Section 8 as the TL;DR covers, is a pretty standard and long dead FPS game that lived and died by it’s multiplayer modes. With that being said, it had a few tricks up it’s sleeve which I think made it a pretty fun and enjoyable game, even if it wasn’t going to set the world on fire. Before diving into those though, I’ll just quickly rattled through the surrounding layers that aren’t really worth covering in detail. Firstly the graphics are fine for the era, nothing special but the variety in locations is appreciated and it avoids the near-ubiquitous BROWN AND BLOOM approach favoured by it’s contemporaries. It even avoids the near mandatory urine-filter that makes all the blues washed out in favour of a “nice” yellow layer. Instead this a game that just looks kinda nice. The soundtrack, such as it is, doesn’t really have a much of a role in this outside of the menu screen but it’s inoffensive so gets a pass. The weapon selection is about what you’d expect, namely assault rifles, pistols, sniper rifles, a missile launcher, a shotgun and an SMG. Finally the AI manages to be both kinda bad and also adequate at the same time, they’re good shots but tactically brain dead so swings and roundabouts. Oh and obviously the writing sucks and the voice acting isn’t very good because this is a game on the budget end of the spectrum.

With that out of the way, why did I like Section 8? Well the first thing that was really cool about the game was the fact that you spawned in by jumping through space!!! The way it works is simple, you pick a place you’d like to respawn and the game obliges by booting you out of a space ship. You then hurtle down towards the battle field, with the option of either crash landing like a badass or initiating a space-break that gives you some control over where you land. Either way getting the whole battlefield while you rush towards it is genuinely pretty cool and a nice idea. One that even ended up becoming part of the Medal of Honor series via MoH:Airborne, shortly before they went full “let’s try to be even cooler than Call of Duty” and died. The other twist that Section 8 has to offer otherwise jaded FPS fans is that you get two mobility gimmicks. The first is that if you hold sprint, eventually you’ll enter SUPER SPRINT after a few seconds and then switch to third person view while running at a very silly speed. As a bonus, you can damage both friends and foes by barrelling into them at Mach 4. Which is honestly a great addition to any game. Then the other great addition to any game is the humble jetpack, which doesn’t last for very long but everyone gets one so Section 8 gets a thumbs up from me if only for that. To compensate for the fact that everyone gets regenerating shields that take a while to go down, plus these movements options the game also has a limited auto-aim feature. Essentially every now and then you lock-on to the enemy for a few seconds, which ends instantly if they go behind cover or line of sight is otherwise broken. The timing has been handled pretty well, as you can’t just abuse it due to the long cooldown and it doesn’t guarantee a kill as generally you’ll only whittle down the enemy’s shields or at least a big chunk of them. As a consequence of these ideas, Section 8 is a fun little multiplayer shooter that gives players the ability to flex on the baddies while still having some crutches for noobs. Plus the multiplayer modes while limited, do feature two variations on “players vs overwhelming numbers of bots” which you love to see in a game. Anyone who has tried playing the Star Wars Battlefront 1 & 2 galactic conquest modes knows how fun standing off against legions of the AI can be, even when the AI isn’t particularly bright.

Unfortunately as mentioned earlier, the Section 8 multiplayer modes are super dead and no one can buy the game. There is a discord community that has jerry-rigged the LAN mode and sometimes plays the game, so click here if you’d like to join them. Otherwise you’re stuck playing against the bots in a pale imitation of MP, convincing a group of your friends to play a LAN game or “enjoying” the campaign mode. Which is why I’m writing this review, because I’ve only recently gotten around to playing the campaign mode after barely thinking about this game for around 12 years. How is it? Well it’s pretty mediocre in pretty much every way imaginable. Now notice that I didn’t say bad, I just said mediocre. This is because the campaign mode can’t really be considered bad, as it’s too bland and inoffensive to be actually objectionable. It’s fine, it even has one or two interesting (not necessarily good) ideas and it functions as a nice enough tutorial for the multiplayer mode. Which is unfortunately dead, but if we consider it in the context of when the game was relevant it’s a forgivable offence. I mean Battlefield Bad Company had a campaign, and it was OK, but people only really cared about the game for the multiplayer mode. So what makes the campaign so bland I hear you ask?

Well first thing’s first, the campaign is just a collection of 8 maps where you basically play normal skirmish matches against the AI. There are some restrictions to your load-out at least initially, and the occasional (short) cutscene but generally speaking these are pretty standard missions. You spawn in to the designated area, move forward, shoot the handful of AI enemies, press the action button to hack something and then either more enemies spawn while you defend the objective or the map gets bigger. When the map gets bigger, you go to the next objective. Rinse and repeat for almost every part of this very short campaign. Should you die, you can just respawn back in. There are no penalities for dying at all. The enemy variety is very minimal, because the enemies are just AI bots and occasionally AI bots in vehicles. Sometimes you even get a vehicle too! The plot is basically an irrelevance, your squadmates have zero personality and neither does the protagonist. In fact the only thing I can think of as being noteworthy is the bizarre way that your squadmates interact with the enemy. On the one hand, they are invulnerable. On the other hand, they only deal damage in rare instances where they are allowed to, or when you’ve dealt a decent amount of damage to an individual enemy who they are then allowed to finish off. It’s quite common to see a squadmate and an enemy locked in an elaborate duel to the death, where both run into each other, unload multiple magazines of gunfire and neither take any damage. This does make them effective distractions, but the enemy will prioritise you if you get too close. Unfortunately, a squad of 5 enemies can all deal damage whereas your squad of 3 buddies is much more limited. As for why I described it as a glorified tutorial, well that’s because over the course of Section 8’s eight missions (in hindsight, was that intentional on the part of the developers?) you are gradually introduced to each mechanic that will be in the multiplayer mode. You get to play as each class at least once. You get to call in turrets and vehicles. You get to pilot each vehicle precisely once and you have to fight each “enemy type” (namely infantry, mechs and vehicles) multiple times. The whole thing is a pretty basic and barebones story stretched over a couple of maps that play like a more scripted version of a multiplayer battle.

