You really do have to applaud Zipper Interactive and thier support of Massive Action Game, better known as MAG.
Despite it's horribly generic title, Zipper has managed to create what I feel is one of the most progressive first person shooters of this generation. How many FPS games can you say that about?
What did Killzone 2 do to change FPS other than just up the graphics ante? Modern Warfare 2 taught us all how to throw rage-fits in a new, violent way. Crysis, while beautiful, comes across as just another FPS with zany abilities and a meh story.
In many ways, the FPS genre just hasn't moved forward much this generation.
What more can you really do with a first person view point and a gun?
Perhaps MAG's charm is in the fact that it doesn't try to change the core values of the FPS, but instead takes the part everyone loves the most -- the multiplayer -- and creates what we've all wanted to experience on our couches since the first "modern era weapons" FPS game came out.
War. Safe war. You know, war where you can't really die, but you want to "experience" what is really going on "over there". (Note: yes, MAG is far from "what's going on over there" but you get the point.)
Fighting on a battlefield with 256 people is an absolute blast. Zipper found way to make it work, make it run smoothly, and best of all, keep it intimate. You'll see the same competitors over and over again, but the scale of size means that you'll see them in very different situations.
Think about how in MW2 you might get camped and know you can just get an easy kill in a camp spot. MAG remedies that with it's massive map. You COULD camp, but it's not going to last long, and when you do run into an old foe again, it's likely to mean something; perhaps it to save a checkpoint or defend an APC.
It's a simple idea. Make the battlefield bigger and with more people and some PC FPS games have tried, but MAG brings it to the consoles and executes it.
The game also brings the maps to life with the havoc you've wrecked smoldering around you. When a match starts a somewhat calm oil refinery turns into a fiery, smoking inferno where you might get killed standing around to admire the destruction the game has caused.
And there's more on the way.
Zipper hasn't shown signs of abandoning the game and even introduced controls for the Playstation Move.
MAG isn't revolutionary in that it's introduced new gameplay elements, but more so in that it's changed the way we should see next-generation multiplayer.
Somehow, eight versus eight doesn't feel much like "war" anymore when you've experienced the war-torn battlefields of MAG.
It's far from perfect, but if you fancy shooting games or experiencing ground-breaking ideas, MAG's still kicking butt even nine months after its release.