When MAG was announced back at E3 2008 I was super excited, I mean, who wasn’t? It boasted a HUGE 256 players shooting each other at the same time? Hell Yea! But then, like most of you, I started thinking of the ramifications a 256 match would entail. Luckily, Zipper Interactive (The fine fellows behind the original SOCOM series) were trying to promote positive teamwork in order to be successful formula on the battlefield of MAG, but we could all feel it from the start: Chaos, lone wolves, noobs, people without mic, all scrambling to figure out what to do...it was a mess.

After a few days with the MAG Beta, I can assure you that Zipper understands our concerns and goes a long way to make the MAG experience as simple, yet as deep as possible. Before you begin fragging your friends, you must choose from one of 3 mercenary companies which vie for control of contracts with warring nations. You can choose between the battle-hardened Americans from Valor, the high tech European fighting force of Raven, or the brutal veterans from Eastern Europe, SVER. Allegience to SVER was pledged and I jumped online.

I explored the barracks first, where you can upgrade your soldier and began studying all my options. The upgrades are divided into tiers, and by upgrading all the options in tier 1, you gain access to tier 2 upgrades. I decided I would focus primarily on assault rifles and my physical prowess. After the barracks, I jumped to the armory to check my loadouts. I had an assault rifle guy, a sniper, and a heavy weapons guy preloaded, and I tweaked them a little. The game gives you “cc points” which you allocated by adding attachments to your weapons, more grenades, armor type, or items such as the health pack or repair pack.

Having become relatively familiar with these two areas, I decided to jump into the abyss, so I chose deploy. Surprisingly, the game found players very quickly, and I was soon loading a 256 player map. “Let’s do this!”.

Obviously, my first game was very disappointing. I was lost, wasn’t really sure what to do and got killed a lot. I kept abandoning my squad (which I didn’t know existed) to try to assist other points that kept being captured. You see, when the game starts, you are either defending a compound, or attacking it. The game gives each squad a series of objectives to attack/defend, and the squad leader decides which of those objectives to assign FRAG0 to.

FRAG0 is an incentive for players to follow orders from their squad leader. If you kill a person, or disarm/plant a bomb, or complete bonus objectives inside the FRAG0 radius, you get double points. Being oblivious to this fact my first game, I didn’t earn a lot of points. One of the first things I noticed is that there was absolutely no lag. There were 256 people playing the game, yet never did my connection hiccup, never did I experience lag, and never did the fluidity of the game stall, very impressive especially because this is still Beta phase.

The second game played very similarly, but I began to understand the FRAG0 points, and stuck with my squad a little bit more. The third game, however, came as a revelation to me. Our squad leader seemed to already be experienced in the world of MAG, and proved to be incredibly helpful. He gave orders through the mics, and we followed them, 10 minutes into the game, we were still holding our first objectives, mowing down the hapless Raven goons with our bullets and bombs. That was the moment I thought: “Damn, this game is good”.

That game ended and I placed in the top 3 in my squad, and it felt good. I had killed 33 people and died 12 times, not bad for the third game. The game mechanics were making sense, and I was coordinating much more efficiently with my teammates: the game had hooked me. I played 2 more games (won 1, lost 1) and sadly the Beta session had ended for the day. I was disappointed, and I couldn’t wait to play again; in the interim, I could only think of the maps, and possible strategies to apply when I returned to the game, as well as which upgrades I would buy next.

Technically, the game feels like what you would expect from the Beta. My biggest gripe was the grenade physics, they feel clunky and their bounce effects are very strange, but aside from that, the controls feel incredibly intuitive and smooth, even though the weapons feel somewhat light. Keeping in mind this is only a Beta, I can see myself playing this a lot when it launches. Once you begin to understand the intricacies of the title, MAG becomes a pleasure to play, and I can safely say this is one of the best Betas I have been a part of. Keep your eyes on this game!

- supermave (mocospace)