Section 8 Review - Xbox Gaming in South Africa

If you can tear yourself away from Modern Warfare 2 long enough to take notice of the other FPS games out there you might stumble across Section 8 on your local game store's shelf and wonder if it's worth a quick look. Well I'm here to tell you that you'd be wise to go back to modern Warfare 2 until you you see Section 8 in the bargain bin. Section 8 is one of those games which lures you in with the promise of some interesting mechanics but after a while it brings on yawns of boredom.

Section 8's basic premise is that you're one of the 8th Armoured Infantry that is trying to battle the ARM of Orion to free planets from their despotic rule. It's all very Halo-lite and the plot makes itself scarce for the majority of the game bar the odd CGI cutscene interspersed between the missions. The trick up Section 8's sleeve is that when you deploy to the battlefield you are in effect shot from a dropship towards the planet and can control where you land as you're falling towards the ground. Of course you're saved from ending up as a small puddle of juicy bits by the powered armour you wear which also allows you to run across the battlefield at speeds to make the Flash jealous.

Of course the point of all this is that you need to go and shoot some bad guys and complete objectives to successfully progress through the missions assigned to you and your squad mates, and it's here that the first blemish on Section 8's Elephant Man face makes its appearance. The missions are as exciting as watching paint dry with you often finding yourself defending some point as waves of generic bad guys try their best to suck up all your bullets by running straight at you only to fall flat after countless clips to the head. The shooting itself is also way below what we've come to expect. By that I mean you're a futuristic space marine in a powerful armoured suit with weapons that look fantastic, but at the end of the day, they might as well be pea shooters as you spot an enemy, shoot a couple of bullets till the gauge indicating his shield disappears and then shoot him some more until he falls over. There's no sense of power in the weapons and for all you know it might be just as effective tossing tennis balls at your enemy for all the feedback you get from your weapons.

The second 'innovative' feature that Section 8 throws your way is your space marine's ability to purchase air drops in the game. As you complete objectives you'll be rewarded with cash that you can use to request equipment and ammo. You can choose where the drop should happen and a few seconds later a dropship flies overhead and drops down a heavy tank or supply drop much like a Santa of the future might drop presents. It can be quite funny using supply drops to dump a huge tank on the head of your enemy but it also helps you defend key areas in the game with turrets and snit-aircraft cannons all serving to prevent your enemy over running your position.

The mission structure of the game is very similar to Unreal Tournament 3 with the single player campaign effectively being bot matches to prepare you for the game's main purpose, multiplayer. The multiplayer can be a nice distraction from the seriousness of other games such as Modern Warfare 2 but you'll be hard pressed to find many other locals playing it, which means you'll have to deal with the usual international lag.

When you first drop from the sky and fly towards the ground in the game I was filled with an inane sense of glee that soon turned to bitter disappointment as I landed and saw that most of the planets and people in the Section 8 universe seem to have been painted by an artist that was constantly thinking depressive thoughts. To say the environments you fight in are bland would be putting it mildly. The creator of this universe must have been real short of creativity when it came to designing the worlds and probably ended up saying 'more sand!' whenever anyone would dare ask him if the environments needed something more. At least the character models look okay...

The sound is also a bit of a letdown with your gun's sound as powerful and impressive as a two year old screaming 'PEW PEW!!!' every time you shoot. The voice acting is also rather unremarkable but at last none of your characters are grating and they soon fade away into a blissful silence as you ignore them.

At the end of the experience, there's not much to recommend - Section 8 is a mediocre FPS that doesn't do enough to stand out in the already crowded shooting genre. Even the diehard shooter fan will find themselves struggling to stay connected to the game, leaving you scratching your head and wondering what the point of it all is.

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