- REVIEW: Section 8: Prejudice - i took out the D and all i got was prejuice

Title: Section 8: Prejudice
Developer: Timegate Studios
Publisher: Timegate Studios
Released: May 2011
Price: $14.99 (Steam - with GFWL, Xbox Live, PSN)

Section 8: Prejudice is a First-Person Shooter set in a futuristic world where everybody has enormous body armor and even more enormous guns. And then they squeeze themselves into even bigger vehicles. And they fall from the sky like blazing diamonds to narrowly miss enemy combatants and vehicles at an alarming rate.


Tagline: "There is no war without prejudice."
 


from the ashes

 Section 8: Prejudice is a re-master-release-do-over/sequel of it's 2009 predecessor Section 8. The "original" was full-priced, full-bore, and fully boring. By no means incompetent, it was criticized as being "uninspired", with a spare singleplayer component and underpopulated multiplayer servers. Whatever merits it had were quickly lost beneath the general consensus of blandness among reviewers.

Undeterred, Timegate Studios had enough gall (and enough time) to polish whatever game they believed they had and foist it once again upon the general gaming population, this time flipping not the genre on its head, but  the pricing.  Now a piddling $14.99 (USD) digital download across multiple platforms, Section 8: Prejudice is attempting to succeed with the same tools but in a different context. The question is, does it?

it's a game

Having been carried along that tide of blandness that condemned the last title, I missed out on whatever greatness (or blandness) was contained therein. Having now attempted this game for the past week or so (with about 4 hours of playtime - 1 hr SP, 3 hr MP), my general opinion is thus: this game is pretty darn fun.

Upon starting, it's obvious that the developers want you to play the SP first, to prepare you for the Meat and Potatoes of the game. You're actually encouraged to play the "Singleplayer tutorial campaign" if you attempt to immediately jump into an MP game mode. That's right, they themselves call the singleplayer campaign a tutorial. This kind of transparency is nice, and it shows me that they know where they put their resources. One of the more surprising things is that the SP campaign in fact plays like a series of MP maps and scenarios. Your AI allies are more than capable of taking out enemies, and you are by no means some kind of bulletproof ubermensch that can plow through hordes of armored foes. Although the introductory dialogue is heavy with quips about your preternatural combat ability, you can die as quickly as you can kill. No favorites here, bubbe.

did you just kill me? did you just kill ME?

MP is the core of the game. In the main menu, the "Dropship" lists all the available unlocks (there are a crapload. i may come back and edit this with an actual number). The nifty thing here is that about a third can be unlocked by simply playing through the entire SP campaign (on the hardest difficulty, though). It's an interesting idea, because these unlocks are usable in both SP and MP modes, meaning you can level up quite significantly without ever having to suffer any of the common MP issues like griefing, imbalancing, or just plain sucking. It's a simple idea that really makes good sense. Timegate has a good head on its shoulders (that or the failure of the first game really kicked them in the pants).

Controls are loose, but not unpredictable. Every weapon has an iron-sights-type mode which slightly increases accuracy and decreases movement speed, but firing from the hip is always viable. Weapons are varietous and customization deep. While it is a class-based game, the ability to choose every element of your loadout means you play the class you want: every good engineer needs a wrench, but you may want a scanner instead of detpacks, or a rocket launcher instead of an LMG. In fact, you may want to maximize your shield regen instead of your wrench recharge or your armor resistance instead of your shield capacity. The number of choices can be overwhelming, but it also means that you play the way you want to play.

When you eventually get into the MP modes, you'll find that all the mechanics of the SP campaign remain intact. The buildings you interact with, the weapons you have at your disposal, and even some of the objectives you were tasked with show up time and again. These objectives are implemented by way of the Dynamic Combat Missions (DCMs) which do a good job of breaking up the monotony of whichever game mode you happen to be in. In Conquest, the obligatory capture-defend-control mode, they serve to direct the focus of the fighting away from the fixed capture points. In Swarm, the co-op fortress mode, they give the players incentives to move beyond the safe confines of their bastion. Beyond that, successfully completing a DCM grants considerable bonuses (most of all in points) such that ignoring them can be quite costly. While there are about 7 different types of DCMs, most of them boil down to sprinting to a marker across the map and retrieving an item, sprinting to a marker across the map and defending an area, sprinting across the map and destroying an objective, sprinting across the map and planting a beacon, sprinting across the map and killing every player on the opposing team at least once, etc. Everything involves sprinting. Which isn't a bad thing. And, as I mentioned before, everybody tends to latch on to these objectives, which results in some of the more fierce firefights I've experienced thus far.

The dynamicity of battlefield foci is enhanced by the fact that there are no fixed spawn points on the map. In the fiction of the game, Section 8 and Arm are both known for their inimitable dropship tactics, essentially dropping their units wherever they please from their impregnable fortress-ships. It sounds exactly like it is: expert players (which you will eventually become) can spawn next to objectives, enemy players, and teammates all with relative ease and accuracy. Of course, deployable stationary AA guns can make these drops less...unexpected.

 and then i got to the menu


The HUD isn't spare, but it is efficient. Even thinking about it now I can't really remember anything that doesn't need to be there. Ammunition readouts, current weapon and tool, radar, and shield status are always visible. Overdrive and jetpack capacity appear when in use, and armor value appears when shields go down. Small details like this show polish not often found in games at this price point. The first menu is functional and useful, although the elements attracting your eyes and the actual buttons you may need to press can at times be very far apart, causing some confusion. The camera seamlessly switches to 3rd person in Overdrive, which is a nice touch and important gameplay element. The menu used to buy deployables is also intuitive and straightforward, meaning easy switching back and forth should you find a firefight on your hands.

tell me Hamlet, these denars, where do i put them

At $14.99, Timegate certainly won't be lining their pockets with diamondium fishing line anytime soon, but it's an enormously generous gesture to put a game like this at this price point. Section 8: Prejudice is a full-blown and bursting with game. With content unlockable in SP and further content unlocked through online play, which can then be used in replays of the SP campaign, the price is justified on numbers alone. But on top of these numbers we have highly polished gameplay, balanced competition, thoughtful design, and solid visuals. With Section 8: Prejudice, I think Timegate has created a winner.

Sometimes you just have to use the right tools in the right place.