Section 8 (S8) is a first-person shooter (FPS) game set in a futuristic universe, which clearly draws on a number of different works for its inspiration. The game does have a single-player campaign, but the focus here is squarely on team-based multi-player. It has been likened to Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW), Battlefield 2 (BF2), the Tribes franchise, Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3), and a number of other games as well, quite likely because it borrows elements from all.
S8 is not the game that dethrones Crysis as king of the visual hill, nor is it arguably even as pretty as UT3, with which it shares an underlying engine. It does look darned good, however, featuring interesting and well-designed environments, good textures, nice animation, and some good special effects. If I had to pick a single word to apply to the graphics in S8, it would be 'workmanlike'. In other words, it looks good and is very polished in its presentation, though there are flashier games out there.
For the most part, I'm happy to say that the visual performance is stellar. I've been in some pretty big battles thus far, with as many as two dozen players in the immediate area, turrets, vehicles, explosions, etc., and the frame rate has stayed smooth and beautifully playable in almost every case. So far I've experienced stuttering precisely twice in the roughly twenty hours I've spent with the game since the closed beta; one was during the early beta and the other was yesterday. The two situations were similar in that I was in an indoor firefight, oddly enough, but that's about all I can say about it. I have no idea why the frame rate plunged to a slide show in those two isolated cases, but it did.
So the short version of the story is that the graphics are very good and generally run very well. My one complaint is that I haven't found much in the way of advanced options to tweak. I could swear I remember being able to configure anti-aliasing (and other stuff) in the beta, but maybe I'm mistaken. I know this much: I would really like to play around with the anti-aliasing and/or anisotropic filtering settings within the game. It looks good as it is, but I'd like to play with the options, and I haven't found a way to to that.
The game audio is almost as satisfying as the visuals. The sound effects are particularly good, I think, and the voice work is nicely done. The one thing I will fault the game for is a lack of variety in the music. Maybe my ears are too sensitive to this sort of thing, but the admittedly beautiful, sweeping orchestral themes of the opening menu are the high point. Once you actually start playing, the game goes downhill in the musical sense. Granted, it's an FPS game, so you don't want the music getting in the way of the action, but I think the music could improve. That's something the Unreal Tournament series got right from day one. S8 has good audio, but it could be better.
The implementation, thankfully, seems squeaky clean. I've read of a few individuals who have no sound when they start the game, but this seems to be related to having a Unimodem Half-Duplex Audio Device in the system. There's a "sticky" thread over at the TimeGate forums that addresses this issue. For what it's worth, I haven't had a single problem with the audio on my Creative Labs X-Fi Fatality card. No stuttering, no volume issues, no dropouts, no nothing. Just solid game audio. Rather workmanlike, don't you think?
The user interface (UI) is simplicity itself. The menus are all functional and relatively clear (it wasn't immediately obvious that "Corde's Story" was the single player campaign) and make it reasonably easy to customize loadouts. My one complaint with that bit of the UI is that I haven't found any way to rename customized loadouts. The game mercilessly insists on uninformative names like "CUSTOM 1", which is downright painfully useless. Tribes 2 (T2) let me custom-name my loadouts years ago, so I don't think I'm asking for too much here.
The in-game UI is pretty much what you'd expect. The basic WASD keys handle movement, 'E' interacts with objects in the world, 'F' uses whatever equipment you have selected, and so forth. In this respect, S8 is much like every other FPS game. I haven't found any keys to activate pre-determined messages (I'll never forget tapping a quick V-G-S to yell "Shazbot!" in the Tribes games), and I'm not even sure if such messages exist. I've heard what seem to be snippets of context sensitive dialogue, though, so I wonder if there's something I'm missing.
At any rate, the HUD provides plenty of information, even if it is a bit oversized in some respects. I think that's part of the whole futuristic vibe. I don't think I need quite so large and detailed a display of how many rounds I have left in my gun; I think a single number suffice. But that's a minor complaint at best. Suffice it to say that the interface is more than good enough and has no major flaws.
