This time last week was the madness of i-series and 2000 people crammed into a room playing 24hours a day. Though the exhibition side of things was a bit of a letdown after last year’s impressive it still had its highlights, one of these was the beta for Section 8 a Team Based online multiplayer game from Timegate Studios.
Section 8 is set in a futuristic universe where players can customise their armour and weapon loadouts depending on their style of play. So you could have a Sniper Rifle with a Rocket Launcher as your secondary and change your armour settings so that you are invisible to Radar and carry your own Repair kit to keep you going between Sniper positions. I went with the Assault Rifle and Rocket Launcher combo and put my Armor points into shielding and armour so I could take a punishment and still win over my opponents. In addition as you play through a match you acquire exp points either through killing the other side or by taking Control Points and completing side objectives. Which you can use to deploy turrets/supply dispensers/additional sensors and to games two vehicles an anti-infantry mech that as Gatling guns and an impressive melee that will take out any poor soul who is front of the mech and the
games ultimate weapon the tank which seats four players who control a different gun expect the pilot who has the main gun and has to drive. The vehicles are brought into the game via some kind of dropship, which can be shot out of the sky before it drops off its payload, to the annoyance of the guy who spent all those points.
At the moment there are two gametypes; you have your standard Team Deathmatch and a capture points gametype that is very battlefield-esque. The game supports 32-players which is a little low for a PC game, I would have expected alot more, but it does not hamper the gameplay. As with the TDM gametype your player ‘burns in’ to the game from around 15,000 feet and plummets towards the earth, you could go straight down and land but you are then venerable for a few seconds as you gather yourself, the alternative is the ‘air brake’ which allows you some control of descent as you plummet but you can also be targeted easier by the AA guns, the best feeling is finding the right time to use the brake and swoop around the AA fire and land near or on top of the CP you want to capture. You can also land on people if you get it right and crush them as you start, which is fun when they do not notice you, before its too late.
The CP gametype has a default of 1000 points for the team to reach in order to win, you can obtain points by killing the other team, capturing/holding CP’s or completing one of the many side objectives that make this game interesting, sometimes the mission could be a simple one like ‘drive a supply truck to your base’ or it could be a lot harder such as activate a beacon (which deploys a mini base) and defend the area from attack for a certain amount of time. They are fun and add variety to a gametype that hasn’t changed much since BF:1942 in 2002.
The sounds and Graphics are great, again showing us like Valve, Epic Games knows how to make a brillant engine that can handle anything.
It is coming the UK around the end of august 2009 for the PC/Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and will have a full single-player campaign based around the missions of a character call Alex Corde, I will expand on this in a full review upon release.
Minimum system requirements:
Windows XP SP3 or Windows Vista SP1
Pentium 4 3Ghz or higher
RAM: 1GB for XP, 2GB for Vista
6 GB free hard drive space
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 or ATI Radeon X1800 with 256 MB, DirectX 9c and Shader 3.0
I loved playing this beta at the I-series Lan. It was fun doing 5v5 matches and I can see 10v10 matches happening as well, that would be even cooler.
It’s a fast paced action game. I don’t know how it will do with all these shooting games around.