Section 8 - first impressions

So the trailer for Section 8 intrigued me. It intrigued me a lot. A super soldier dropping into battle, hallucinating about his childhood. That's interesting, that's mature, that sets up some nice conflict which may lead to some deep characters.

Yeah, like hell it does.

I'm being overly cynical - I've only played about an hour of this game and the plot hasn't really started yet but this game is very damn consoley and the day the consoles start producing deep games of their own volition... well, then I'll start taking them seriously.

But whatever, it's an FPS, they're supposed to be mindless fun. Is Section 8 fun?

Well.

Hm.

So far, yes and no. I think this is what Halo was desperately trying to be - it's a generic FPS with a lot of nice little features. You've got a jetpack, for instance, and unlike pretty much any other jetpack I can think of in a game, you're actually given a decent amount of fuel for it. You can customise your character loadout from the word go, which is nice, and you're given some fun little AI mates that follow you around the place.

The problem arises with... well this war you're fighting is against some people wearing red armor (as opposed to the blue stuff you're wearing) and they appear to be voiced by the Daleks. Anyhoo, these guys are really fucking tough. They've got the same armor as you so they take a LOT of shots to dispatch. So many that it's really not very fun.

Section 8 breaks one of the cardinal rules of gameplay: enemies should be killed with very few hits if they're well placed.

It's early days so I'm hoping this problem will go after a couple of levels but if it doesn't, it's going to be a game breaker as far as I'm concerned. I'm not exagerating, by the way, with the default assault rifle it takes about 10 seconds of constant fire to dispatch every enemy. That, my friends, is just too damn long.

But whatever, the atmosphere is good, there are some nice touches, the universe these guys have set up is different enough to warrent a proper explore... I'll give it another crack tomorrow.