Before we get into the really amazing stuff, I should note that the basic game mechanics are all solid. Movement, stances, shooting, reloading, etc. are all pretty much what you'd expect, though I particularly like the pacing of combat. Thanks to armor and shields the player can actually survive being caught out in the open, unlike, say, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (CoD4) where pretty much every weapon kills instantly. As in Halo, shields regenerate over time but not fast enough to make players too hard to kill. It's a delicate balance, but I think S8 gets it just right. You feel like you're tough enough to take some risks, and the fact that you can't be gunned down in an instant makes it possible to react with intelligent tactical choices, but you're not so hard to kill you can just wander into any situation guns a blazing and expect to survive. I like that.
With the basics out of the way, I have to say that game mechanics are where S8 really shines. It seems to me like the developers sat down and asked themselves a question: what are the worst aspects of FPS games, and how can we either do away with them altogether or turn them on their heads and make them fun? At the risk of overstating the case, S8 is the most groundbreakingly innovative FPS game I've seen in years, or maybe ever, in some very important ways. It innovates through a series of small changes that solve practically every major complaint I've lodged against FPS games, and I'm not talking about the little stuff; I'm talking about the big frustrations that drive me away from the the genre again and again.
First, S8 is the only FPS game I've played that actually solves the spawn camping/raping problem. And I don't mean minimizes it or makes it tolerable, I mean solves it. Period. I've played other games that use semi-random spawns, but players learn them after a while. I've played other games that feature spawn immunity, but that only slows the determined griefers; they hide out of sight, wait for the couple of seconds necessary for a newly spawned player to become vulnerable, and then blow him away. S8 solves the problem completely, insofar as the player chooses where he spawns. And not just from a list of conquered points either; anywhere on the map is fair game, though spawning within the clearly visible range of an anti-air turret is suicide.
This free-spawn mechanic would be great on its own, but it also fixes the unbeatable sniper problem. There were a few maps in ETQW, for example, that had spots from which a sniper could kill with near one hundred percent impunity. Your only hope, when faced with such a situation, was to spawn as a sniper and hope to be able to draw a bead on him before he could gun you down, which could be quite difficult and incredibly frustrating. S8 makes this impossible. If somebody gets into a great sniping position and picks you off, all you have to do is set your spawn point right behind him. I've used this trick this multiple times to great effect. I think it's even possible to drop directly on him, killing him instantly, but I haven't been able to pull it off. Sniping in S8 is a whole new ball game.
As if that weren't enough, S8's spawn system makes respawn delay far more tolerable. Getting killed in Unreal Tournament (UT) was never all that bad because you could respawn immediately. But get killed in a game like BF2 and you might be waiting for ten seconds, fifteen seconds, or whatever the admin has set for the server, before you can get back into the game. That gives the player a good reason to avoid dying, for sure, but it's also boring and takes away from the fun. In contrast, S8 lets you pick a drop (i.e., spawn) location, counts down for a couple of seconds, and then treats you to what is essentially a High Altitude Low Open parachute drop minus the parachute.
Even better, you often have the option to engage airbrakes, once you get below a certain altitude, which give you a limited ability to change where you're going to land. This is a great little enhancement for when your drop point isn't quite where the action is anymore, though there is a trade-off: it slows you down and makes you more of a target for enemy anti-air fire. In effect, the process of respawning has been turned into a limited but interesting minigame. Total time before getting back into the game is probably about the same as other games, but the experiential difference is huge. It's hard for me to believe, but I have not once found myself bored while waiting to respawn in S8. How wacky is that?!
As they say in stupid TV infomercials: but wait, there's more! Let me ask you a question: how many times have you spawned in some FPS game and spent thirty seconds running to get to the action, only to die instantly from some well placed sniper, a stupid teamkill, or something like that? Now you're stuck waiting to respawn (again), just so you can tackle that thirty second run (again). Kiss that all goodbye, folks, because S8 adds the notion of overdrive to running.
When you start running, a meter appears on the left side of your screen and begins filling. When it's full you'll shift into overdrive and start moving like a cheetah going flat out chasing his dinner. It takes something like five seconds or so to start overdrive, after which I don't think I've ever spent more than ten seconds or so getting from one end of the map to the other. Overdrive is a fantastic innovation and seems well balanced; i.e., you can't use it often enough to run away safely from every fight, but you can use it often enough to minimize the amount of time you spend trying to get where you want to be. I love it!
