle more interesting, players can also gain control of defensive bunkers as well as optional factories producing helicopter-like aircraft, boats, and other such useful equipment. On top of all that, alien crash sites litter the map; they must be controlled in order to create advanced alien technology to aid in the battle against the opposing team.

As in Counter-Strike, players are not assigned to specific classes but are rather able to buy new equipment and weapons at the beginning of every round, with more kills and captures conferring more money with which to suit up in purchase zones. All of this is combined with Crysis' nanosuit featured in its single-player game. With the suit, players can apply one enhanced effect to themselves at any given time: great speed, enhanced strength, toughened armor, or a personal cloak. Particularly useful in multiplayer is the ability to augment weaponry with various types of zoom scopes and other attachments.

Cloaking seems like the most useful nanosuit ability to employ in multiplayer, since it provides obvious advantages when attempting to infiltrate and acquire an enemy-controlled structure, while speed is useful simply for traversing the large map included in the multiplayer beta, particularly early in the game.

As teams capture more bunkers, which contain forward spawn points, they are better able to push the enemy back from the crucial central factory and spread outward to grab the peripheral factories. Crysis' Power Struggle mode is very much dependent on teamwork, and requires each player to have a fairly good understanding of what is going on and where it is useful to be at any given time in order to be most effective. If playing against an uncoordinated team (or one not up to a sufficient player count), it can be fairly easy to capture territories with little resistance, since there are so many to capture.