Don't believe the Halo/CoD hacks or most of the critic reviews. This is the best MP shooter out there right now!
This is why MAG is so good. The pimply-faced nerds who get hard-ons camping spawns or going Rambo in CoD aren't going to have fun with this game. You have to actually think about what you're doing. You have to be aware of what's going on around you. If you want to camp out and snipe people, you certainly can, but it will never take long for the opposition to take you down, whether with an RPG or just by flanking you. Unless you know your team is covering your flanks and you've got suppressive fire to complement your sniping, your camping will be short-lived.
Teamplay and community are bigger in this game than any other game out there right now.
The great part about this game is the maps are big enough that there are always different ways to tackle situations. They're extremely well designed and the battles feel very fluid. You'll constantly be attacked from different angles and you'll rarely get caught up in the mexican standoffs and choke-points that a lot of other team based play gets bogged down in. Yes, you can have up to 256 players on one map, but the maps are big enough to make sure that the whole thing can't be covered at once.
The biggest criticisms I see for this game are the graphics and the actual gameplay. As far as graphics go, no, it doesn't look as good as Crysis or Killzone, or even MW2, but it still looks great and does everything it needs to do. The players look realistic. The guns, explosions and effects look realistic and I don't know what else you really need to know about it. In my opinion, the graphics are actually better than I thought they could manage with so many people online at the same time.
Next are the gameplay criticisms coming from the review sites. In this I REALLY don't understand what the hell any of them are talking about. Personally I don't see many differences from other good shooters out there. Your weapons fire realistically (recoil especially) and people die when you shoot them. The only things that are different from this compared to MW maybe are the following:
1. There's no auto regenerating health. OMG. This means that now you'll have to actually pull out a medkit and heal yourself.
2. You don't get retarded kill streak awards. I'm not sure why people thought it was compelling/intelligent design to be able to launch a predator strke or to unleash war dogs on the enemy simply because you killed a few people in a row, but I certainly don't miss it here.
3. You can't run around all rambo-like and survive. You get tooled. The other team can and will work together and make you look stupid.
4. The maps are bigger. This makes the fights more realistic and make more sense. Instead of throwing a bunch of adolescents into a tiny playing area that makes no sense at all to run around shooting each other point blank, players have to watch what's going on and communicate with their team. I think that's a good thing.
5. The games are about WINNING. WINNING is now the objective rather than padding your stats. To me this makes the game 10x more compelling and so much more fun as a result. I don't feel like I'm playing with a bunch of kids whose self-esteem are tied in completely with what their K/D ratio is. Thank God.
I strongly urge anyone who's thinking about this game to try it out. I've played every big MP shooter out there for 360, PC and PS3 and this is the best one I've ever played. The review sites are riding Activision's pole so hard they weren't objectively reviewing this game at all.