The overdrive mechanic is also nicely complemented by S8's jetpacks. They aren't quite as powerful as the Tribes series from which they're clearly inspired, but they're very useful nevertheless. A lightly armored fighter with an energy pack could fly for quite a while in T2, for example, whereas S8's jetpacks provide more of a short boost. Hit it in the middle of an overdrive run, though, and you can soar pretty high and clear some big obstacles. As much as I liked T2, I never really felt like I mastered skiing; I would get hung up on some invisible node in the terrain all too often and come to a dead stop. I can't say I've mastered S8, but I'll tell you this: it doesn't take more than five or ten minutes of practice to be as mobile as I was after years of playing T2.
In terms of deployables, S8 ties them to a money-based system not unlike that used to buy gear in Counterstrike, Shadowrun, The Killing Floor, etc. You earn funds by accomplishing things in game, which only encourages players to work together to achieve goals. You don't earn a lot of money for each kill, but you earn enough to request quite a few items during the course of a normal game. I've never found myself with money to burn, but I've almost always had enough to call down something helpful for the situation at hand. Put several players together at a location, and they can work together very quickly to build quite a nice little base away from home.
I always loved the deployables in T2, but they could be a real pain in the rump. It was always easy enough to set them up near a main base because you could just run right back inside to one of the stations to get your next item. But what if you needed to set up a remote base out in the field? You had to hump a remote station on your back all the way there, which made movement slow and painful compared to wearing an energy pack, deploy it, and then use it to put down your other deployables. And all the while you were vulnerable; if even one person spotted you, you were toast or your remote station was history. Either way, it meant starting over.
In S8 you can buy as many deployables as you have the funds to purchase, and you can drop them pretty much anywhere. You just pull up the menu, make your selection, point where you want it to go, and click. That's it. The smaller stuff drops down within a few seconds, while larger items (e.g., heavy combat armor, tanks, and so forth) are flown in and dropped after a somewhat longer delay. And because the vehicles are deployables, and not something that appear at fixed spawn points, there's none of the BF2-style nonsense where half your team hangs around the airfield waiting for planes to respawn, or teamkilling each other to steal them. No, when you call down heavy armor or a tank, it comes where you want it, and it's locked so only you can enter it. Pure genius.
Deployables also become a lot more powerful if you're smart about using them in combinations. If you drop an inventory station right next to an anti-air (AA) turret and a rocket turret, for example, you're going to be hard to dislodge. The inventory station will heal the other items, the AA turret will shoot down enemies dropping directly from overhead, the rocket turret will do big damage to vehicles, and you have your own weapons for dealing with infantry coming in on foot.
This mechanic is crucial for accomplishing some of the dynamic campaign missions (DCMs), which I'll cover in more depth later. When protecting an outpost, for example, it's not uncommon to drop multiple turrets, inventory stations, and the like, which make it possible to ward off pretty much the whole enemy team if they're not playing intelligently. And if I haven't stressed it enough, you can do this anywhere on the map, which radically expands the tactical options compared to most games. I can't wait to see what crazy, map-owning tactics arise in the S8 gaming community.
But lest you think you've just discovered the game's achilles heel, let me reassure you: the deployables don't unbalance the game at all. They're useful, but they're also fragile enough that a missile equipped soldier can take them down pretty quickly. There's also a particular inventory item, which is part of the artillery loadout by default, that makes it possible to blow up tight clusters of deployables immediately. This is just one example of the brilliance of S8: for every move there's a counter-move—unlike BF2, for example, where parking a couple of tanks near the enemy's last spawn point pretty much guarantees victory through non-stop spawn rape.
Whereas the spawn system and overdrive mechanics are wonderfully innovative, S8's loadouts are merely an improved version of the systems in other games. You don't get to pick different kinds of armor, but you do get to pick your primary and secondary weapon, two equipment items, and ten passive modules that let you customize your style of play. The modules remind me somewhat of "perks" from CoD4, but you don't have to unlock them. Anyone can customize his loadout from day one with the same things as max-level veteran players. I have to confess I do like systems that involve unlocks, but S8 undoubtedly makes it easier for the new player to get into the game and not get clobbered by some advanced weapon to which he has no access.
