The FPS market is more crowded than an open bar Atlantic City strip club on free wings night. With utter juggernauts like Halo, Killzone, Gears, and anything Call of Duty related dominating the landscape, you need to do something really special and out of the ordinary to even be noticed, let alone played. Section 8 takes some very good ideas from the aforementioned into a very satisfying and different multiplayer experience.

Section 8 is your standard futuristic space shooter with overpowered weapons, rechargeable shields, and jet packs. Jet Packs you say? Yes, Section 8 lets us reach new heights with jet packs attached to our backs. It may sound trite, but it is something that we really have not seen yet. Section 8 also borrows ideas from Call of Duty where you can customize your weapon caches. It borrows the ideas from Killzone 2 where there are long matches with different objectives popping up to keep the games fresh. The matches work in the following manner: You take control of various points on the map where you can install rocket and gun turrets along with objectives such as VIP, intel collection, etc. The more you control, the more points you get. Furthermore, the way you respawn is just like an ODST would as you drop in from the sky like a meteor entering the atmosphere.

The most prevalent issues you will notice here is the graphics are nothing special. I would not call them dated or last-gen, but rather blasé. You wont look at the game and say, “Whoa, that’s fierce” as you would other shooters. There are 8 classes, but the weapons are much less than that. The classes have weapons that overlap which greatly reduces the variability between them. There is a single player campaign which is fun, but it’s more or less the multiplayer with AI bots strewn throughout.

Section 8 is basically a $60 multilplayer shooter that borrows good ideas from a bunch of the industry leaders and makes them its own. This is not necessarily a bad thing considering what was taken. The game has a great online tracking system for medals and stats. The FPS market is crowded, but playing as souped up soldiers with jet packs, artillery rounds, rocket launchers, and the ability to call in even bigger robots to ride in and kick ass is a lot of fun. It is a team oriented game and if you are into that, then definitely check it out.