Shooting people is one of my favourite gaming pass times, in the face, groin or rather often the knee. I’m usually not to bothered by where as long as some damage is inflicted and I feel like I am at least getting my kicks in before the other guy (who is overly proficient at online shooters) gets some lead through my head. So you would think that a game dedicated only to the online shooting, with massive teams and large battle fields, would be right up my barrel. MAG, it seems, might not have been my cup of tea right from the start.
The collaboration between Zipper Studios and Sony resulted in a fairly ambitious announcement 2 years ago, 256 players in the same game, battling it out on in an online arena all created by the all powerful 4th dimension creating PS3. Fanboys howled with glee while the PR machine went into overdrive trying to convince the gaming public that bigger, in terms of scale, is most assuredly better.
When you fire up MAG you will be greeted with the option of choosing your faction, the team that you will be fighting with to assert PMC supremacy. After which there is a quick control familiarisation tutorial that teaches you the ropes. Once completed there is then a series of less than full size training skirmishes that include up to 64 people.
Once level 8 is reached your character will be able to join in the full sized skirmishes, 128 players on each side, that’s a lot of people, if you have every seen a mass of ants scrambling you might get an idea of what happens. People moving across the entire battle field towards the various objectives, trying to gain a little ground, destroy one fixed utility, revive a fallen comrade. The partitioning of squads is a good start to organising the mess, the voice coms become more important than any other game available.
My main problem with the game came from the slow build up, not just slow, but almost totourous. The limitation of weapons, the inability to keep pace with heavily armed enemies, it’s just not fun. At some point in development the focus moved away from fun and towards the grind of what you might expect from an RPG. Some of the blame for this may well be placed on the shoulders of the popular Modern Warfare, unlocking extra abilities and guns seems to have carried over to being the norm, if not, an expectation.
The thing is, I don’t want to have to play a game for 5 hours before a get something resembling an accurate weapon. This seems to be what Zipper think will add longevity to the online experience, it however shortened mine. It is also why this review might be a little shorter than I might have hoped, I just couldn’t bring myself to play it any longer than I did. There are games far more interesting that are waiting for me to thrash at the moment.
Closing Comments
If you have plenty of disposable time then perhaps this is something that you might not have an issue with, but as it is, I do not feel the pavlovian response to continue when drip fed pieces of a game.