Anyway, the modules include items that boost your armor, increase your damage, mitigate others' ability to lock-on to you, enhance your own ability to lock-on to others, boost your repair rate, boost your shields, boost your jetpack recharge and run speed, increase detection time and turret delay before firing at you, and improve your weapons firing by minimizing recoil and such. Each of these nine different options may be equipped more than once to boost its contribution, though different modules have different upper limits. That may be confusing, but it will make sense when you see the interface.
The only bad thing I can say about the loadout system as a whole, beyond the comment I made earlier about being unable to name your own custom loadouts, is that there aren't enough of them. I think T2 gave the player a total of twenty, but whatever the number was I used them all. Seriously, I had loadouts for specific roles, specific tasks, etc. I know S8 is trying to be more simple and approachable, but I wish I had a few more than the six slots it provides, and of course I wish I could name them myself. Regardless, the loadout system is a great mechanic for matching your style of play with the right equipment.
Plenty of other games provide some ability to lock on to remote targets with missile launchers, and some games provide the ability to lock on to players to enhance aim. But S8 is the only game of which I'm aware that makes the lock-on system itself something of a minigame. In short, when you zoom in with your weapon, you'll see a tip that indicates you can lock onto your target by pressing the 'E' key. If you do that, then your shots will hit your target until the lock breaks after some duration. But once you've used it, you can't use it again for some cooldown period that can feel rather longish in the middle of a firefight, believe me.
I'm not clear on all the details, but it seems that your shots have an increased chance of penetrating shields when lock-on is engaged, or something like that, because I find I mow guys down a lot quicker and not just because it helps my aim. It was purely instinctive for veteran T2 players to jump and engage their jets the instant they started taking damage. It's just what you did because you're harder to hit in the air than on the ground. As the motto of the Israeli air force states: speed is life. But it's not that simple in S8. I've had players try that with me, only to die in mid air because I saved my lock-on for precisely that tactic.
The lock-on mechanic turns every combat into more of a chess game. Do I lock-on right from the start? Not if you're up close, but maybe so if from range. Or what if I'm coming in from above unseen? Do I lock-on as I approach to boost my accuracy while flying to chew through his shields before I land? Or do I try to score a combined grenade/rifle blast right at the outset and save my lock-on for when he bolts? And of course the whole equation is changed if you've equipped a module that boosts lock-on duration and decreases its recharge time. It's amazing how significantly this one, little change alters the fundamentals of combat.
S8 would be highly innovative and very worthwhile just for the game mechanics I've mentioned thus far, but it does something truly wonderful: it takes almost every popular game mode from the last twenty years and brings them together into one, unified experience! I have never before seen a multi-player focused FPS game that packs so much into its one and only game mode. It's amazing, refreshing, and wholly unprecedented in my experience. The trick will be whether I can do it justice with words.
First, there's the basic stuff. Two teams spawn and go after control points, which can be captured. You don't need them for spawn points, so it's not like losing your last control point means a frustrating end to the game ala BF2, no, you need them for team score points. Each team starts each game with zero points, and the game ends when a team reaches a score of 1,000 points. Each control point your team holds awards so many score points every so often. As such, taking and holding control points paves a path to victory. It's a bit like combining the basic conquest mechanics from BF2 with the domination game mode from the original UT. I'm not sure yet whether respawning costs team score points, or whether you achieve them for killing enemies, breaking their stuff, etc., but I do know you get them periodically from holding spawn points.
You also get them from completing a variety of dynamic campaign missions (DCMs) in the game. As battle progresses, your team earns points in four categories: siege, assault, recon, and support. You achieve these points by performing different actions. Killing the enemy gives assault points, for example, while repairing broken equipment gives support points. Various DCMs trigger, as I understand it, when a team has accumulated sufficient points in one category, or sufficient points in multiple categories, depending upon the type of DCM (the different types have different requirements for being triggered). And no, I'm not sure whether these points make up or contribute to your team score or not. I'm a bit fuzzy on the system, largely because the Steam version of the game doesn't yet have its manual available online.
At any rate, there is a surprising variety of DCMs to be triggered, all of which inject the flavor of other popular game modes into S8. For example, you may be asked to sneak into an enemy's base and retrieve a crucial piece of intel, then bring it all the way back home to your base so it can be uploaded. Can anyone say "capture the flag"? Alternately, you may be asked to secure a drop zone for an inbound general and escort him safely to your nearest base. Sounds like the "pilot" mode from Raven Shield or "VIP" mode in so many other games, doesn't it?
