MAG Review

After a lengthy closed beta and what was essentially time-specific demo of an open beta, Zipper Interactive’s MAG has finally hit the PS3 in its full retail form. Although the prospect of a 256-player shooter certainly sounds refreshing in a world where Modern Warfare 2’s 9v9 is king, is it enough to carry the game on its own? Does the game bring anything new to the fight? After reaching level 30 with a member of the Valor faction, I think I’m ready to make my final judgments and decide whether or not this is a war you want to start fighting yourself.

Graphically, MAG is nothing to write home about. If anything, it’s actually a bit of a disappointment compared to most recent shooters and PS3-exclusives. With very basic particle effects and character animations, the battlefield isn’t always the most breathtaking thing to look at. Although you are allowed a small amount of character customization at the beginning of your mercenary career, you won’t find yourself standing out from the crowd, far from it in fact. With only a small array of faces and voices to choose for your character, all of the soldiers quickly begin to look the same, swapping out a Mohawk for a Samoan complexion or deeper voice every once in a while.

Unfortunately, the game’s menu and UI follow in the footsteps of the graphics. Clunky and decidedly last-generation, everything from the opening screen showcasing military documents scattered beneath a large PDA containing your character’s information to the less-than-intuitive skill menu that will have you slowly scrolling up and down and up and down as you pick which skill is best to spend your precious few points on feels dated and bargain-bin, which is unfortunate because both the skill system and the gameplay deserve much better. With this said, the overall presentation is bearable at worst and just above average at best.

It is in the gameplay and the multiplayer that MAG truly shines, especially when you consider the lack of a single player component. Veterans of the SOCOM and Battlefield series will feel at home in this fight. With four game modes, MAG’s complexity increases alongside the player count. Beginning with the 64-player Suppression to the 256-player Domination, players can go from a simple infantry-focused deathmatch to a massive battlefield struggle littered with objectives of varying importance and an entirely human-based leadership system.

Building on the basic concepts of the FPS (run, shoot, hide, etc.) is a very deep and innovative skill system that feels more like something out of an MMO than a shooter. Some skills grant you new weapons or abilities while others will permanently increase certain attributes such as sprint length, rifle wobble, and things of that nature. You create a character at the beginning of the game, pick a faction (once again like in many MMOs), and invest solely in this character without the ability to change and alter those skills on the fly. Because the skills are semi-permanent in nature, you’re bound to made a bad choice and regret it later, so, just like MMOs, MAG offers you the ability to gain a full respec with enough playtime under your belt. These respects become increasingly more expensive the more times you use one, but after one or two, I found the play style I enjoyed most and planned on sticking to all the way till level 60.

Coupled with the excellent voice chat is the player and experience-based leadership system. Each squad (8 players) has a leader, each platoon (4 squads) has a leader, and each team (2 platoons) has a leader titled the Office in Charge or OIC. Once you’ve reached a certain player level, you are given the option to apply for these leadership roles which grant you certain additional abilities depending on the game type being played. The individual with the most leadership experience is granted the position. Although in the lower player level game modes, squad leaders can do little more than point their subordinates in the right directions, it is really in the larger games that these roles take on their true intent.

In Acquisition (128 players) and Domination (256 players), squad leaders are given the ability to declare attack or defend points, call in a UAV to survey the battlefield, and have cluster bombs dropped across the battlefield. Platoon leaders are given the ability to voice chat to all of the squad leaders below them as well as all of the players beneath them in the command structure at once in addition to an increased payload of special abilities. The OIC has the ability to call in a slew of higher powered air strikes and reconnaissance abilities as well as the option to speak to platoon leaders, squad leaders, or every member of his or her 128-player team at once which is in a word: epic. This structure helps to alleviate having a bad or inexperienced team as there seems to always be someone with a mic guiding the way.

The gameplay and multiplayer aspects of MAG are truly what work to set it apart from the crowd of shooters currently sitting on game store shelves. If you are a fan of large-scale battles rarely able to be experienced anywhere in video games before, cooperative voice-based gameplay, and capable shooting mechanics based around a long-term skill-tree, than MAG is definitely a game you need to play.

What MAG lacks in graphical prowess, it makes up for in terms of overall performance. Considering the huge increase in players present all of MAG’s game type compared to other shooters we’ve seen this generation, it’s amazing that the game runs as well as it does. Even in the most player-heavy of game modes, the game is almost entirely lag free with a silky smooth frame rate.

That said, the game isn’t free of its fair share of bugs. Ranging from a failed button register to a small graphical glitch, most of MAG’s few bugs are easily moved past, but there is one in particular in which players who have died in or near water are unable to be revived by their teammates. This can lead to controller-banging levels of frustration. This may not seem like the biggest deal, but on some maps (the SVER Acquisition map comes to mind) it can easily become the reason for a loss, especially when the defenders learn to exploit it. Thankfully, this seems like something that can be easily patched in the future.

Ultimately, MAG is a deep shooter with a good online community that offers an experience you truly cannot get out of any other game. Sacrificing graphics and some of that AAA shine for mostly lag-free gameplay and a deep level of strategy, Zipper Interactive has done a good job with their new IP. I just hope that next time it won’t be good, it will be excellent. Fans of SOCOM and similar military shooters should pick this game up, but big fans of Modern Warfare might want to get some hands-on before they open their wallets.