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Genre: First-Person Action Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Developer: Zipper Interactive Players: Up to 256

By colmwarner (25th Feb 2010)

Anyone who has played any of the major FPS titles in recent years will have been looking forward to the release of MAG, the Massive Action Game. Zipper Interactive designed a title that promised to knock Modern Warfare 2 right off its lofty perch and redefine how couch-based soldiers engage in warfare.

The scene is set in 2025, where private armies compete for government contracts. National armies are not allowed leave the borders of their respective countries, so peace is mandatory. Private Military Companies have been undercutting each other to the point where violence between them has broken out in what has become known as the Shadow War. Each of the three factions - Raven, SVER and Valor - has its own weapons and skills, and upon loading the game, you create a character aligned to one of said factions. Raven is the high-tech army with limited experience, SVER seem to be a poorer cousins that are battle-hardened but with inferior equipment, and Valor are the veteran army, although they use standard weapons. Raven’s weapons look like current ones coated in carbon fibre, but all weapons are derivatives of current technology.

Once a faction is chosen, you get to pick a face for your character and the training level explains the controls, we get to see what the game is all about: the massively multiplayer battles. Designed exclusively for online play, there is no single player campaign. At first, you can only play suppression games. These are essentially team deathmatches with 64 players, and once you level up, you unlock Sabotage, where teams attack or defend specific objectives. Once the main objectives are destroyed, another one appears on the map, the destruction of which ends the game. This type again allows 64 players.

Level up a few more times, and you unlock Acquisition matches, the first of the 128-player games, where players have to disarm mortar batteries, anti-aircraft guns, sensor arrays and gates in order to eventually steal prototype APC’s from the opposition and drive them to the safety of their own transport choppers. It's more difficult than it seems, as gates and emplacements can be repaired by the defending team, so the journey home can be just as difficult as the invasion, and nothing is certain right until the end of the round.



Domination games are where the epic proportions of MAG become evident. 256 players battle each other for domination of a level, with the results of each game going towards the total for each faction on a persistent world map. Each section has its own attack and defence objectives, and the outcome of the overall map is determined by the success of each area.

Gameplay ultimately offers little more than your standard FPS. Experience points are awarded for kills, with extra XP for important kills like killing someone who is attacking one of your defence objectives. You can also gain XP by healing downed comrades before they bleed out, or by repairing something the enemy destroyed. Players with high enough levels can apply for ranking positions. Each section, platoon and army can have leaders who issue orders and objectives, and also get in-game advantages. Keeping the levels requirement means that your leader will always have at least a degree of experience, and avoid the obvious pitfalls that allowing zero-day players command would bring.



As you progress through the levels, there are technology trees to help you customise your character. However, unlike MW2, where the unlocks follow a set order, you gain one point every time you level up, and can use your points to unlock scopes, perks, and so on. You can concentrate on assault rifles, close quarters, special equipment and physical endurance, and within each tree there are further options. It’s not just accessories that are unlocked this way, the weapons are also part of the tech tree. You have a cost associated with each loadout to prevent players brining too much equipment into the field, and will quite often have to use lighter armour than you’d like just to get a repair gun into your inventory. This provides a level of balance to the game, and makes people adopt specific roles on their teams.

There are vehicles in most game types, APC’s, tanks and armed jeeps, all of which do make for more varied gameplay. While you can parachute into certain spawn points, call in UAV’s and bombing runs, the vehicles you control are all land-based.



I’m sure you’re wondering what could possibly go wrong. The answer, unfortunately, is lots. The controls are awkward and unintuitive. Ridiculous amounts of bullets are required to drop enemies. And while huge amounts of intelligent ideas went into the design, not all are realised when actually playing. Leaders don’t provide any ammo or equipment drops, just objectives that are unclear to the team members. Some of these are little things, but annoying nonetheless. For example, lobbies expire when the game ends, which means you have to join a queue every time you want to play. You cannot pick up weapons or resupply from fallen players. If you run out of ammunition, then you have to go to one of the resupply locations on the map, which is inevitably being camped by someone on the opposing team. Remember in early FPS games where the weight of your loadout was irrelevant, and only the weapon in your hand mattered? Well this is your chance to welcome it back. If you switch to pistol, you can run across a map, but drawing an anti-tank gun that you’ve supposedly been carrying all along slows you to a crawl.

There is imbalance with the factions too. The first character I created was aligned to Valor. However, I kept getting repeatedly killed by people with automatic weapons. So I deleted my character and tried again with Raven. Instantly my kill/death ratio improved, even though I was playing the same. Raven seems to be wining the Shadow War at the time of writing because of this.



The individual battles can also be frustrating, because there are so many players running around doing their own thing. Sure, there are commanders, but even when they do issue orders, it’s unclear to the players what’s happening, and the sheer scale of battles means that you are often left feeling irrelevant. You can hold an objective and lose the game, or make a mess of things and win. The sheer chaos can be real fun, but can feel strangely empty at times.

This is a solid FPS, with ideas behind it that should have made it epic, but in practice, many of the grand ideas failed to translate into viable experiences. The fact that I didn’t experience any lag in over 50 games, regardless of the number of players on varied connections, is no minor feat. It’s very nearly there, and with some tweaking could be the future franchise to overwhelm them all.

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