Magenta has very little going for it as a military game. The game claims to be realistic rather than romantic, it is frankly neither.
The system is a pretty standard die stepping system, with some attempt made to spice it up a bit, with being able to push for more dice, risk for bigger dice, or breeze for more smaller dice with a chance of overwhelming success.
Magenta assumes all players have a main character who makes command decisions ranking from basic training recruit (really?) to General of the Army, but only in wartime (again really?), and a squad of four other supporting characters, who really do the dirty work. This is marginally interesting I guess, with the stated intent being that you are supposed to care about what happens to your semi-disposable mooks, and I guess that is where the drama is supposed to come in.
What baffles me the most about this game is that in a world where major powers have been at war for a decade, veterans abound, and actual military field manuals are freely available on most subjects to anybody with access to Google, this game completely fails to even remotely understand what soldiers do. For example Airborne Infantry are listed as Aerospace specialists, with bonuses in resisting G-forces and Aeronautics, rather than simply being the light infantrymen that they are. I was a paratrooper myself and I promise you I have never been in an airplane where resisting G-force was even relevant. This game is like being in a Tom Clancy novel where the characters aren't awesome.
It being a PWYW game, most of it's flaws can be forgiven at some level, I would not play the game as it was written, and I would be careful about what you pay for it until you have a chance to read it.
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