MAG Is like nothing you will ever play, it does what it does well, and has got a whole lot more to it than meets the eye
First lets start with the back-story of MAG. The year is 2025 and raw materials such as oil are scarce and government's are hiring PMC's to do their dirty work for them under the radar of the media and the general population, in turn this causes PMC's to start competing for contracts this competitiveness fuels a war called the "Shadow War" This war is between the "Big Three" PMC's called Valour Company (North America and Britain) S.V.E.R or Seryi Volk Excecutive Response (Middle east, Russia and Asia) and Raven (Germany, Austria and central Europe) You are part of one of these PMC's of your choosing, you start of as a rookie but through time you can rise up through the ranks to become a true leader.
Lets start from the basics here. MAG is a FPS you cant put it into any other genre if you wanted to, The shooter elements of this release are solid with many of the controls to which you are probably familiar to. The style of the game play is greatly reminiscent of such games as Call Of Duty and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, but it feels different from any other shooter, almost every enemy you face has a different gun from you, they all go down quicker or slower depending on their armour, skills and base health etc. You can attach an array of different attachments to your given weapon which can make game-play much more varied
Enemies do not go down as fast as other shooters which means you have to choose different ways to approach an enemy sometimes which makes it almost strategic. So in short the FPS aspect of MAG is solid but not similar to most FPS's out there.
The Chain Of Command element of MAG is very well implemented in my opinion, and is not just some tacked on Leadership mode where anyone can just press the "Massive Destruction Button" and hope for the best.
Each team isn't just 256 players running at each-other in one big middle of the map skirmish. The game is squad based combat where different people tackle different obstacles at different parts of the map.
Each squad is given a squad leader their job is to set objectives for the squad, when a squad leader sets an objective you gain frago if you are near it or trying to capture it this gives you double the points for whatever exp you may earn. Above that there is the Platoon leader, this is the leader of 32 players you lose the ability to set objectives but gain much more powerful abilities in the process that will greatly assist your team or greatly hinder the opposition. At the top is the Company leader (the guy in charge) This role is designed for the strategy fans out there, you lose abilities that will kill other players but you gain abilities that will, fro example disable the enemies assets, slow down their spawns and refresh your teams abilities you also gain some sweet abilities such as automatic health regeneration.
There is 8 people in a squad, 4 squads of 8 each make up a platoon which is 32 players Four of these platoons of 32 make up a company consisting of 256 players. There is four game modes (five if you have purchased the Interdiction expansion) Suppression is a training excersise where two platoons of the same PMC battle it out in a sort of team death-match mode where your goal is to deplete the enemies bar by killing them there is no frago in this mode. sabotage has the same amount of players but your objective here is to capture two data centres and when that is done push onto the main data centre and destroy it, the other teams goal is to defend this for as long as they can, you capture them by putting explosives on it and waiting until it explodes this mode has frago. The next step up is Acquisition, this mode has 128 players (64 on each side) your goal in this is to steal two of the enemies experimental vehicles and bring them back to a LZ where they will be airlifted off. The biggest mode of them all is Domination and it does exactly what it says on the tin. Your goal here is to Completely decimate an enemies fuel supply base To do this you must first capture a ring of Burn-off towers and cooling towers then push into the heart of the base where there is 8 objectives labelled A-H. you can capture only two of these depending on which squad you are in. This is the only mode where a company leader slot is available.
MAG is a level based game where you get experience for capturing specific objectives and killing other enemies or repairing/ healing team-mates. This means you do not have to go on a rampage to gain experience instead you can do some field support and help your team.
MAG features a talent tree (you may hear this from other games such as World Of Warcraft) Where when you level up you gain a skill point to spend on the talent tree each "branch" features a host of specific abilities, you need to spend two skill points on one section of the branch to move on. Some of these branches feature weapons, field equipment, character enhancements or new play styles such as sniper rifles and heavy machine guns.
The presentation of MAG is nothing special this is mainly because Zipper included so much content that increasing the graphics to say call of duty would probably lead to much given lag.
In conclusion MAG is a game where even though it has some major flaws it greatly shines in what it dos best.