Military Video Games, computer games, games, gaming - Military Times

You’ve played it before

The new first-person shooter “Section 8” is like a good fugue, or a sonnet, or an episode of “Law and Order”: A well-executed formula that relies on the strength of its structure to take you to familiar but enjoyable places.

The premise of the game is standard sci-fi boilerplate: In the future, the imperial forces of Earth must put down an insurgency on distant colonial planets. To do this, they send in the 8th Armored Infantry — the galaxy’s infamous “Section 8” — to carry out their violence needs. You play as a member of the 8th’s elite 1st Recon unit, charged with softening up the enemy in small units before the regular forces go in.

Not only have you heard that concept before, you’ve seen and played it: “Section 8” has giant structure and alien-desert locales just like “Halo”; powered armor suits just like “Halo”; and space-V-22 Osprey tilt-jets, just like “Halo,” that you can call to bring you vehicles — just like “Halo.” Fortunately, there are no annoying aliens in “Section 8” and no interminable storyline.

So if you belong to the legions who think “Halo” was the greatest first-person shooter, playing “Section 8” will be like listening to a Stone Temple Pilots album after one by Pearl Jam. Maybe the similarities will drive you crazy, or maybe you’ll like both for the same reasons.

In the places where “Section 8” improves on “Halo,” it does so with authority. The game is built around big multiplayer battles on huge maps where your team must work together on a series of different objectives as opposed to a single death-match or capture-the-flag session. This many-games-in-one concept, which also appeared in this year’s “Killzone 2,” is apparently what’s hip now in shooter world, although I worry about programmers losing sight of the perfect, classic team death match. Then again, I have an old soul.

When you can’t or don’t want to go online, “Section 8” has a single-player campaign and a you-versus-bots mode that reproduces the experience of the multiplayer, which will be good for players without an Internet connection.

The troops of the 8th AI “burn in” to planets when they need to attack, dropping from ships in orbit — just as in, ahem, “Halo” — but “Section 8” lets you aim where you land and even choose when to slow your descent. When you respawn, you fall from outer space toward the map below, and with some practice you can angle yourself over territory protected by enemy guns or land behind bad guys and outflank them.

Your armor suit lets you run at superspeed across the large multiplayer maps, which is really useful, and it has a jet-pack, which is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, your weapons, including laser rifles and missile launchers, are dry toast. If you’re used to games in which a single headshot or a well-aimed burst is enough to kill opponents, you may find combat in “Section 8” wearisome, because it involves relatively long fights spent hosing down the other players.

I was also disappointed by the 8th AI’s vehicles, which consist of a hover-tank and a larger armored suit you could wear over your existing armor. The tank is needlessly difficult to drive, so I spent a lot of time trying to back away from walls and corners, and its presence is usually irrelevant on the huge battlefields. Compare that to “Call of Duty: World at War,” for example, in which a team can suffocate the map if it grabs armor quickly enough.

The larger armored suit doesn’t let you fly or run fast, and I never felt that its gun was any more lethal than my regular rifle. In addition to the vehicles, you can call in fixed-gun and anti-aircraft emplacements, useful for distracting the opposition, as well as resupply stations that everyone on your team can use to change out their weapons.

And in another improvement that is becoming standard in today’s video games, you can repair it all. When vehicles, fixed emplacements or teammates take damage, you can fix them up if you’re carrying the repair tool, meaning everyone can be a rifleman and an engineer at the same time.

So “Section 8” is a perfectly acceptable workaday shooter to absorb your near-term video gaming time, but not long from now, you’ll be yanking it out of your console to make room for “Halo 3: ODST” and “Modern Warfare 2.”

Unlike those games, though, you probably won’t put this one back in again.