In the year 2025, apparently wars will be so commonly fought that countries simply won't be able to support their own militaries. To step in and making fighting possible for all nations are the PMCs, or Private Military Corporations. There is Valor, a group that defines itself by courage and honor and centers in North America. Then there is Raven, a strictly business PMC that goes into war for profit rather than glory and hails from Europe. And finally there is SVER, a rag-tag group that just wants to fight coming mostly from Russia and the Middle East. When you first load up MAG you will be asked to pick one of these factions, and from that point on you are stuck with them until you either delete you profile or reach level 60. For the most part, the differences between factions are cosmetic. There might be a gun or two that is slightly more powerful for each faction, but the differences are small and balanced by other aspects like rate of fire and clip size. Your choice of faction should be determined mostly by which one your friends are in, or some completely arbitrary criteria if you don't have many PSN friends. Personally, I chose Raven because I wanted to hear mission briefings and in-game announcements with a British accent.

Once you join a faction it's time to create your character, and I must say I really enjoy MAG's take on character creation. As you play you will gain experience and levels, with each level earning you a skill point that can be used to unlock new weapons, weapon attachments, equipment, and passive skills. Rather than choosing a class and given options within those parameters, you are given the full skill tree at your disposal to make whatever class you want. Want a sniper with heavy armor and a rocket launcher? Go for it. An assault medic with mines? Sure, why not. In the end MAG will assign you a class designation, but it will be based on what tools you already use the most so it feels very natural to the experience. Now, there are some limitations so that you can't just go and create any type of character. Better weapons and equipment will cost more points in the skill tree, making them harder to unlock since you only get one skill point per level. Additionally, each weapon, weapon attachment, and piece of equipment takes up points in your loadout. You still have a lot of flexibility within your allotted loadout points, but it keeps the game balance by restricting a player from creating a tank character with heavy armor, three rocket launchers, and a medkit.

Speaking of medkits, they are a very important part of MAG. I've seen players threaten to boot others from matches for not having medkits on a few rare occasions. Once a player is down, as long as it wasn't an explosion or knife that killed them, they can be revived by any player with a medkit. Since I naturally am attracted to more of a support role, this has made MAG very rewarding since it's possible to still be a valuable member of the team even if you're not a great shot.

There are four multiplayer modes in MAG, though two are locked from the start. Right away you have access to the Suppression and Sabotage modes, the smallest of MAG's game modes with 64 players (32 per team). Suppression is your basic team deathmatch, and is the least fun or exciting of MAG's offerings. If you like team deathmatch it's there to give you the option, but after diving into the other game modes and getting a taste of MAG's more strategic depth, it's hard to go get excited about a no-frills team deathmatch mode.

Sabotage is your first real taste of MAG with two teams fighting for control points. One team is the attacker, trying to capture two locations simultaneously before moving on to plant a bomb at a third location. The other team takes a defensive role, trying to stop the attackers from capturing any points at all. Since both of the initial capture points need to be held at the same time, if the attackers only capture one the defensive team has a chance to get it back before the second point falls.

Once you reach level 4 you unlock Acquisition mode, which makes things a bit more complicated. It is a 128 player mode where the attacking team must capture two vehicles deep in the enemy base and drive them back to a transport helicopter while the defending team protects the vehicles or must destroy them if they are captured. In between the attackers and the target vehicles are respawn bunkers, radio towers, mortar cannons, and road blocks, all of which give the defending team an advantage but all of which can be destroyed by C4. The defending team can attempt to repair any of these destroyed structures, and the match becomes a delicate balance between defending/attacking smaller goals and the primary goal of the vehicles.

The final mode is Domination, the mighty 256 player mode, and is unlocked at level 10. As with the other modes, the two teams are split into smaller 8-player squads to make the chaos a bit more manageable, with each squad attacking or defending various points on an absolutely massive map. It incorporates elements from both Sabotage and Acquisition modes to make for a feeling of grand scale that I have never felt in an FPS before. I could easily double the length of this review talking about all of the goals and strategies of the Domination mode alone. Suffice it to say that when it works, Domination mode in MAG is the best multiplayer experience I've had in a videogame.

