MAG

As leader it's your choice whether to remove enemy air support so you can unlock a new spawn point deeper into the map, or focus on removing roadblocks to let vehicles through. And that choice can mean the difference between victory and defeat in the greater war.

Outside of combat, the game enjoys functional presentation that does little to celebrate or promote its underlying inventiveness. The interface for unlocking new skills is clunky and awkward to navigate, while menus are ugly and derivative.

When you first start the game you must decide, Steel Battalion-style, which of the game's three rival factions you're going to conscript with: the smart, black ops-style Raven, the ragtag terrorist-chic SVER or the orthodox US military Valor. The choice of faction is mostly a cosmetic one, without much difference in skills or tactical ability between the three. Even so, the option to customise your character's outfit based on their current level as in an RPG is as compelling in this context as it's ever been.

MAG, a purely multiplayer game, is designed to grow and settle with time. As such, the texture and tone of the experience will change over the coming weeks and months. In this first week ahead of release, everyone is learning, working their way up through the lower levels. There are relatively few people who have unlocked, for example, both the injector gun and the resuscitate skill to be able to use it on teammates. But in a week or two, as the community's skill base has broadened, so the tactical scope of entire armies will have deepened.

As with Planetside, to the casual onlooker MAG will look like a dumb free-for-all - a disappointment heightened by the mediocre FPS aspects to the experience. But invest time and the game opens up. It provides a unique and compelling vision for how multiplayer games of this size can use smart, informed system design to funnel and focus their players into easygoing yet rewarding strategy.

Despite the game's successes, there are times where the approach fails. In the Sabotage game mode especially, tussling to capture and defend one or two locations creates awkward, tiresome bottlenecks. But in general, MAG breaks impressive new ground and Zipper's ambitions have been met.

Its downfall is perhaps in failing to clothe its ingenuity in ways that will secure it the size of community it deserves, and in failing to match up to the heavyweights of the genre in terms of its basic gunplay. These drawbacks seem likely to reduce the game's population to a core of devotees, a future at odds with its everyman name.