M.A.G. is the latest from famed SOCOM developer Zipper Interactive. The team decided to forgo heading up last year's SOCOM: Confrontation and instead chose to tackle a much greater feat. They aim to create a structured and team-focused, online-only shooter featuring up to 256 players. The concept revolves around three Private Military Corporations or PMC's and the struggle to dominate the battlefield. You begin by choosing one of three factions to work for and fine tuning minor appearance options for your character. Next you equip your load out with one of the three starting weapons: Sniper, Assault or Light Machine Gun. As experience is gained in combat, you rank up and unlock skill points that can be used to purchase additional weapons and upgrades. The gameplay borrows from some of the industry's heavy hitters including Battlefield: Bad Company, Killzone 2 and the Modern Warfare series. You will have to heal yourself to survive continuous encounters since the decision was made to implement a non-regenerating health system, which honestly feels antiquated. The skill point progression system is a credit to Call of Duty 4 and the squad system is reminiscent of Killzone 2. Taking several elements previously done and combining them isn't necessarily a bad thing, however there doesn't appear to be much innovation or originality. M.A.G. is a shooter, it works, and that is its greatest strength.
This game is by no means a graphical powerhouse. The visuals are clean and crisp, but unfortunately lack fine detail. This isn't surprising considering the massive size of the maps populated by up to 256 combatants. The maps feature awful draw distance with rampant texture pop-in. There is currently not much customization in character appearance, but this is presumably because this is only a sampling of the final build.
Team Zipper aims to balance the lack of technical brawn with the use of dedicated servers. Having suffered several weeks of nearly unplayable matches in Modern Warfare 2, joining a dedicated server was a revelation. There was nearly no lag to be found in the several hours I've already invested. This introduced something that has been sorely missing from many online shooters: a level playing field. There seems to be an issue with scope accuracy that is unrelated to lag. There were several instances where I fired on a prone target with a Sniper rifle only to have the round seemingly disappear. Be prepared to wait excessive spawn times as well. I waited as long as twenty seconds on many occasions. Once you spawn, be prepared to trek a minute or so before you see any signs of life. That is of course unless you fall victim to spawn camping, which is already a concern in the game (I played several matches where the enemy team was able to target us at the pre-designated spawn location).
There is tremendous potential for MAG to have a strong presence in the crowded FPS market. With a now industry standard deep upgrade system and lag free dedicated servers, it could easily garner a tremendous online community. The beta is available now on PSN (allow at least 30 minutes to download) and the full game will be released on January 26th, 2010 on the Playstation 3.
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