Similarly, you might be asked to defend an outpost for a period of time, assist a commando on some mission to assault the enemy, retrieve a bomb and detonate it in an enemy base, escort a convoy, etc. Completing these missions earns you team score points toward victory. Stopping the opposing team from completing their missions at least prevents them from earning said points and may bring points to your own team as well; I'm not sure. What I do know is that these missions make S8 something special indeed. It requires a non-trivial mental shift to stay on top of the control point situation and devote the necessary attention to DCMs which, I suppose, is probably a minigame in its own right, eh?
So many other FPS games get tired because, in the end, it all boils down to shooting. Game modes get tired because they're the same thing over and over and over, ad nauseam. You can only capture so many flags, after all, before it just grows tiresome, and your only recourse is to try another game mode, of which you will also eventually tire. But with S8 lots of different modes get mixed up in every game. Seriously, every single game you play is going to feature deathmatch, team deathmatch, conquest, and domination right from the get-go, and will likely add to that list capture the flag, last man standing, protect the VIP, escort the vehicle, hunt the target, and more along the way. The variety spices up the game play like no other FPS game I've ever played. It makes every game of S8 a new experience.
The only negative comment I can make is that sometimes the mission generator goes awry and produces results that aren't much fun. Last night, for example, I was playing in a 16 vs 16 match, and both teams were within a hundred points of the score limit. When I heard the announcement that a VIP was inbound, I figured we had the game wrapped up right there. I could see the point where he was going to drop, and it was near a relatively well-fortified base. I jetpack-jumped to disengage from the firefight I was in and overdrove to get to the site ASAP.
Sure enough, the VIP dropped in right on schedule and started for our nearest base, flanked by a couple of teammates and me. The only problem was that the DCM generator had chosen that very moment to drop an enemy commando in roughly the same location. Their commando wiped out our VIP before my teammates and I could do much of anything, and that was game over right there. A hard fought battle ended in defeat largely because of the luck of the draw. I've seen similar situations where an outpost is dropped near a convoy mission, which usually means the outpost's guns make short work of the convoy.
Still, those things don't happen very often, and when they do it's quite forgivable, given the degree to which DCMs enliven the game. S8's game design is magnificent in this regard. The developers didn't focus on refining multiple wildly different modes of play, which only fragments their own community of servers in the process; no, they simply tossed all the different modes of play into the same damned game, thus bringing together all the players on the same servers. Why hasn't anybody thought of this before?! It's brilliant!
Finally, it bears mention that the player progresses through a series of persistent ranks by earning experience. You earn experience by doing stuff and get nice boosts by earning badges and such. It's not at all clear to me how these are meaningful, aside perhaps from bragging rights, but it's there. The "Dropship" menu option will take you to a page where you can review your rank, badges, and Games For Windows Live (GFWL) achievements. I don't care all that much about such things, but I will agree they do feel like rewards and they are fun for reviewing your progress. Maybe something will unlock for me at some point, but I doubt it. We'll see. Suffice it to say that if you care about this sort of thing, S8 provides your very own "wall of me" feature.
There's something of a story to the single-player campaign. It's your basic military sci-fi stuff, and it's not very compelling, but it's there. I don't think it does much to motivate either the single-player aspect of the game or any of the multi-player carnage. But then I don't really care much with this genre either. Seriously, who gives a rip what's driving the factions in BF2? S8 features two teams, they both have weapons, and neither one much likes the other for whatever reason, so mayhem ensues. 'Nuff said.
First, the big warning: the PC version of the game is totally buggered at launch. Fracked Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) is just too gentle a locution. The beta was solid and ran beautifully from day one, but the addition of the final movies, a new version of the PhysX system, and integration with GFWL have apparently made the game a crash-fest at startup for the majority of players. I guess that just goes to show how important it is to have all the features working during a beta test—which is what the beta milestone is all about, but I digress. One hopes the developers will issue a patch soon. In the meantime, I've put together a collection of fixes for the crash-at-startup issue on my blog. If you buy the game and have the problems, use the troubleshooting steps I outline; they should fix most of the known issues.
