My Random Thoughts on Section 8: Prejudice

Again with the long absence. Sometimes there’s nothing else to blame except my own laziness. Better late than never though, right?

In any event, my friends and I have recently been on the lookout for some good PC games to play together. We figure that since split-screen gaming on consoles seems to be falling by the wayside, we will just bring all of our laptops together and get a little bit of LAN gaming going (well, “LAN gaming” in a loose sense of the term, since a lot of games don’t support actual LAN play anymore). Thankfully, PC gaming seems to be going through a bit of a resurgence, and now we have plenty of smaller games like Sanctum that run nicely on laptops and provide some good co-op entertainment without breaking the bank. One of the games occupying the vast majority of our PC gaming time right now is Section 8: Prejudice, and since we’ve poured at least five hours into that game so far (5.6 hours according to my Steam profile), I feel as though I’m entitled to say a few things about it. So let’s start this off:

Positives

Spawning System: I feel like this has been talked about by people more eloquent than myself, but it bears repeating: Section 8: Prejudice has one of the most inventive spawning system that I’ve ever seen in a first person shooter. Rather than spawning at a control point, a squad location, or an otherwise random area on the map, this game has you jumping into the battlefield from an airship. You can drop in to literally any part of the map that you want, thought you want to steer clear of enemy territory, since anti-air placements can chew you to bits in short order, and you’re incapable of fighting back while in the air. It’s fun to perform a drop, and it’s even more fun to play a game mode like Swarm (where you fight off waves of enemies while defending a control point) and see your enemies dropping from the sky into the distance, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before their forces descend upon you.

Movement System: Having a game that takes place far into the future and features soldiers decked out in futuristic armour definitely comes with its advantages. Namely, you can basically ignore all of the common “realism” trappings that games like Call of Duty and Battlefield have to adhere to. Section 8 does this in the coolest way possible: by giving you jetpacks. While it’s certainly not the first game to have such a feature (Halo Reach comes to mind), it makes things much easier in a Battlefield-style large-scale FPS game, where you don’t want to waste time traversing staircases and elevators after traveling dozens of miles. Speaking of traveling dozens of miles, Section 8 does a pretty good job of handling that common annoyance by giving your character the ability to run at superhuman speeds if the sprint button is held down for long enough. This obviously wouldn’t make any sense in Bad Company 2 (which is why I’ve wasted many minutes of my life running to control point B in Atacama Desert, only to get sniped upon my arrival), but again, not having to worry about realism has its advantages.

Bots: I spoke earlier about how my friends and I are looking for games that we can play in co-op. While you can certainly cooperate in adversarial games with human opponents, sometimes we’re just not in the mood for all of the bullshit that comes along with your typical group of FPS gamers. And that’s where bot matches become a beautiful thing. The bot AI isn’t the greatest in the world (funny how the AI in the original Unreal Tournament remains some of the best that the gaming industry has ever seen), but it honestly doesn’t need to be. My friends and I have managed to sink numerous hours into games that have bot AI that I would describe as being “adequate” at best (Gears of War 2, Black Ops, Perfect Dark Zero), but it still manages to be fun, and you can always jack up the difficulty or increase the number of bots if things get a little too easy for you. Again, it’s hardly a novel feature, but it’s one that more games should include, regardless of how well the feature is implemented.

Price: We paid $15 for this game, and we’re not even close to being done with it. On the flip side, I paid about $35 for Brink, and I only managed to squeeze about eight hours of gameplay out of it (and a few of those hours were hardly enjoyable). Even if we were to drop the game today and never play it again, I honestly don’t think of 5.6 hours of fun for $15 as a bad value proposition. There are some $60 games that haven’t given me as much entertainment. And to sweeten the deal even more, Steam recently had a sale on the DLC map packs, and we snagged them for a very nice $3.39. It would be nice if a certain other gaming franchise gave you a break every once in a while with its map packs.

Negatives

Games for Windows Live: Again, this is a subject that has been discussed by people much smarter than myself, but Games for Windows Live is synonymous with “unnecessary”. When it’s not taking an eternity to connect, and when it finally manages to get out of your way, it just doesn’t do anything to justify the extra baggage that it brings along for the ride. Steam (and now Origin) already has a perfectly serviceable Friends system in place, and I don’t like the fact that I’m being forced to work within a system that is vastly inferior to something that I’m already accustomed to using. As it turns out, the hatred towards GFWL seems to be almost universal. If you don’t believe me, just consider how the announcement that Skyrim wouldn’t be using the service was met with a fair amount of jubilation among the gaming populace.

No Dedicated Servers: This is essentially a port of the Xbox 360 version (or at least it feels that way), and so perhaps the lack of dedicated servers isn’t entirely unexpected. Still, I wouldn’t mind playing this game in a 32-player dedicated server, Battlefield-style. I imagine that would be pretty damn fun, and it would certainly run smooth. When it comes to co-op, it’s not the end of the world (especially considering how we’re all in the same room connected to the same WiFi network), but it’s always nice to see developers go the extra mile while bringing their console games over to the PC.

Swarm maps could use a little more variety: Swarm is one of our favourite game modes in Section 8: Prejudice (right after Conquest, I would say), and the only things holding it back from true greatness are the lack of maps and the lack of variety among the maps. There are only four Swarm maps (the DLC might have more, but I haven’t checked yet, unfortunately), and they all play out in much the same way. While there is some distinction between maps (Eden puts your control point on a platform while Whiteout has it on the ground), I wouldn’t mind seeing them go in a direction similar to Gears of War 2’s Horde mode, where the map structure is drastically different from one map to the next. Instead, we’re left with four maps that are essentially giant fields, and battles that play out in the same way, regardless of which direction you’re facing in the map. It’s not the end of the world, and the game mode still manages to be fun despite this shortcoming, but I can’t help but think about how much more epic this game mode could have been.

So there you have it. Overall, I must say that I’m quite pleased with Section 8: Prejudice, and the fact that it only costs $15 just sweetens the deal even more (and let’s not forget about the inexpensive DLC, though I’m not sure if the sale is still going). While four-player split-screen gaming on the consoles appears to be dying a slow death (I sincerely hope that I’m wrong on this one, but I haven’t seen much evidence against my theory), the PC remains a great way of turning your pad into a realm of headshots, unhealthy snack food consumption, and plenty of cursing.