MAG

Massive Action Game

This has been on my radar for sometime now, I think it's been more than a year since I got my first peek at a trailer for this game and have been doing my best to keep my ears to the ground hoping to hear any possible news about this game so you could imagine how miffed I was to hear that I had totally missed the Beta's, luckily though I managed to get myself a copy of the open Beta released last week and managed to get some good play time in. Yes, yes, I know it's only a Beta but with only two weeks until this game comes out surely not much can change...?

First off I would just like to reiterate that so far I have only managed to play the open Beta and I shall hopefully update this post in the future or perhaps someone can add a comment on just how wrong I was hehe ;)

Well lets start off with what MAG really is, Mag is the first ever multiplayer only game for consoles that is able to support 250 players, that's 250 players on one level at one time! Just imagine Battlefield Bad Company or Call of Duty but with 125 players on your team as apposed to just 8 or 16... i can tell you one things for sure, the action is intense to say the least, bullets flying all over the place, explosions in the distance, I-N-T-E-N-S-E! The game is basically split into two segment types namely capture the flag and demolition with lots of shooting in between of course, players are split down into smaller groups with their own set of objectives, once the objectives are completed the teams then move onto the next stage and so on until all objectives are completed and a victor crowned.

Sounds good but alas just a few too many bugs have been left in the game, now I know that it's only the Beta and I'm hoping that Zipper have made two copies of the game with us Joe's only having seen one of them but I fear that this is not the case... The first problem I have with Mag is it's average graphics, now I can accept the fact that not all games can look the best and sometimes sacrifices have to be made, but some of the character artwork in Mag is verging on terrible! Don't get me wrong it does the job but in the age of "next gen consoles" this just should not be the case, the lighting is way off on some of the jungle levels making it almost imposable to spot enemies especially when they are wearing black (Raven) add to this the confusion that inherently comes from 250 people running left right and centre and well... lets just say I managed to shoot a few of my own team mates as well as get shot stood right next to an enemy player.

The sound in Mag could definitely do with a bit of improvement, as with graphics sound isn't as important as gameplay but for some reason the sounds in Mag are just unforgivable! The guns sound like a 5 year old's toy, the explosions are basically the same sound over and over, not something i thought I would ever be complaining about but with sooo many of them going on throughout the game it soon becomes annoying.

Add to these two some bad collision detection, some weapons that seem to do no damage and you soon get the feeling that all this beta testing was for nothing, I just don't see how so many of these errors managed to remain in the current version.

I have to admit though that even with these errors Mag was still an enjoyable game, things are a little hard to get used to at the start and it can sometimes be annoying to empty an entire clip into someone without them dieing, lucky for us then that the game allows players to purchase a number of upgrades for each class with the potential to eventually working their way to a position of leadership, whether this will be enough to make mag a classic is unknown, my personal feelings are that mag will simply be a road map used by the likes of EA or Infinity Ward when developing there next batch of shooters while Mag will instead turn out to be something closer to the likes of Warhawk, yes it's a good game but alas there is better out there.

There's a few weeks to go until the release and my one hope is that zipper is hard at work putting the finishing touches on the actual game and it will turn out that the beta was just chucked together for gameplay and network testing, if this is not the case i think i might just have to wait for Bad Company 2 although I would be tempted to use Mag as a gap fuller... Will just have to wait and see.

Gameplay 8.5/10

Graphics 6.8/10

Sound 6.5/10

Total 73/100