Section 8 is a futuristic, first-person shooter that launched quietly under a majority of gamer radars. I’ll admit I didn’t know much about the game myself, so I decided to investigate before the review. In short, one good army of mech-soldiers has to stop an evil tyrant and his battalion of bad mech-soldiers while saving the planet. Sounds plain enough but the developers added in a few unexpected twists to the gameplay in order to try and make this game stand out.
These little twists add an original touch that creates a slightly different experience than most of the first-person shooters that are out there now. The more noticeable ones include the ability to change your weapon layout at any supply depot as often as you would like, putting your armored suit into an “Overdrive” mode. This allows you to move across the battlefield at an accelerated rate while dodging enemy fire, and the ability to deploy your soldier and purchased supplies/weapons anywhere on the map from your drop ship.
As much as I liked these change ups to the genre, I cannot say that the game is not without its flaws. Touching on the solo campaign/storyline aspect of the game, it’s short and undesirable. You control a soldier named Corde in the Section 8 team on its way to stop a rogue group of similarly suited soldiers and their leader. Aside from a couple of decent cutscenes, the story wasn’t captivating and the relationship between the character and the player was nonexistent. Simply deploy him out, perform the objectives to complete the mission, and move on.
The multiplayer is what this game was built for. You have two options when choosing between an Instant Action game or a regular Multiplayer mode. There is no difference in content; it’s just that one is geared for offline and the other for online. The set up is the same for every map, which is to outscore your opponent by taking over bases and completing tasks such as escort a VIP to a safe area or protect an ally convoy for a few minutes. While the concept is the same for each map, you can choose different play modes. My favorites were the Swarm and Super Swarm, which cause your team to be outnumbered by the enemy, and the One Man Army that has you, solo, against a desired number of bots/players. The multiplayer section definitely makes up for the lack of depth in the solo campaign.
I did enjoy this game more than I thought I would, but my complaints outweigh the positives. The game boosts how you can deploy yourself to anywhere on the map (solo or MP), but fails to warn you if it’s anywhere near AA (anti-air) turrets that will blast you down in seconds. It’s understandable that the enemies would have defenses, but you are given no time to steer yourself away if you deploy too close to the radius. Another issue is that the deployment and reload times are entirely too long. Deployment has you dropping down, then braking before you hit the battlefield — which wastes about 10-15 seconds until you may see action again. That time, while short, can make or break a winning scenario. Reload times, forced or manual, are absurd and leave you weaponless way too long. When it takes more than half your clip to kill one person, expect death when you’re outnumbered by one or two enemies. The ability to purchase additional vehicles and supplies/depots are nice, but the purchase screen takes up the entire HUD making you a sitting duck since it’s in real time. Let me say for the record, that the tank is too big, clunky, very slow, and damn near impossible to control. The camera just doesn’t zoom out far enough to tell which way the tank is facing. More often than not, you’ll be too worried about getting it straight than enemy fire. My final complaint is with the ranked matches. You need at least four live players for the stats to be enabled. So if someone drops out, the game disables the stat tracker and goes from a ranked multiplayer game to an unranked match. As if finding a game with four players wasn’t difficult enough, I had to hope that no one dropped out of the match just so that my stats would count. The developers should have kept the matches ranked regardless because bots still fill the player gaps and count towards stats when killed.
Section 8 isn’t terrible, it just has a lot of flaws. It’s your run of the mill first-person shooter with some added perks. Unfortunately, these perks aren’t enough to redeem the game. It will be overshadowed by some of the more popular FPS titles like Halo and Call of Duty. If you have any interest in playing this game, I would suggest a rental. If not, you aren’t missing much that you haven’t seen before.
