Ever wondered what it would be like to play a game with 256 players? Sony's PS3-exclusive Massive Action Game (MAG), which is currently in Beta shows attempts to show you how.
Set in 2025, nations are at peace yet wars are still fought by Private Military Corporations (PMCs).
MAG makes you choose your alliance to one of the three PMCs: Valor, Raven or S.V.E.R. Although there is very little difference apart from their appearance, and slight disparities in guns, these are all balanced out to produce a fair playing field. While the maps are large, they are always busy. It doesn't take too long to find the best places to defend from and the best to attack from.
Size is where this game takes off. Imagine that you had over ten
MW2 games next to each other, but you could run between them; this gives you an understanding of both the map size, the number of players and the sheer amount of action going on.
At first all this does seem daunting; and initially I was unsure where to go and what to do. Before long I became accustomed to it. For me it felt slightly like being able to parachute in
Warhawk,
MAG has a more realistic feel, with far superior graphics.
The controls are responsive and feel light like
CoD, rather than the heaviness of a game such as
Kill Zone 2. If you’re a regular first-person shooter player, the controls are intuitive - cycling though weapons and equipment does take a long time at first, however. After a while it becomes natural but that said, for me it is sometimes slower than I wanted.
Although the beta has long waiting times to get into games, and very little to do until you’re in a game other than slightly customising your character, the wait is certainly made up for when you get to play. In the beta you can be waiting up to five minutes to join a game but when finally do join, they usually last for around 10-20 minutes. Customing your character is slightly limited with the usual set number of faces and voices but this doesn’t bring much of a dampener to the game the real.
You can also customise weapons and equipment: health regenerators and a fixing device are among the equipment you can take on the battlefield along with the usual grenade and rocket launcher. Guns can be upgraded by using experience points. Upgrades include: better optical sights, or grips for less recoil. But when adding them you have to balance these out against have, for example, less armour so you stay under the set limit your character can have.
While
MAG is close to 'LAG' in spelling that’s where the similarities end. With many online games, lag comes occasionally to all; even in games of only around 20 people, someone will often complain their connection wasn’t smooth. During my time and many fellow gamers’ times playing the
MAG beta there has been no experience of the dreaded lag, which is a pleasant surprise considering there’s 255 other players.
Graphics and the overall look of the beta were improved while it went along. The menu screens were revamped, and bugs that sometimes meant graphics-fail were fixed. You can feel the sounds of the game, if you speakers are loud enough, and the audio made sense with no apparent abnormal noises being heard while I played.
Overall this is going to be a massive exclusive in more ways than one for the PS3, with the feel, graphics, sounds and game-play all top notch. Although the aiting times are sometimes annoying the game itself makes up for it. I was able to score a beta, I'd give the beta 8/10.
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