Section 8 Multiplayer Preview [PC]

You’re all smart, witty, good-looking people with a great taste, aren’t you, readers? Of course you are. Which is why you remember Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2.There’s a chance that some of you smart, witty, good-looking people with taste who all played Tribes have forgotten about it though, so here’s a refresher: Tribes was one of the first Battlefield 1942-style games, despite having come out before BF1942 did. Tribes focused on infantry combat over a variety of modes, but these soldiers had jetpacks. The gameworld was your oyster: with creative boosting, you could get on top of any ridge, and this allowed some creative map design. Some took place in seemingly-impassable mountains, with bases halfway up the steepest slopes, while others gave you flat landscapes that you could bound through like a six year old on a sugar binge. Vehicles played a part, too, with a variety available, ranging from speeder bikes to tanks to huge bombers that took half a dozen people to fly. Weapons, by and large, required you to lead your targets – no easy feat when they’re sailing through the air and able to change direction at a moment’s notice. Then there were the game modes, from deathmatches to base attacks, to king of the hill, to more oddball modes in which one player was designated your prey, while another hunted you. The Tribes series was brilliant.So far, I’ve spent longer talking about Tribes than I have Section 8, but for good reason: Section 8 feels very much like a spiritual successor to Tribes.It’s not all going to be happy, and I don’t want to get the hopes of Tribes fans up too high. They are quite emphatically not the same game, but Section 8 takes a lot of cues from Tribes, and it feels wrong to discuss it without talking about its surrogate father.Section 8 is a Battlefield 1942-style game that focuses on infantry combat, and features jetpacks. And vehicles. And base attacks.Appropriately, every round starts with you picking a drop location for your soldier, who then rockets down in his suit of powered armour. Applying airbrakes slows you down, lessening your downtime when you hit the ground, but also makes you a much easier target for AA guns and ground troops. This heavily dictates the pace of the game in the levels we played – you can’t safely airdrop straight into bases controlled by enemies due to the presence of AA guns, but you could always focus your initial attack on those self-same AA guns, opening the base up to reinforcements from the sky. The game allowing you to essentially spawn anywhere you like makes it feel rather different to anything else on the market, as there are no concerted pushes from any one direction, and quick thinking can let you sneak up on a position that’s busy attacking one direction.Your class choice factors into this, too. There are a number of pre-made classes, ranging from a sneaky-but-fast sniper type through to a slow-moving tank, but you’ve also got the ability to customise any and all of them, without much in the way of limits, thanks to passive modules. You’ve got ten points to split between various categories. Some up your damage, some steady your gun, some increase your armour, or shield regeneration, or speed. Factor in the choice of two weapons and two pieces of secondary kit and you can, if you so desire, create a lightning-fast class with plenty of jetpack power, a missile launcher for tanks, a shotgun for close-range, some demolition charges, and the ability to hide himself from enemy scanners. All of a sudden you’ve got a fast strike soldier capable of obliterating base defenses, with the ability to leg it if he gets into a scrap he can’t win.{PAGE TITLE=Section 8 Multiplayer Part 2}As with Battlefield, the majority of your time is spent capturing or defending particular sections of the map. Each of these periodically provide your team with victory points, but this isn’t the way to win the game. Doing various things – destroying defenses, killing enemies with a heavy machine gun, starting the capture of an enemy base – rewards your team with resources that let you create Dynamic Combat Missions, or DCMs. Perhaps you’ll select the option which spawns a convoy that you must defend. Maybe you’ll start up a mission that sends a ridiculously tough commando in to attack an enemy point. Either way, your team will get a heads-up about the mission and can then head over to try and complete it, but so too will the enemy, and as completion of the mission results in a whole load of victory points it’s in their best interests to stop you. In our preview, this tended to create a variety of objectives and choices for players of all types – do you go for the enemy VIP, or do you maintain the assault on Point 1? Point 4′s coming under attack, too; someone needs to go back there, but you could always wait until you die and then respawn, hurtling towards Point 4 like a comet. A comet with a gun. Which is brilliant.Teams are broken up into squads, which makes organising all of this a whole lot easier, but that’s far from everything in terms of strategy – you’ve also got money that can be used to airdrop in anything from gun turrets to tanks. Want to knock out the AA turret on an enemy base and replace it with one of your own to prevent them dropping in reinforcements when you try to capture it? Go for it. Maybe drop a minigun turret next to that capture point to keep it defended once you succeed? Sure. Want to just drop in a mech suit and go stomping? I’d recommend it.So far, I’m sure most people suspect this sounds a fair bit like Tribes 2 (well, most smart and gorgeous people, like those who played Tribes) but there are a few key differences. First and foremost is the weapons. While Tribes 2 didn’t have much in the way of hitscan weapons, generally relying instead on working out where your opponent was going to be by the time your shot reached them, Section 8 significantly tones that down with the majority of weapons seeming to be instant hits. While this is sure to disappoint a number of people, it’s likely to make Section 8 a lot more accessible to those used to more conventional shooters like Halo (which, admittedly, it also feels somewhat akin to) and games with a whole mess of players running around are astonishingly good fun, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing.Further concessions come in the form of the lock-on. Assuming that your quarry isn’t using a sensor jammer, switching to the iron sights of your weapon and holding down a key locks your crosshairs on them, seemingly assuring you of hits regardless of lag. Considering armour upgrades, the long time it takes to recharge and the general amount of firepower it takes to kill someone, it’s far from a game-breaker, but it makes sure that everyone can actually assist regardless of skill. It will also, I suspect, play a far more important role in the console version in which pinpoint accuracy will be a lot harder than with a mouse and keyboard, but that’s pure speculation at this stage.There were a few disappointments in the preview build – weapons lack the kind of definitive punch I tend to enjoy, and the general assault rifle/sniper rifle/pistol/missile launcher setup lacks imagination, but they all have their individual uses and are well served. Likewise, the jetpacks don’t quite have the power or length of boost I’d like, even when you pump a load of modules into them, but then combining it with a sprint did allow me to leap halfway across the map. Anyway: while this isn’t Tribes, it’s got a hell of a lot in common and the mix of accessibility with the potential for grand, sweeping strategies makes it – say it with me – one to watch, even in this multiplayer-only test.Well, that, and there’s just something unbelievably brilliant about respawning by hurtling towards the ground at ludicrous speeds.