If you had asked me two years ago to define the characteristic that separated a multiplayer shooter from a massively multiplayer online role playing game, I probably wouldn’t have had much of a problem. However, now that I’ve seen MAG in action, I haven’t the faintest idea how to make that distinction, and I’m not quite certain the difference even exists anymore.

When MAG first debuted on the scene back at E3 2008, it appeared under the title of MAG: Massive Action Game, and even though the latter half of the title has been dropped (thank god), it still completely lives up to that lofty adjective. MAG is truly “massive.”

Perhaps MAG’s greatest strength and greatest weakness is that actually playing the game isn’t very much different than playing your everyday 16-player multiplayer match. It’s extremely well executed, and very fun, but it’s essentially not very different. This is a great thing because it allows players to enjoy themselves without having to be burdened by the huge amount of other goings-on across the rest of the battlefield.

But it’s also a crippling fault in some respects. Unless you’re playing as a higher ranking officer (which only a handful out of the 256 players will be) you’ll be playing a grunt soldier who plays similarly to other multiplayer FPSs. If you’re one of those people, you may find yourself saying, “sure this is impressive, but what’s the difference? Who cares if it’s 256 players when I’ll only ever even see 50 or so.”