MAG: A Sniper’s Eye View

I’m a bush. A very deadly bush with a suppressed sniper rifle. Picking off anyone who gets within 2 feet of the stairs to our bunker. Unfortunately someone has spotted the deadly bush-that-I-am and is sprinting round behind me. His burst of speed makes him visible on my radar and I spot the blip. I stop, drop and crawl away – making not even the slightest noise through the mic to give myself away. I crawl round behind him as he stands over the bush-that-was-me wondering, vocally, where the hell I went. I knife him in the back. Then I take his gun ( I was almost out of ammo anyway ) and kill his mates with it.

Deep.

Ambitious.

Cavernous.

Massive. Action. Game.

Big simply doesn’t cut it with MAG. Big is peanuts to MAG. MAG is huge. MAG is vast. If you ask me, MAG is one of the most important shooters to be made in recent times. If nothing else it shows that console gamers can cope with vast. They can cope with massive and that, done right, Chaos is not Invention’s evil twin. Its mother would be proud…

Let’s get one thing straight from the off. I have a very limited attention span. I often half-jest that it’s about 40 hours long, then I get bored and move on. It’s only a half joke though. Dragon Age is a prime example, 40 hours in I’m only halfway through and can’t now bear to crank the thing up again. This is a worry when it comes to big hardcore games as, generally, I don’t have the time or the will to persevere with them ( Demon’s Souls being my one exception ). It’s especially a worry with a game that possesses a gaping time-maw like MAG’s.

From the detail and size of the maps to the beautifully well thought out progression system. It all deserves so much more time than any reviewer, amateur or otherwise, could possibly give it. In fact it’s so cavernous that there is almost no way to do the whole game justice in one review. Doing so would lead to skimming of important detail or be a tome the size of War and Peace. Neither option is palatable to me, so I’m going to concentrate on my particular speciality and hope that it gives you a taste of the incredible, overwhelming depth available to those willing to put some effort into the game.

My speciality? I’m a camping git. I am a sniper. I’m not just a sniper though, I’m a Raven sniper. And that my friend, makes me a fucking ninja. Well now I am. The first 15 hours or so? I was a cowering little dormouse. In fact for the first 5 hours I was a bullet magnet until I finally learned not to rush in with the rest of the squad, instead giving them support from the rear. Picking off as many of their foes as I possibly could before they reached each other. Now I’ve  nearly hit 50 hours and I dinged 1000 kills with the sniper rifle long ago. I’m still learning new tricks and being spawned in new areas of the maps available to me. And crucially… I’m not bored. Not even slightly.

But let’s get some basics out of the way first. When you first load up MAG you’re faced with a tough choice. Which faction should you fight for? RAVEN, VALOR or SVER? For some it won’t be much of a choice as they’ll simply choose the faction their mates are fighting for. Nonetheless it’s a commitment. You only have one save attached to your PSN profile. If you want to join another faction you have to delete that save and start again, losing all your XP when you do it. It makes a statement about what the game expects of you right from the off. It expects your heart and soul. If you want to do well, then you need to persevere. It points it’s finger at you and says “We want YOU”. In my case from that moment forward the Shadow War, and RAVEN, had a dedicated recruit.

The differences between the factions are actually surprisingly marked. The blurb says that RAVEN has the high-tech advantage, VALOR is battlefield proven with more diverse tactics available to them, and SVER is more guerilla warfare focussed. I’m not sure how much of that is just marketing spiel but I did pick up an enemy sniper rifle from a rival’s corpse recently to find it completely different to the weapons I have access to. It had an amazing fire rate balanced by a lack of bullet capacity. It went through 100 bullets in about 10 seconds, guaranteeing a medium range kill but making you visible and defenceless. It’s a hit and run rifle. Forcing a different style of gameplay more akin to the guerilla warfare the blurb mentions. The RAVEN sniper is less visible, forced to be much more thoughtful about his sniping spots. Less mobile, perhaps, but a lot more precise. It’s all very clever if you ask me.

After that it’s a case of being gradually introduced to the game modes and slowly finding a specialisation that fits you. To start with you’ll probably have access to only the Suppression mode, which is small beer for MAG. 32 player team deathmatch and one map. This is considered the training area for each faction, so as a RAVEN member you would only play against other RAVEN players. It’s still big enough to require some learning but with a level or two under your belt you should feel comfortable enough to move on to one of the larger, newly unlocked modes where the meat of the game really lies.

First up – Sabotage. 32 vs 32, faction vs faction attack and defend. As is the case with all the large scale modes, each faction has it’s own home map. That map is the one you defend. Whenever you play on an away map you attack. This means you always start at the same end of each map. That might seem like a recipe for boredom but for me it’s an anchor point. The maps are so large, so well designed and detailed that if not for some familiarity in the spawn points they’d be all but impossible to learn. The design of a Sabotage map splits the 32 man platoon into 2 sections each consisting of 2 squads of 8. You can go anywhere you like in the map but are likely to have orders to defend either point A or point B. Should A and B both fall  then the attackers are allowed to push on to point C. Detonate explosives there and it’s game over. It’s a beautifully simple structure which ( combined with great map design ) really emphasises the need to think tactically.

