Review: Section 8

Posted by Brad T on January 30th, 2011 | 2 Comments | Tags: Section 8

Section 8 is a Sci-Fi shooter revolving around large maps employing a battlefield like scoring system. It has sat in our queue for quite some time, and last week I decided to give it a shot. Surprisingly I had a pretty good time with this title. I had tried it once when it first came out but had no clue how the game worked so I shelved it. This time I started with the single player and let the game hold my hand a bit before I became the ranked killing machine I am today.

The story revolves around Section 8, a military branch tasked with suicide missions. You take control of Corde and see him grow throughout the ranks and his service. Your arsenal consists of your normal array of weapons, assault rifle, sniper rifle, shotgun, etc. I would have liked to have seen a little better of a variety, as the weapons don’t really come off too spacely for a sci-fi shooter. I didn’t care for the story, as you’re apparently hell bent on revenge killing some dude from the rival faction Arm of Orion that killed your dudes prior to the game starting. In fact, you do a few missions first before Corde even speaks up once, and then suddenly the screen starts babbling on about how so and so killed my friends. I stopped taking it serious at that point and jumped into multiplayer.

This game supports bots in multiplayer. I was worried at first, but I have had no trouble finding 32 player games almost completely full of actual people with actual pings. The bots make it so more people are on the field at once, and I can’t complain. There are also dedicated servers available. Levels are taken almost straight from the single player campaign, so they’re instantly familiar to you. They’re all quite large, making for some interesting big team battles. You choose your loadout from the dropship and then are allowed to pick anywhere on the map to spawn. You can also choose to join a squad in which you and 4 others will be highlighted a different color on the map. This adds to teamwork, but I wish there were squad commands for the leader. I didn’t have my mic, but there is voice chat. But like the majority of Playstation games, few people use the mic.

You’re then fired down from the sky with the option to control your character in midair to land exactly where you want to on the battlefield. If you do it right, you can even land on enemies, killing them. Though the maps are large, after sprinting for a few seconds, your suit will enter overdrive mode, going into an all out sprint allowing you to zip across the map which never gets old. You also have a jet pack so as to evade attack or reach nice sniping spots.

When you complete objectives or kill the enemy you score your team resources and yourself currency. The resources go towards winning the game and activating missions within the battle. These vary from bomb planting to convoy protecting. These missions add to the unpredictability of battles. Currency allows you to buy deployables, ranging from sentry turrets, to mechs, to tanks. Eric and I had a great time as mech and engineer. He would heal me while I would grab people up and perform a fatality-esque kill animation.

Besides the singleplayer lacking and some framerate chugs every once in awhile, I don’t have much to knock this game for. If anything, I regret that I didn’t pick it up right when it came out. I’m glad that the online community is still flourishing, and honestly, if I had played this game last year, it would have won one of our game of the year awards. I look forward to the sequel.

For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.