Section 8: Prejudice: first person shooters passed me by

At some point first person shooters and I parted ways. I was there at the beginning, playing Wolfenstein and downloading the DOOM preview off of the campus network. I learned the ways of WASD and circle strafing. I followed the evolution of the genre. I even jumped over to consoles to learn how to twin stick with Halo. But somewhere after Battlefield 2, sometime around Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, I began to drift away. My brief dalliance with Modern Warfare confirmed my feelings that I was no longer a “mainstream” FPSer. So I slunk off to strategy games. At least I didn’t fall all the way into wargaming.

Fortunately with a mature genre like FPSs, plenty of games will excite an almost 40-year-old father of a sub-2-year-old, homeowner, and mouselook inverter. If you’re willing to look past the multi-million dollar ad campaigns and dig around the edges you’ll find some gems.

After the jump, I “drop in” on Section 8: Prejudice

I get smoked in any FPS duel relying on reflexes. But Section 8:Prejudice isn’t about kill/death ratios. It’s about completing missions, capturing points in Conquest mode, and defending your capture point in Swarm. I’ll happily gear up in an Engineer configuration to repair bases. I’ll select an Artillery configuration and go hunting enemy AA turrets to clear the way for my team to drop straight onto a held capture point. I don’t have to fight.

The sheer variety of weapons, ammo types, equipments, and modules means I can configure my loadout for the style of play I want to do at that moment. As soon I unlocked EMP rounds for my machine gun, I modified my Guardian loadout to use it. Now when an enemy recognizes my machine gun he thinks his shields are safe. He’s wrong. My EMP rounds rip through shields.

I’ll invest in an FPS if it focuses on tactics and planning. Section 8: Prejudice requires those things, as well as the ability to blow things up and shoot people in the face. And it costs 1/4 the normal price of a game.

Up next: There’s a single player mode to this game?

Paul “Rorschach” Tobia is a big fan of games. When he’s not taking care of his family or day job he runs websites about games, podcasts about games, and occasionally plays games.