If you are crazy enough to jump out of a plane sans parachute then you are fit for Section 8. Section 8 is about crazy recon troopers who wear bitchin’ armor and jump from orbit to the battlefield. You are said recon trooper, a futuristic paratrooper who is probably slightly unstable and armed to the teeth. The new first person shooter published by Southpeak and developed by Timegate has a few tricks that make it stand out from other titles in the genre.

“Burning in” is the games trademark gimmick.  That’s deploying from orbit to the battlefield, allowing the player to select their class and their spawn location. The demo map consisted of three areas to capture or control.  These areas have base defenses in forms of Anti-Air and Ground Turrets to lay hate on players attempting to “burn in” or spawn too far behind enemy lines. I call it a gimmick because it is reminiscent of Medal of Honor Airborne, with the exception that the class system in Section 8 is extremely customizable. Vehicles of a few varieties and weapons of the standard pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, machine gun, explosives are available plus a jetpack, which is  always fun.

Instantly recognizable is the fact the game is geared towards multiplayer. The demo allows you to play single player against bots or online on a server. I say a server because if you have a Windows PC you can setup a server to host Xbox Live games. This brings back memories of Quake and Counterstrike where I would be stuck in a never ending battle to find a decent lag-free server. If I wanted to deal with this crap I would still have a serious gaming PC, this is why matchmaking was invented people, to avoid the painful timesuck of server hunting. At least playing single player the bots proved to be quality teammates and opponents.

Graphics and sound are pretty standard for what to expect of a FPS these days, nothing too special here.  Controls were relatively smooth but sometimes felt disconnected from the game as crouching, re-loading, and changing secondary weapons seemed to have lackluster response times. I encountered a few annoying glitches and restrictions such as not being able to burn in to the high points of the map, I just bounced off the mountain top. I also burned in through an enemy dropship, doing zero damage to anything. Finally I managed to exposure an error where the dropship menu was still on my screen after I burned in, unresponsive of course so it would not allow me to exit the menu or control my character.

At the end of the play this demo felt a lot like Quake Wars: Enemy Territory and Medal of Honor Airborne had sex one drunken regrettable night.  To be fair QW:ET had a lot of jager and is a bit crazy which made MoHA look a lot better than we know it really is. Section 8 has a cool class system, but nothing new. I applaud the “burning in” spawn approach but again nothing totally revolutionary. Before playing I thought Section 8 had a great concept that should be tons of fun. After playing I’m going to give this a miss at retail and go back to play the Quake Wars: Enemy Territory demo again.