GAME REVIEW

MAG: A massively addictive game

February 6, 2010

Darren Zenko

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

 

Confession time, dear reader: I am a diehard single-player gamer. I game as George Thorogood drinks – alone. I do understand online gaming, its lingo and guilds and raids, but I understand it in the same way a beer-league defenceman understands pro hockey.

The last multiplayer game into which I put a significant amount of time (200-plus hours) was Duke Nukem, back in the '90s. It's with this thin background that I stepped into the multiplayer martial meat-grinder of MAG.

I ought to explain my beef with multiplayer. It's not that I don't like it, but that I like it too much. I know my psychology and know where my potential addictions lie, having felt their touch. Late nights shading into mornings with text-based dungeon crawls in the early `90s, the aforementioned Duke death-match kick, flirtations with Ultima Online and Fantasy Star Online ... so seductive. If I let myself get too deep – God forbid I install World of Warcraft – I'm gone. Even after a relatively scanty 15 hours with MAG, I felt those hooks in my heart.

This despite my relative newbiedom. MAG is, in fact, quite a newbie-friendly game. The "M" in the title stands for "Massive" – the rest is "Action Game" – with up to 256 virtual mercenaries duking it out in some battles, and with this much going on the focus is on group tactics rather than individual deathmatch-style heroism.

For a rookie, there's something liberating in being just one of dozens of nearly anonymous pieces of meat rather than a sore-thumb liability/victim. Follow-the-leader is the name of the game, and you learn quick.

And even when you cluelessly blunder into a firing lane, you're kind of helping out: those five snipers that shot your green butt off just gave their positions away.

So, I had a lot of fun. The maps that support so many players are big and varied, filled with tunnels and lookouts, tactical opportunities or liabilities depending on where you're standing, and moving through them is smooth and solid. MAG's no-frills first-person-shooter controls don't get in the way of all the crouching, crawling, dashing and shoot-shoot-shooting you'll be doing.

It's a good gateway – or re-entry – drug.

And this is a problem.

The good gameplay and unexpected friendliness of the "massive" style combine with a role playing game-style character development system to really get my addiction-ready dopamine receptors howling. Add a hook – a global mercenary war in which your efforts may turn the tide – that makes play feel like responsibility, and a player culture that seems pleasantly light on the racism/misogyny/homophobia that's turned me off death-matching in the past, and MAG has the makings of a life-wrecker.

If only there was a single-player campaign to take the edge off.

Toronto Star

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