Zipper Interactive is an American game developer known for their SOCOM series. Their newest creation is the very ambitious, PlayStation 3 exclusive, MAG: Massive Action Game. When MAG was revealed at E3, the title of the game was probably the second thing most people remembered. The first thing was surely the number 256, which is the number of players MAG’s servers can support at one time. While this is surely an impressive achievement, it does not automatically equate to awesomeness.

With other shooters running strong, claiming hours upon hours of millions of gamers’ lives, Zipper would surely need something new to draw people away from highly successful industry standards like Gears of War, Halo, and Call of Duty. This new feature was less of a feature than it was mechanics. They designed a new server architecture that would allow up to 256 players in one game at once. Something that enormous has never been done on a console before, so that certainly drew some attention their way; I know I was damn excited to hear about a game that allowed more than 18 players per server. So Zipper was thinking outside the boxes; that’s awesome, huh? No. It’s not. Soldiers of the ever-outrageous console war immediately took to making uneducated claims that MAG would be a definite failure, because surely no console can support 256 players at the same time without severe lag. We can finally put that claim to the test.

I picked MAG up at midnight on January 26th, as I had preordered it. Early review and score: MAG’s cover art earns an instant 7/7. The following morning, I popped MAG in for the first time; awfully excited for something new after investing maybe three days worth of time into Modern Warfare 2. First order of business: choose a faction. You are able to choose from three different factions, or “companies”, as they are called. You can think of this as MAG’s version of World of Warcraft’s Horde and Alliance. These three factions are: Valor – classic military style made up of American, British and Mexican veterans; Raven – futuristic (2025) lab rat soldiers who will always use state of the art technology – hailing from mainly European countries; and finally SVER (Seryi Volk Executive Response, pronounced “sever”), the very unconventional army hailing from Asia. Let’s start with your choice in army.

There are pros and cons that come with choosing any of the three factions to side with, but some factions are more disadvantaged than others. For example, Valor’s Sabotage (one of four game types) map (yes, map; not maps) is immensely easier to capture than to defend. It got to the point where the invading faction would overtake all of our points in under 2 minutes… out of twenty available. Now this could be traced back to bad teamwork, but the fact is that there are two initial points that must be captured: A and B, and Valor’s A and B are protected by, well… nothing. A and B both reside in a building with an entrance on each side. This differs from Raven and SVER’s Sabotage maps, as their points are fortified with steel buildings, ladders and staircases. Valor is greatly disadvantaged in the Sabotage game type. More on the game types later. Weapon range, power and whatnot may vary from faction to faction, but other than my immediate realization that the maps are not fairly designed, the only difference from faction to faction is appearance.

Next order of business: the content. MAG suffers due to one very specific condition: it is thin. Skinny. Narrow. We want for ourselves to be thin, not for our games to be thin! If you tell me that a game is going to be solely based online, then I will tell you that the game better be fat. Rotund. Filled to the brim. MAG, unfortunately, is not. MAG’s content is so scarce that your interest in the game dies a little each time you turn it on. What do I mean by content? Simple: maps, guns and game types. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 featured 17 maps for its online half, excluding the entire single player campaign and Spec Ops missions. That is an acceptable amount of maps for an online game where the focus wasn’t directed fully onto the online portion of the game. When you are looking to compete with a game as dominant as Modern Warfare 2, you should look at the qualities that make it success, the qualities that make it replayable. Having said that, 17 maps for a game like MAG should have been the bare minimum. Zipper obviously didn’t agree. There are twelve, yes, 12, maps to be had in MAG. That laughable number might have been acceptable back when we were playing Turok Evolution on split screens, but when you are trying to boast about a game that features 256 players in one game, you might want to give the game some content to put that amazing capability to use.

Complaining about the number of maps isn’t going to me anywhere, so I might as well get used to it. I mean, twelve maps isn’t SO bad, right? Wrong! Saying MAG has twelve maps is being generous. Let me explain. First things first, I think there are about 3-4 maps for training, but I did not include those into the twelve, as they are solely for training, only to be played by yourself. Now, there are four game types: suppression, sabotage, acquisition and domination. Here’s the kicker, while there are twelve maps, those twelve are organized so that there are three maps available to play on suppression, three maps available to play on sabotage, and so on and so forth. But WAIT!!! Suppression is essentially a training game type, in which you fight casually against your own faction only. It’s hard to even consider it a real game type. Unless you make a character with each faction, you can immediately eliminate two maps, as you will never play the two opposing forces’ suppression maps. So now we’re down to ten maps total. The remaining three game types make up the “meat and potatoes” of the game. I can promise you that once you are ranked highly enough to play sabotage, acquisition and domination, you will never return to suppression; let’s just call it three game types total.

