Section 8: Prejudice is an XBLA follow-up to TimeGate Studio’s
Section 8. It reunites the player with Captain Alex Corde and the 8th Armored Infantry and picks up from the end of the first game in the series. Gameplay spans across on-foot engagements as well as the ability to command mechs, combat motorcycles, tanks and other vehicles. At first glance, seeing that it is an Arcade game, you might be quick to dismiss it as not worth your time, or a simple cash-grab scheme by the developers. Well, if you are quick to make those types of assumptions, I urge you to take the time to read this review so that I can help you understand the flaws in that logic.
Prejudice is quite an ambitious title, and most of what it sets out to do it does well. The game boasts a five-hour-long single-player campaign in addition to two multiplayer modes: Conquest and Swarm. As mentioned in a news post earlier this week, this is also the first game on the console to receive dedicated server support for its multiplayer modes. That is quite a feat in and of itself. All in all this is a game with depth the likes of which is rarely seen in the vast ocean of XBLA content.
The campaign mode was my first experience with the game. In it you play as Captain Alex Corde as he leads his troops against Arm of Orion soldiers, in addition to a previously-unknown threat. I found the length satisfying – it was not so short that it could be regarded as simply training for the multiplayer modes, and yet it didn’t drag on, taking random turns as it went and confusing me along the way. The difficulty of the game ramps up smoothly, never really getting into “unfair” waters but remaining challenging at the same time.
The controls are mapped rather intuitively, which is a feat given the various items and abilities that you can trigger in your playtime. You have control of a sprint button, jet pack, primary weapon, tool/grenades, and more, in addition to the bevy of standard FPS control schemes. But after some time with it the muscle-memory takes over and you find yourself using all your abilities and devices in a smooth, consistent manner and it just… works. If there was one thing I could nit-pick about the controls it would be the aiming mechanism. I messed with the sensitivity a lot and could never actually land on a setting that felt right. The aiming seemed to always start slow and then speed up as it went, and it oftentimes resulted in me either overshooting or coming up short of my target, which is annoying either way. The only thing I can really compare it to is in a game where you are in a vehicle manning a gatling gun or something of the sort. In those cases the “slow to start, and then speeding up afterwards” aspect of aiming could be attributed to the fact that you have to get momentum to swing the huge gun around. But in Prejudice it seemed like that was the case all the time, no matter the weapon. Again, small nit-pick, but there it is.
Graphically speaking the game is robust. There were times that I forgot that I was playing an Arcade game. However, there were other instances where it was rather obvious, the most noticeable of which were times where the shadows flickered consistently on the characters’ faces and on the ground in cutscenes. This wasn’t a big deal though, just an observation. The sounds are good, but not really anything to write home about. The music is suitably “epic” for the subject matter, and the sound effects do a decent job as well. Explosions go boom, guns sound nice (especially the machine gun), etc. But they just don’t really stand out in any way either, so it’s just a case of status-quo here; nothing really goes above and beyond in making the aural landscape different or impressive.
