Well this is pretty much what we are going to get with the final release so I thought I would write a little review.
Presentation
Lets face it the graphics are not that good though they are a fairly impressive for agame of this magnitude.Some textures look prettybad and theworst part is the foliage which looks horrible.The biggest issue in this department is animations. The running and jumping animations are stiff and look pretty bad. The character models actually look pretty decent. I do really like how the menus look and how the background is diffrent depending on the PMC you chose.The visuals in MAG aren't that great but they don't take away from the gameplay.
Gameplay
Here is were online shooters make their money and MAG doesn't disappoint the gun play is great. It doesn't take a whole clip to kill someone but it doesn't take 2 hits like a CoD. The gunplay is smooth andfeels great. MAGs selling point is its large scale battle. 256 player battles has never been done before on consoles and MAG does it without any LAG or slowdowns. Another big selling point is the 3 playable PMCs. Unfortunately the differences between the PMCs are just cosmetic. The guns are just reskinned andif the weapons do have any diffrences they are hardly noticable. All the PMCs have the same equipment and Upgrades. I love the RPG like skill tree used to upgrade it always countless combinations to custumize your soldier. The thing is you will be custumizing with the diffrent skills not weapons themselves becuase the weapons in this game are limited. There is 3 assualt rifles( 1 being useless) 1 smg 2 pistols 3 sniper rifles(Only 1 is really useful)3 lmgs and 2 pistols. Im not asking for 50 diffrent guns but having more then 2 or 3 per group would be nice.The Gamplay in MAG is very good but a few things really ruin this experience.
The 2 biggest selling points in MAG are 256 and 3 PMCs the problem is these things are what hurts MAG the most. First 256 sounds great but in reality the way the maps are divided you never really get to see the all 256 in one area. Instead of having a large 256 player battle the map is broken into 4 smaller battles.Another reason 256 hurtsis becauseMAG is a team game first and its hard to get 8 people to use teamwork in most games. In MAG you have to get 128 people to work together which is not realistic. The excellent command system does help this butit doesnt solve the problem.If you play domination your squad could dominate but you have to relay on the 3 other platoons to do their work. The 3 PMCs also hurt MAG greatly since each PMC can only defend their own map this leads to certain teams having advantages. Also if you have friends on other factions you cannot play with them. Some maps are harder or easier to defend then other certain factions a large advantage. If you could attack and defend all maps this would be solved.
Another problem with MAG is its very repetitive. Yea their are 12 maps I think but there is only 3 per game mode. This game is meant to be played 256 in domination but you will only play the 3 domination maps. You will never get to play those 9 other maps if you like to play dominaiton. To add to that you only defend your map and never get todefend the other maps so that even limits the experiance even further. There is only 4 game modes suppression, sabotage, acquisition, and domination. 4 game modes sounds great but at the end of the day they are all aside from suppression attack and defend variants. All of those game modes involve one team attacking somewhere and another team camping that spot. Another problem is the timer. In sabotage the timer is 20 minutes long. If your defending there is no way for you to stop the timer. If you are dominating the other team you are left to spawn camp for 20 mins. Maybe if they had the timer 10 minutes then you get a additional 10 minutes when you capture the first objective.
Conclusion
MAG has great gameplay and a ton of potential and had many great new ideas like command, 256, and different playable factions but they were not executed very well and they created to many problems. At the end of the day 256 players is a gimmick that hurts the experaince more then helps it.If they make MAG 2 and fix some of these problemsI will be the first in line but this game as is has to many problems.
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