As stated earlier, each game type has one map per faction. You’d expect each map to be completely different from the last one, like in MW2, Halo, Gears of War, etc… Each of those games featured very diverse maps. MAG, on the other hand, features three types of maps total. Valor’s three maps have a “country-green” theme, which never strays from being, well, country-green. SVER’s three maps have an outlandish red-haze theme that makes you feel like you’re fighting for control of Mars. Raven’s three maps have an urban rainforest theme. With one map a piece per game type, you’d think that they would make each map different in a way, but that’s simply not the case. While these maps are all similar, they are also enormous, which is both a pro and a con. The sheer size of the maps doesn’t even begin to make up for the sickening number of total maps, but it does account for more space than nine normal sized maps would account for. At the same time, the size of the maps makes spawning half a mile from any sort of action even more ridiculous, not to mention the long respawn times (anywhere from 5-20 seconds).

The three game types are, once again, sabotage, acquisition and domination. In sabotage, the invading faction tries to capture points A and B, and when that is complete, they invade a fort to plant charges and destroy point C; the other faction defends their points, obviously. This is the most fun game type in my opinion, and offers the most replay value. Sabotage features 32v32 battles. In acquisition, the invading faction tries to steal two enemy vehicle prototypes. Battles here are fought with 128 players, 64v64. In domination, the invading faction tries to secure “burnoff” towers and destroy as many enemy bases as possible. The game can end in one of two ways: the invading team can fill up the damage bar at the top of the screen, by destroying all points, or the defending team can defend for the entire time limit and be victorious. This is the big one, the 128v128, 256 player battle. What can be said about it? It is nothing more than a cluster of grenades exploding and bullets flying past your face. It’s actually too much. One time I couldn’t even leave my spawn point without being shot in the face instantly. That’s all there is as far as game types.

With nine maps between three game types, this game MUST have a sizable armory of various gun types, right? Wrong again. Off the top of my head, I can recall that there are about twelve to fourteen guns total. You have three main types: assault rifle (M4, AK-74, etc), sniper rifles and heavy machine guns. Then there are side weapons such as a pistol, sub machine gun and shotgun. A few launchers, such as an RPG, are available as well, but serve little purpose. The weapons are all very bland and non-distinctive. Gear items include your typical frag grenade, smoke grenade, medic-kit and repair-kit. I, personally, cannot get over the lack of content this game provides. It is an online-only game, so where did all of the focus go? I can see no area of the game that is flourishing. There are very few maps, and each map is similar to the last one; there are three game types that grow thin after a few hours, and the approach to guns makes it seem like the shooting part of first person shooter is second to something else.

Now that I’ve covered the content, or lack of content, rather, I need to talk about the gameplay. To me, MAG feels more like a computer game than a console game. More of a Counter-Strike than a Modern Warfare. You will find that your player moves very quickly and jumps quite athletically. Aiming your gun is quite difficult in this game; aiming down the sights of your gun is even more difficult. While you may find a sensitivity setting that allows you to aim comfortably from the hip, you will find no setting that allows for both optimal hip-fire and ADS fire; if you want to fire from the hip more accurately, your ADS fire will suffer, and vice versa. The reason for this is that your character will aim his gun very quickly from the hip, but when you enter the gun’s sights, it feels as though you’ve lowered your sensitivity to the lowest possible setting. How do you fix that? Normally you’d raise your overall sensitivity, but as stated before, that will make your hip-fire suffer. Zipper should have included a setting to adjust ADS sensitivity. The guns feel very weak, as by default the assault rifles will take about 8 bullets to kill; default sniper rifle takes 3 bullets, or one headshot to kill; and, well, the pistol will take a while. There is something you can do about this, but it still does not change the fact that a kill requires a LOT of bullets in MAG.

With each level you gain, you are rewarded with one skill point that can be spent on upgrading your character. You upgrade by category: assault rifles, athleticism, marksman, etc. This is a fair upgrading system; no complaints here. You are also given the option to “respec” your character, which eats up all of the respec points you’ve earned and gives you every skill point you’ve earned back to be spent differently. This was a great feature.

The questions preceding MAG’s release were not about the gameplay, however; they were about whether or not the servers could support that many players and still be playable. 256 players per server is quite a thing for a console to handle, but hats off to Zipper. I can fully say that you will be disappointed if you picked this game up expecting lag. The game runs as if it’s a single player game. It is as smooth as online gaming comes. I’ve had fewer problems with lag in this game than I have ever had with any other game. Seriously, Zipper needs to be credited here, because they blew away even the highest of expectations as far as connectivity goes.

I had such high expectations for MAG. I never let the fact that there could be server problems bug me, because I knew they wouldn’t release the game if it weren’t tested and ready to play. What I did not expect, however, was that the game would have such little content in the form of maps, guns and game types. I cannot stress it enough: if you’re going to make an online-only game, you better give us a real package, as far as the maps and guns go. I was expecting MAG to have upwards of 20 maps; 20+ DIVERSE maps, not three maps for three game types, in which each map is one color hue different from the last. I’m sure there will be downloadable content at some point, but I am not going to stick around only to be disappointed again. After about 25 hours of gameplay, I can safely say that I will never play MAG again. Can’t do it. Won’t do it. I was very tempted to give this 3/7, however, the fact that it runs as smoothly as it does makes it worthy of a 4/7.

TL;DR – Far too few maps and weapons for such an ambitious online based game. Runs surprisingly smoothly, but gets old fast.