Next, there are a few other bugs worth mentioning. I've been a bit annoyed at the frequency with which my missiles fly right through turrets and such without hitting them. I suspect this is a flaw with the hit-detection code or bounding boxes or something like that. It reminds me of the old missile-goes-through-the-front-of-the-jeep days in BF2. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen, and it's irritating when it does. Second, as I mentioned above, the DCM generator sometimes produces wacky, destined-to-fail combinations. It's irritating but forgivable. Others report that team chat doesn't always work, but I haven't seen that happen.
Aside from that, though, the content is solid. I'm not sure how many maps there are in total, but I haven't learned them all yet in twenty hours of play, and they appear to scale depending upon the maximum number of players on the server. There is quite a variety of weapons from which to choose, a bunch of useful equipment, a more than nice selection of passive modules, a good stock of deployables, and plenty of stuff around bases to repair and use. And, of course, the sheer number of different modes packed into any given game is simply nuts. Every single game I've played has been quite different from every other game I've played. Yes, the same DCMs often turn up, but they come in different patterns at different times, and, as such, bring their own unique challenges. Sometimes they're easy; sometimes they're impossible; but I've yet to find them anything but fun.
S8 definitely doesn't skimp on content. I'm sure the community will eventually grow tired of the maps. I suspect there are "only" six or eight maps, or somewhere thereabout, but no matter how many maps a game provides the community eventually gets bored. But if the gaming community can hail Left 4 Dead as the greatest thing since sliced bread with only five campaigns—a pathetic two of which were available for versus-mode play at launch—then nobody has any business rejecting S8 for the more-than-a-handful of entirely complete maps with which it ships. When you're bored with the multi-player, you can always fire up the single-player campaign or use the instant action option. Suffice it to say, my gut tells me this game has legs.
Given that S8 is clearly intended to be a multi-player game, everything I've said concerns its multi-player aspect, but there nevertheless remain a couple of things to add. First, the network code is nearly flawless. I've been disconnected from servers a couple of times, which could be the fault of my router mind you, but the gaming experience while connected is nearly perfect. I haven't seen repeating lag spikes, player warping, or other glitches. I haven't seen any problems beyond occasional lag and a couple of disconnections, and that's really saying something.
I am a bit concerned about cheating, however. I don't believe I've observed any exploits, but I haven't noticed PunkBuster or any other anti-cheat feature either. It's a sad fact of life that people cheat at virtually everything, and this is certainly true of video games. Ask anybody who played the original Diablo online just how much fun that was if you think anti-cheat mechanisms are optional. My hope is that I'm missing the obvious. If not, the developers would be well advised to integrate PunkBuster or something; otherwise, it's only a matter of time until the cheaters show up and ruin the party.
I've probably gushed enough to make the conclusion as obvious as it is foregone: I think S8 is the most incredible, multi-player focused FPS game to come out in years. I've recently had a great time with Shadowrun because of the way it mixes magic, melee combat, and shooting into an interesting and tasty stew, but S8 is so much more innovative (and polished) that it's truly in a category of its own. It's like the developers took the best bits of pretty much every popular FPS ever made, crammed them all together into a single game, and then removed or fixed all the stuff that wasn't any fun. All that's left is pure gaming crack.
I'm not saying that the game will be a hit with everyone. If you're a die hard Quake fanatic, for example, then you probably won't like this game, and let's be honest: S8 is going to be far too complex for you because it involves more than running, jumping, and shooting. But if you're an FPS gamer looking for something fast paced, yet deeply strategic, with a huge wealth of tactical flexibility, S8 definitely deserves a look. Frankly, the whole Tribes community should just go buy it en masse, save for those die-hards, I suppose, who won't play a game that doesn't have skiing. You people know who you are.
Just bear in mind that the game remains horribly broken as I write this, at least for us folks who bought the game on Steam. To be clear, I've read only one report of anyone having a problem with the CD/DVD retail version, and I don't even know if that's genuine. Since first penning the review, I've been in contact with someone at TimeGate and have been assured they're on top of it and working to correct the issue. As I've noted above, there are also various steps one may take to resolve the problems. Properly warned ye be, says I. I didn't let that deter me from buying the game on launch day, and frustrating as the hours were while I spent fighting to make it run, I have to say it was definitely worth it. Highly, highly, highly recommended.
09/08/2009