Released last year for the Xbox 360 and PC, TimeGate Studios went out on their own to publish this futuristic FPS on the PS3. While the game is aimed at online multiplayer matches, it still provides a single player mode called "Corde's Story" that takes the maps provided in this game and runs players through a quick tutorial and some "defend this!" and "attack this!" objectives. It's great that it's included, but it can feel like a chore at times. For practice, you can start a bot-filled instant action game. I'll admit that I spent most of my time here and really enjoyed the amount of options that the title provided me. Of course, there's online multiplayer for those of you that simply must kill other players.

This game's defining feature is that players are taking part of an interplanetary war by dropping into battlefields directly from space. This set up is used for just about everything in the game from launching into the level to calling up reinforcements. More than just serving as a cool intro into a level, depending on the drop target you pick your character has a nice safe landing or anti-aircraft turrets fire at him as he approaches the ground. This makes capturing these turrets actually useful and beneficial. Doing well in battle lets you purchase other weapons, turrets, and even tanks. It sounds silly, but there's nothing like seeing a giant tank being dropped into a map at high speeds. When something of its size is called into play, it does a good job of mixing up the gameplay without feeling like an overpowered perk from Call of Duty.

So this all sounds great, right? Here's where it gets into "love it or hate it" territory. Players act as big muscled, bald space marines in heavy armored suits and because of this they are slow. And when I say slow, I mean "you think your character is stuck in crawl" slow. To address this issue, the developers put in a sort of simple, sort of complicated sprinting system. The basic sprint still feels pretty snail paced considering the amount of ground you have to cover on your typical map. But if you sprint for 7 to 10 seconds, you activate this power-sprint that will finally get you moving. The only thing is that I found myself blow right by my targets when using this feature way too often. On top of this, it has a completely arbitrary meter tied to it, so you can't sprint all the time. I'm sure this makes sense to someone, but for me it was clunky at best and controller-throwing infuriating at other times. I understand the narrative reasons to include this functionality. It makes sense. I get it. However, making sense doesn't always make fun and this was the biggest point of contention between me and the game. Let this be a lesson to future game designers here: Your standard run speed should not be a punishment for using sprint.

Section 8 doesn't push many creative envelopes, it has a single player campaign featuring flesh-toned rainbow of nameless bald space marines, and it implements some highly questionable control mechanics. It would be easy to harp on the faults here, but when I gathered my thoughts for this review I realized that I've forgiven other games for even poorer design choices and reason why I found it difficult to forgive this game is because of the genre. The sad fact is that the game's genre just isn't my forte to begin with and the quirks that I saw here didn't help bring me into the game, but pushed me out instead. For the avid FPS player deliberately looking for something plays and feels "different," I say try Section 8, you'll love it. You'll find some interesting ideas and mechanics and see what it looks like when a developer takes an experimental approach to an established (over-saturated?) genre. All others should drop in with extreme caution.