When it works. And that's the real issue that needs to be discussed here. If you've played online shooters before then you're probably cringing at the thought of trying to have 256 players work together for multiple simultaneous goals. That's where both the beauty and downfall of MAG begins. Once a player reaches level 15 they can apply for a leadership position on their team. As a squad leader, platoon leader, or Officer in Charge you can post objectives for your team, view a map of the battlefield to coordinate players, and call in vital support abilities like recon UAV and mortar strikes. If a squad leader is doing their job right, and communicating well with the team, then MAG is wonderful. But if you get a squad leader that doesn't know what they're doing, or even worse, doesn't have a headset, then you're in for a long, tedious match.

MAG is not a very noob-friedly game. Aside from the first two paragraphs of this review, almost none of that information is given to you in-game. You are left to figure it out for yourself, which could take several matches of wandering aimlessly. Luckily, in my experience, MAG players in general are a very helpful bunch. Since teamwork is so integral to success, my cries for help were almost always met with a teammate telling me to follow them or otherwise helpfully explaining what our current objective was. Sure there were a few times where my questions were left unanswered or ridiculed, but that was by far the minority of my time spent with MAG.

It would also seem that the average MAG player is far more mature than what you may encounter in games like Halo 3 and Modern Warfare 2. So far I've only encountered three people who used words like "f*g", and when I have voted to kick them from the game the rest of my squad has been more than happy to follow suit. I don't know if it's the fact that trash talk is pointless since you can only communicate with your own team, or whether the learning curve of MAG and reliance on teamwork is too much for the average simple-minded bigot to handle, but whatever the reason may be, MAG is one of the most LGBT-friendly shooters I've yet seen.

As much as I do enjoy the multiplayer experience of MAG, there are some issues that need to be mentioned. The controls take quite an adjustment to get used to. Weapons fire with R1 and switch with R2, with no option to change that control layout. Additionally, grenades are treated as equipment and must be equipped before use, unlike other shooters that have a designated grenade button. The HUD can also be confusing thanks to a cluttered radar. Most FPS games will have a section of the screen flash red to tell you where you're being shot from. Well in MAG you have little grey markers to tell you where other players near you are shooting, yellow for if they are shooting at you, and red for if they hit you. Again, this would probably be more manageable if the game actually conveyed that information at some point. The presentation is also lacking, with graphics that are mediocre (though this is made more acceptable considering the scale of some of the maps) and sound that hardly conveys a sense of weight behind the game's weapons.

The Shadow War aspect of the game, the persistent war between factions that had me most excited about MAG, is also somewhat of a disappointment. Yes, winning matches improves your faction's stake in a particular game mode, which provides you with leadership bonuses for that mode. But since each game mode is treated completely independent of the others there isn't as much of a unified sense of accomplishment. Victory in the Sabotage mode has no bearing on Acquisition or Domination, so once the more complex (and more fun) modes are unlocked there is little reason to play anything else. I suppose my disappointment stems primarily from wanting Zipper Interactive to have done more with the Shadow War aspect. What's in place works, but it could have been so much more. Maybe Chrome Hounds just spoiled me.

Most disappointing though is the lack of map variety. Each game mode has three maps, one for each faction. When playing on these maps you will always only see one side. As Raven, I will only ever defend on Raven maps, and only ever attack on Valor or SVER maps. With so little map variety it begins to get very, very repetitive. And though Domination maps are large enough that you can play them a few times and see different parts of the map, it's still extremely disappointing to pay full price for a multiplayer only game that has less level content than other shooters with both single and multiplayer modes. As I mentioned earlier, you can switch factions once you reach level 60 (which will be required to get all of MAG's gold trophies), so it is possible to see both sides of very map, but that still doesn't solve the problem that there just aren't enough maps to begin with.

One thing that isn't an issue though, is lag. Initially finding a match can take a while, my DS was never far from reach when trying to jump into matchmaking. But once you're playing it's smooth sailing for the whole match. That's a pretty impressive feat for a 256-player game.

All said and done, I really enjoyed MAG. In fact I'm still enjoying MAG, with it replacing Modern Warfare 2 as my online shooter of choice. It's a game that requires patience and a time commitment to really get into the meat of it and understand all that it has to offer, but those that put in the time will not be disappointed. There are faults, but the core gameplay and community of players are strong enough for the good to out-weight the bad. If you're looking for a great online shooter for the PS3, and a pretty LGBT-friendly one at that, then MAG comes highly recommended.

8/10
NOTE ABOUT THE SCORE: Subtract two points from that score if you play with a bad squad leader, or add one point if you play with a particularly good one. Yes, it makes that much of a difference.