MAG Beta

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

So as my highly inspired title says, the MAG Beta just became available on the psn. I downloaded, installed it, downloaded the patch (already??) installed that, then waited an hour for it to download MORE updates, thennn.... waited another 10 minutes trying to sign into a single game before finally being able to play it.

And it plays ok, to be honest. Feels like a cross between Killzone 2 and CoD, with the formers weighty feel and the latters near instant death if you fail to spot someone in the bushes 50 feet away, but not quite so harsh. This is of course, when you're not spending most of the game running all the way across fairly massive levels to get to the next objective, which you'll do a LOT. Honestly they could have made every area like 100 metres smaller and you'd still respawn a mile from where you need to be and it's not helped by the fact that you can only respawn a specific intervals of about 15 seconds, so if you die, change class, miss the next respawn window, you have to wait for the next one.

Also the weapon switching is really quite slow and cumbersome, with primary and secondary weapons allocated to r2 and ALL other items on the l2, including grenades, medpacks, repair kits, and nade launchers. So if you want to quickly throw out a grenade you might have to press r2 twice just to cycle through all the kit you have and then still have to hit r1 to throw it, by which time you're likely dead already. I suppose you could just carry one item to make it easier, but then you're lacking extra items which you might need. As it is I haven't been throwing many grenades.

Aside from all these niggles though the game plays... ok I guess, and there's certainly a good deal of customisabilty with the classes you can make, the weapons and items you can use and the things you can upgrade. Overall I'm a little more interested in this now.

So, anyone else been playing?

[Bells]

How about the scope of the battles? Have you played a game in a full room? Any lags? Since the "catch" is that you're playing with a ton of people, what's that like?

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Well so far most of the game modes are locked out, I'm presuming because I'm only level 4, so I can only join games with 64 people in. There has been a bit of lag here and there, but only when lots of people respawn together at once, it kinda gets confused as to who is supposed to be occupying the space so you get a bit jostled, but other than that it runs fine.

You don't really notice how many people there are in the game to be honest, with the maps being so huge the fighting is often quite spread out, and as people die they do have that pretty long wait between respawns so that keeps the numbers down. It doesn't feel as if there's as many people running around as there actually is, though this probably changes once you add a couple hundred more to each game later on.