MAG Review

26 Jan 2010 at 09:27:35 by Richard Walker
Systems used to review this title: (PS3)

Possibly one of the most literal game titles of all time, MAG: Massive Action Game is unsurprisingly, a massive action game. It's actually a really massive action game, offering online multiplayer support for up to 256-players, across four game modes each of which offer a different style of objective-based play.

MAG's core concept of staging vast battles that cater for so many players is undoubtedly an ambitious one and something that to us, seemed somewhat foolhardy and potentially unworkable. But amazingly, MAG pulls it off with seemingly effortless aplomb by simply dividing players into manageable squads of eight all working towards the same objectives.

Each team (or company, to use the correct lingo) consists of four of these eight man squads, which are themselves split into platoons of four. So, that's four times four squads of eight, which equals 128-players per team. Are you listening, soldier? Excellent. Key to your enjoyment in playing MAG however, will ultimately depend upon how effectively you're able to communicate with the rest of your team, and therein lies one of MAG's most glaring and fundamental problems.

While MAG mostly succeeds in delivering quantity, the level of quality is another issue entirely. From a gameplay standpoint, it appears that Zipper Interactive has been playing a lot of Battlefield: Bad Company, since some of the objectives and controls have been liberally borrowed from DICE's lauded multiplayer shooter. No bad thing, surely? Indeed, this isn't MAG's biggest problem – the troubles really emerge when you're trying to communicate and co-ordinate tasks with the other members of your team.

Cue much frustration when you're shot down, doomed to lie on the battlefield, writhing around like a beached fish waiting for someone to revive you and put you back in the game. Chances are that no one will bother to respond to your vain calls for rescue. But then, Zipper can hardly be blamed for this, although it might have been far more preferable - especially given the frenetic nature of a battlefield inhabited by 255 other players (128 of which are out to get you) - to have been given a context-sensitive prompt to repair or heal. Instead, having to fumble for a healing adrenaline shot is too fiddly for anyone to bother helping you back to your feet.

MAG's controls are a nice hybrid of BF's and Modern Warfare 2's, mapping sprinting and melee attacks onto those clicky L3 and R3 analogue stick buttons, but with Bad Company's awkward item selection nonsense attached to the L1 button. The number of times we were killed while fumbling for a grenade or accidentally aiming down the sites because we brushed L2 as we vainly grasped for a reviving adrenaline shot was cause for much grinding of teeth and tearing out of hair. It's a control setup that's simply far too ham-fisted for this kind of game. And no quick access to an instant grenade means that attempting to select one from your gear is suicide.

MAG's clunky gear selection coupled with that dodgy communication issue almost makes for a game-breaking combination, but the solid and robust FPS action shines through and rescues MAG from being marred by these irritations. Zipper should be congratulated for looking beyond the success of the SOCOM franchise to craft a supremely slick and intuitive FPS that's as overtly ambitious as MAG.

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