Incentives are in place to keep squads together and “on message” too; any decent squad leader will use those incentives effectively, allowing squad-mates to get bonus XP for downing enemies and healing allies within a designated area. It’s very effective as a tool to promote teamwork and for the most part works really well. I’ve found myself in a real groove here. Light, suppressed rifle, and mines equipped along with Medikit. Acoustic locator ( a device which shows long distance shots on your HUD ) sacrificed so that I can get everything in within the weight limit. A weight limit which seems fine to begin with, I might add, but soon forces you to make some critical decisions about what kit you unlock and carry, and how you might specialise. When defending, I sprint to place my mines at our bunker, rush to reload with fresh mines, dart back to comfy sniper spot and start to pick off the incoming enemy. Any that get past me or my squad get nailed by the mines, at which point I rush back to replace them. In between I’m darting out to bring people back to life, saving them the wait and long run involved in respawning. It all works rather nicely, most of the time.

Acquisition is the next mode. 128 players in a 64 v 64 skirmish in which the attackers have to steal two well guarded vehicles. To do this they have to break through a well structured defence of gates, bunkers, AA guns, and all sorts of other great gizmos which are put to use by the chain of command from squad leader to platoon leader to commander. It’s something I’d love to get my hands on but at the moment I feel a sniper is the wrong class to be in command. Not in the thick of things, it feels wrong to be throwing my squad-mates into the fray. Also as a sniper you quite often have to stay silent to avoid alerting nearby enemies to your presence ( proximity voice is used to great effect here ) and a good squad leader is generally fairly vocal. My main role in Acquisition mode has evolved over time. Generally tooled up with a repair kit or mines I’m either repairing damage or protecting the bunker that we initially spawn from whilst using the high position next to the attached gun turret to try and pick off enemy infiltrators from. It’s an interesting role which requires a beady eye on everything around me including nearby AA guns which may need repairing.

Finally there’s the bad boy. Domination – a 256 player, 128 vs 128 mode in which each side is trying to occupy as many designated areas as possible ( oil supply has a lot to with these maps iirc ). The team gets split up into 32 player platoons which in turn get split into 8 player squads. The chain of command keeps things orderly and while you feel part of a massive battle you tend not to feel lost. Admittedly my first couple of games did feel a bit bewildering and I’ve still not settled into a routine on the domination maps but a good leader and a commander with tactical nouse can make it feel like you really are part of something; a feature of the game which will only get enhanced with time. As the players gain experience the tactics will mature and what you will have is a very elegant combination of FPS and RTS. It is imo, a positive way forward for two genres that have shown signs of stagnating over recent years ( I know the sales say otherwise but in my opinion FPS gameplay has moved on very little in the last couple of years ).

For the most part I’ve stuck to Sabotage recently. A desire to learn the maps properly led me to focus on one mode and as I’ve done that I’ve come to notice an almost fractal level of detail in the design. The closer you look the more you see. Little dips in the ridge-line perfect for sniping; sneaky little routes round the back of enemy bases; roofs that you thought you couldn’t reach are actually reachable if you steer hard enough when parachuting in. Heck I found a new camping spot the other day that I ran past every day since launch. It was only when I saw the enemy there that I decided to work out how the hell he got up there.

Everywhere you look, if you look hard enough, there’s a piece of design which can gain you an advantage. It’s  mind-boggling to contemplate, and that’s on the 64 player maps. The 256 player ones are going to take months to learn. Heck, they’re so big that I’m still on occasion spawning in areas that I’d never encountered before. 50 hours in, that’s really something.

MAG is the most rewarding game I’ve ever played. After 30 levels I’ve finally nailed the Most Valuable Player award on a couple of matches and my after-match score has tripled on average. I know the nooks and crannies now; I feel comfortable darting out from my sniper spots to replace mines, heal squad-mates and so on. I feel in control;  MAG is at it’s most beautiful when you feel like that. In fact MAG is a master-class in control. So many chaotic elements. 256 of them to be exact, sometimes mouthy, sometimes borderline sociopaths ( but remarkably, mostly really decent people who want to work as a team ) and still they manage to impose this beautiful structure on it. Look at it this way. I’m so intolerant of fools I generally go into anaphylactic shock when I hear one, yet I use my mic all the time with MAG.  Zipper deserve accolades for this. They won’t get them, but they deserve them.

I see an assault gunner pointing his rifle out of a church window.  I sneak under his nose outside the window unseen as he lets rip at my team-mates. Quickly, I pop two bullets between his eyes and run round to the church door, knowing there will be more inside. I crouch and dart inside, turning and knifing two more guys before they have a chance to pull the trigger. Without stopping I run to the bottom of the bell-tower and insert a suppressed ( an unlock I worked hard to get ) sniper bullet in the back of an enemy sniper’s head. Before I head up the ladder I deploy two mines either side of the bell-tower. I climb up out of the window and onto the roof. As I pick off a couple of snipers from across the map I hear an explosion. Someone had rushed in to wreak their revenge on me, only to be greeted by the mines I had placed earlier. You could probably see my grin from space.

If you’re looking for a squad then look no further. We’ve been playing most nights of late so the more the merrier. Simply sign up to the forum and shout out here.