Section 8 Multiplayer Preview [PC]

24 Jul 2009 at 11:34:35 by Tim McDonald

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.

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