Section 8: Prejudice [game, review]
Apr. 21st, 2012 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsLast night I finished Section 8: Prejudice, a fairly mundane second-string first person shooter in the mold of Halo: armored super soldiers crawling their way through metric tons of enemy territory, engaging with the enemy and generally blowing shit up.
It's not a bad game, but it's not your triple-A title. It was certainly worth the $4.99 I paid for it on Steam. It actually plays a lot like Halo, but with a nifty addition: you can (briefly) fly when your jetpack is fully charged.
Still, it's a slog of a game: kill a lot of bad guys, move to the next level. Each level by itself is fairly fun, but the tissue of a plot that holds it together is completely pointless, and there are no interesting twists to the story, nor does the accumulation of levels seem to point to an ultimate plot point. The game just kinda ends, after a boss battle that's frustratingly inane. Your shots don't do anything to the villain; you just have to wait for him to do something stupid, and then you run in, kick him, and run away. Do this four times and it's over.
The mechanics are great, the visuals nice and artsy and in many some places quite well done. There are scenes: "In this scene, the point of your blowing shit up is to prevent XYZ from being destroyed." But these scenes don't add up to a story, you don't achieve anything interesting, and ultimately there's no engagement with the first-person-ness of the game.
Still, if blowing shit up and pretending to be a super-soldier of the transhuman future is your thing, and you don't have $59.99 to drop on being Samantha Shepherd (Mass Effect), $4.99 isn't a bad price to pay for a few hour's entertainment.
It's not a bad game, but it's not your triple-A title. It was certainly worth the $4.99 I paid for it on Steam. It actually plays a lot like Halo, but with a nifty addition: you can (briefly) fly when your jetpack is fully charged.
Still, it's a slog of a game: kill a lot of bad guys, move to the next level. Each level by itself is fairly fun, but the tissue of a plot that holds it together is completely pointless, and there are no interesting twists to the story, nor does the accumulation of levels seem to point to an ultimate plot point. The game just kinda ends, after a boss battle that's frustratingly inane. Your shots don't do anything to the villain; you just have to wait for him to do something stupid, and then you run in, kick him, and run away. Do this four times and it's over.
The mechanics are great, the visuals nice and artsy and in many some places quite well done. There are scenes: "In this scene, the point of your blowing shit up is to prevent XYZ from being destroyed." But these scenes don't add up to a story, you don't achieve anything interesting, and ultimately there's no engagement with the first-person-ness of the game.
Still, if blowing shit up and pretending to be a super-soldier of the transhuman future is your thing, and you don't have $59.99 to drop on being Samantha Shepherd (Mass Effect), $4.99 isn't a bad price to pay for a few hour's entertainment.
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-21 11:07 pm (UTC)Interestingly that review saw me get spammed by Derek Smart. Not something to be proud of, but equally eye-rolling. =)
no subject
Date: 2012-04-22 05:31 am (UTC)....
'cause that is _exactly_ what I named her. WTF hive mind?
Also, Painkiller is $5 on gog.com for the weekend. It doesn't really have any pretensions to being anything other than You Kill Lots and Lots and Lots of Mooks, and it's good at it. It's the subject of a semi-legendary and positive review from Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-22 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-23 04:18 am (UTC)