Does this game plummet from the heavens anew or does it fall flat on its face in the battlefield?
Aesthetically the game excels. Running on Unreal Engine everything looks crisp and palpable, but I cannot help but feel the environments were slovenly designed, the world is void of those little details that congregate to offer significant bonus points on the graphical front. Negligence has wounded the outstandingly realistic textures as a harrowing shortcoming whilst simultaneously it acts as a relief on your system. Animations are flowing portrayals of anthropic movement and hinged areas are fluid, lips move in believable synchronisation with phonetic sounds. If you want a game that is visually great, Section 8 would be scribbled down fairly high up on the roster. But this is, unfortunately, a digression: graphics don't make a game, gameplay does and this is where demonic horrors indulge in my disappointment.
The storyline that furtively lurks underneath the single-player is a passable and uninspired experience. It's a cliché affair with you playing as the heroic Section 8 against an opposing coterie commanded by a runaway soldier. It acts as a preliminary phase before you jump into the multiplayer. About three hours in length with a bog-standard predictable plot it is instantly recognisable that the single-player was utterly ignored. On the positive side, AI is superb, it's clever, cunning and tactical and in some places I was feeling regretfully challenged by the gun-toting robots. The difficulty scale does cater for everyone though and there is a steady transition between the brain-dead and the hyperactive aimbots.
And then, after you three hour journey of reluctance through the campaign you're booted into the multiplayer. Weapons are in limited supply throughout the game. Only six weapons exist in the game, each with their own spontaneous idiosyncrasies, the weapons are all balanced and have a designated role in a battlefield situation but the amount of damage a weapon inflicts varies incredibly making firefights annoying unpredictable.
Unpredictability does work in favour of Section 8 though. Cue fascination: there's only one game mode. It's called Conquest and is a carbon-copy of Domination, capture objectives (by hacking terminals and defending them) and defend them whilst they generate points. Reach the score limit and win. That's the all-too-average basics. The real mayhem becomes part of the equation when you start activating Dynamic Combat Missions.
Dynamic Combat Missions or DCMs are additional challenges added on top of the basic Domination game mode. As you kill people of certain classes, defend objectives, capture objectives get a certain amount of kills with a weapon and so on, you muster points that can then be used to purchase DCMs. DCMs include defending a convoy as it is driven to a position delineated on the map whilst the enemy try to undermine your attempts, grabbing some enemy intelligence that is spawned randomly on the map and getting it to the appropriate point and defending an outpost. If you succeed in your challenge you're awarded more points but if you lose the opposing team gets them. These factors can be, ultimately, game-changing and add a new element of tactical thinking to the procedural capturing of nodes.
Section 8 also features very large maps and to traverse these sizeable environments, Section 8 kits you out with some pretty interesting mechanical extras for improved locomotion. Your cyborglike suit suddenly bursts into "hyperdrive" mode if you sprint undisturbed for long enough, sucking your camera out into a third person perspective with the sudden alacrity. A jetpack allows you to zoom into brief aerial combat. These can be used for a myriad of advantageous purposes including evasive manoeuvres, reaching good sniping positions and getting to team mates in desperate need quickly. The real zest in the movement-focussed take on tactical combat that Section 8 offers is the ability to drop from thousands of feet above and land wherever you choose. You can drop in and flank enemies, crash down in an orbital pursuit after enemy DCMs and vehicles or swoop down to make a tight formation with team mates.
Sadly, the online community dispersed long ago and even now it is rapidly diminishing. Even if there are some great features in this game, there is no one to play with. The social element of this game is long since dead, the community a fraction of its former self. The tactics that this game relied so heavily on cannot be achieved with bots: without an active multiplayer fanbase this game is truly hopeless, its glory now a fading memory. Section 8 is not coming back down from the sky.