Section 8: Prejudice Review

Section 8: Prejudice is an underdog story – a small developer (in this case, Timegate Studios) trying to fulfill the promise of its original idea while making the transition from retail to full-fledged downloadable title. It has a cool hook in its "soldiers fired from a space cannon" premise. It brings a retail title's worth of modes and content to a downloadable title. The pieces are all there. But Section 8: Prejudice can't seem to fit them together into something more than sort-of interesting.

Section 8: Prejudice is the sequel to 2009's Section 8, which introduced, uh, Section 8: a group of cybernetic crazy people fired from orbit into battle wearing nothing but their armor.

I said it was a great hook.

At its heart, Section 8 was a multiplayer-focused affair, with 32-player objective-based matches. It was an FPS that married elements of the Battlefield series with the ardently-worshipped Tribes games - players jetpacked over vehicles and mechs while securing control points and performing other tasks randomly assigned over the course of a match.

Section 8: Prejudice seems poised to correct the original game's main failings, like a mostly non-existent single player element and a certain generic lack of identity outside of the dude-bombardment mechanic. Prejudice promises a lot. Timegate have added a new wave-based survival mode for four players called Swarm. There's also a "full" single-player campaign in Prejudice, with more of a story to it than the tutorial-in-everything-but-name from the first game.

At least, I think there was supposed to be a story to it. While Section 8: Prejudice starts with an interesting idea – the original military hard-men used to tame colonial space were forcefully decommissioned by Section 8's precursors, and now they're back and pissed about it – it barrels headfirst into cliché territory and doesn't look back. Playing through Prejudice's uninspired level design, I can see why they'd want to get through it as quickly as possible.

Section 8: Prejudice's campaign feels like it was tacked onto the multiplayer as an afterthought. It swings from one worst-case-scenario to the other. There's the totally mindless point A to point B trek requiring you to slaughter AI bots thrown in with little thought to placement or encounter design. Then there are the clear "this is training for multiplayer situations" scenarios requiring you to hack terminals or repair vehicles for no discernable reason. While you'll be given different tasks, every mission feels similar.

Section 8: Prejudice shifts over time from repetitive but easy, to repetitive but frustrating. Neither is an especially good thing, but one is easier to overlook than the other. Prejudice doesn't challenge you by clever use of established rules and play. Instead, it contradicts previously demonstrated convention, spamming missile turrets that do much greater damage, and producing enemies whose accuracy is close enough to perfect so as to be indistinguishable from it (and who can take more punishment than the combined forces you've murdered to meet them).