Getting ramped up for Halo 3: ODST next week, I’ve been getting my fix of first person shooters lately. I mean come on; I can’t show up on Xbox live and look like a noob on launch day. Well September 1st, Timegate Studios and SouthPeak Interactive released Section 8, and after watching the trailer, man was I excited to test out this Halo lookalike. Well after playing it for a bit I found that while it has a single player campaign, Section 8 was clearly designed to be a multiplayer game. In fact, they probably should have stated something about that right on the front of the box. Let’s check it out; you’ll see what I mean.
In the modern military, the term “Section 8” refers to a discharge of personnel due to a mental illness. In the game, “Section 8” refers to the group of soldiers who are perceived as insane by the military due to their near-suicidal missions. You are the elite of the United States Imperial Forces, the crazy bastards that can do what no other soldier can. Upon starting the campaign, you take on the role of Alex Corde, a newbie in the 8th armored infantry soldiers of Section 8, about to take part in a mission on New Madrid. After being shot out of your space ship, you land and all hell breaks loose as your team eventually gets wiped out by an ex-member of the 8th armored, turned rogue, named Sorren.
Being that inter-stellar travel is now possible, humans are working to colonize the far reaches of space. Keep in mind that the great distance and vastness of space still stalls communications and more importantly, time to send reinforcements. Sorren and his army, The Arm of Orion, take advantage of this and make strikes on new colonies to establish bases of their own. Being the sole survivor of his first onslaught, you vow to avenge your fallen soldiers, and begin to hunt down and stop Sorren and “The Arm.”
The actual length of the single player campaign is only about 4 hours, which is why I believe this game was really designed just for multiplayer. The campaign itself really only teaches you how to play and gets you accustomed to what you are going to see in the online matches. If you don’t have Xbox Live, do not buy this game, you’ll be wasting your money.
You’ll take part in a variety of different levels broken down into several small sub-levels. Once you move to multiplayer, you actually see that all of the maps that you played on in single player are the same maps that you’ll be playing on. Luckily, there are a TON of them.
Section 8 reminds me of a combination of Halo, Team Fortress 2 and Frontlines: Fuel of War. Of course you’re a space marine in the future, but you actually have different classes that you can play as that have different abilities and bonuses. The only game type supported is an objective based territories match where there are multiple bases on the map and you’ve got to hold them all as long as you can. The online battles support 16v16 and fill in any empty slots with bots.
A neat feature I found was that you can actually host your own server by using a windows-based hosting product called X-Server. This way you can administer your own games if you’d like and only allow your friends to play with you.
You’ll find that Section 8 is pretty challenging most of the time, but luckily you have unlimited lives. There is a pretty elegant achievement system built in that rewards you for all kinds of things like 30 kills with each type of gun, killing sprees and some miscellaneous crazy stuff.
Section 8 is of course a first person shooter, but it’s got a very unique feel to it. I absolutely loved playing the multiplayer, as your game experience varies greatly with the different people that you play with.
There is a defined set of classes like Recon, Infiltrator, Engineer, Guardian etc… and each can use different weapon sets and can use different accessories. But the big thing that sets the different load-outs apart is the ability to customize the attributes of the class. If you don’t like how the engineer is defined, you can modify how much armor plating he wears, or how fast he can run etc… You can basically make up your own classes that best suit your game play to dominate the multiplayer battlefield.
For the most part, you move really slow, but if you hold down the right thumb stick, you’ll start to sprint for about 5 seconds, and then the camera zooms out to third person and you go into an overdrive mode where you run super fast for a long period of time. So if you need to get somewhere fast, or more importantly, get away from something fast, this will become your lifeline.
You also have the ability to use jetpacks that allow you to fly for very short periods of time. When mastered in conjunction with the sprinting, combat can get really crazy. As you kill enemy soldiers and capture objectives, you earn points for your team and when one team has enough points, they win the match. You also earn money as you play the game, which can be used to purchase turrets, supply depots and really cool armored vehicles that greatly influence the battle.
Finally, when you die and when you start a mission, you “burn-in” from your space ship in orbit and fall to the planet at great speed. A very neat feature is that you have the ability to select where you want to burn-in, and as you fall, you can apply air-brakes to slowly guide you to anywhere on the battlefield. So if there is some heavy action and your team is getting nailed, you can drop right in behind the enemy soldiers and flank them, unless of course they’ve set up an anti-air turret in the area. This combined with the different load-outs and purchasable equipment makes this first person shooter more about strategy than skill most of the time.
Like so many other games on the market today, Section 8 utilizes the Unreal Engine 3 for it’s stunning graphics. That said; there is a lot of texture popping at times so you’ll often see low-res models of your weapons and certain environments for short periods of time. When there is a lot of action on the screen, you’ll also run into some serious frame-rate issues that can really hinder your ability to perform at your greatest potential. Luckily this situation is few and far between.
The only pre-rendered cut-scene is the video that you watch in the beginning. Everything else is game-engine rendered so it’s not as eloquent, but still doesn’t look all that bad. All in all, the game looks great. The Section 8 soldiers look cool as hell, they have sweet weapons, and the levels are the perfect size to allow lots of action everywhere you look. Timegate stated that Aliens and Starship Troopers were major influences for the game and you can certainly tell as you walk around the many bases scattered across the battlefields.
The voice acting in the game is actually pretty decent. You start to get attached to the soldiers in your squad, as they are constantly shouting out status updates and commands to you.
Section 8, though only containing a 4-hour single player campaign is certainly a very fun game once you figure out what the heck you are doing. Getting the controls down initially can be a little rough and you’ll probably take a beating the first several online matches that you play. The territories game-play is nothing new to us, but the implementation of the class-based load-outs, sprinting and flying with awesome weapons really makes it quite fun. My only problem is that it costs 60 bucks for a repetitive multiplayer-only game. Personally, I think Section 8 is a great game for what it is, but I’d probably wait until the price drops a bit so that you can keep this one laying around for those times when you’re bored and want to just hop into some fun 16v16 multiplayer greatness.
