MAG: Massive Action Game

Despite sounding like something you’d put on your car, MAG promises to be one of the biggest FPS games around. See if the following sentence excites you. MAG is a 256-player shooting game by Zipper Interactive, the company behind the majority of the SOCOM games. MAG is hopefully just a project name, standing for ‘Massive Action Game’. Sure it sounds cheesy as, but it is what it is.

A 256-player war game sounds like carnage, and that’s what is promised. That said, there will be some order to the madness as teams will be divided into eight-man squads. The squad leader can decide the team's objective, which will see many teams heading towards mission-critical waypoints. Some teams will go it alone, whereas others will join up and help each other out. What this means is that there will always be a heap going on and that strategy will be as important as good gun-slinging skills. To help everyone play nice, you get a lot more experience points working with your squad than if you go Rambo.

All this would be for nothing if the game didn’t deliver some amazing settings. Luckily, judging from early gameplay trailers, MAG takes place in some huge open-ended maps with towns full of detail and objects to use as cover. Each map will have a good many strategic locations making for interesting scenarios ranging from stealing vehicles from a base to taking out key gun emplacements. Of course, there will be a range of map sizes to accommodate smaller games.

Graphically the game looks more than competent. The graphics here will never be groundbreaking considering the amount of data the system and the servers need to crunch, but that said MAG does look good. Hopefully with the ground-up game engine created for MAG, movement will also be smooth to not destroy the sense of realism the graphics convey.

Often when a game promises as much as MAG, it’s easy to be sceptical, but with veterans of the genre behind the helm this game may just live up to the hype. And although a 256-player game may sound daunting, jumping in with a team of seven buddies sounds like a huge amount of fun!