And at this point there really isn’t much more to say about the game. The campaign is basically a blur and I finished it in one sitting, without any difficulty. The fact that you can respawn infinitely and that each completed objective causes a supply point (which regenerates ammo and health) to drop in at your location makes it a pretty easy time. The final boss fight is just a mech with some tougher enemies escorting it, while the only real fearsome gunfights occur during “defend the objective” missions. But you can keep respawning, and the enemy AI is pretty dumb, so I never failed a mission. As mentioned the plot is super basic, you are a MARINE in SPACE whose squad dies fighting the BIG BAD GUY and so you are MAD at the BIG BAD GUY and eventually you find him and SHOOT HIM. That’s about it, there’s no world building or side characters or ambiguity or choices or anything. It’s as simple as it gets. There is one cutscene that is unintentionally really funny because the protagonist keeps saying he’s gonna COME but I chalked that up to me being immature. I will note that the environments look kinda nice and uh… the shooting is fine even if playing against bots isn’t as fun as playing against real people. I guess I should point out that Section 8 is weird in the sense that explosives don’t deal that much damage, and as a consequence enemies are surprisingly durable even if they are unsurprisingly dumb. There’s not much more to elaborate on there though, because this is a very simple campaign for an enjoyable if fairly simple FPS game.

In conclusion then Section 8 is a good FPS game that has been largely lost to the mists of time. If you were to pick it up today, you’d get a mediocre campaign and some matches against AI bots that are pretty dumb. You’d also get the potential for a fun LAN party, but let’s not kid ourselves – that probably won’t happen. So would I recommend Section 8? Not really. It’s a game I enjoyed back in the day and playing through it wasn’t a bad experience, but unless you are someone like me with fond memories this is a short and insubstantial experience. As mentioned the game is sort of free, because it’s abandonware and the truly dedicated reader can join a discord group and maybe get an online match out of it. Alas Section 8 is a game that came and went, that I can’t in good faith endorse to anyone except those who are exceptionally curious about the dead games of the 7th console generation. If you are one of those eccentrics, then it’s a fine experience with some nice ideas. For everyone else, press F to pay respects.

The post Section 8 appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Legendary is, for want of a better description, a very slapdash game that seems to have been put together by a team that had grandiose albeit unfulfilled ambitions. It starts off with International Art-Thief Deckard taking instructions from Posh English Lady Veronica after Deckard opens up Pandora’s Box on the instructions of a sinister benefactor. To the surprise of no one, this doesn’t go well and causes chaos to ensue as the world finds itself under attack by swarms of Gryphons in the air and legions of fire lizards on the streets. The opening of the game is unintentionally(?) very silly, as the player has no real control over anything and must plod along while explosions and choreographed scenes of hungry hungry gryphons chomping through civilians keep playing out in front of them. The whole thing feels more like an interactive Michael Bay movie than anything, as buildings collapse, fires break out and everyone freaks out while you stumble around like a disaster movie Forrest Gump.

Eventually proud American Deckard finds a pistol just lying around, which introduces the first red-flag of the game as it becomes apparent that we’re dealing with yet another 2-weapon limit FPS game. In addition to this, a second red flag is raised as it’s revealed that the max amount of ammunition you can carry for each weapon is pretty limited. As such you will be constantly coming across guns, which is a touch out of place for a game that has two settings – New York and jolly old England. Fortunately(?) as Legendary proceeds we discover that there are barely any weapons to worry about, as the game has a very, very standard FPS game load out. There are a whole SEVEN weapons to keep track of, which at least are very creative and show that the developers invested time into making this an interesting and varied FPS game that stands the test of time and is still worth playi-

Hahahahaha nah I’m taking the piss, you get a pistol, SMG, shotgun, assault rifle, heavy machine gun, flamethrower and rocket launcher (3^rd red flag) with the last two on that list only appearing for the last hour of the game.

This is made even worse as these two weapons don’t give you any real reason to use them outside of 3 sections in which they are mandatory, as ammunition is limited and they perform worse in most situations than other weapons you already have. You do also have a melee weapon but much like the pistol, it instantly gets forgotten about as soon as you have the SMG/Shotgun power combo which are for dealing with human and mythical creature enemies respectively. The human enemies are nothing to write home about, as they have very basic AI and are limited to the range of weapons that you have access to. In spite of them being incredibly dumb, they are still the biggest threat in the game as they have hit-scan weapons and instantaneous reaction times (the 4^th red flag, who likes hit-scan???) which means that they can quickly shred through your plot armour. They don’t have much health and go down to a few blasts from the iron-sights of most guns, but in a case of yet another red flag your aim sensitivity sky-rockets the more you zoom in. As such utilising the scope on the Assault Rifle is a real pain in the backside.

The same can also be said about most of the enemy creatures, none of which are very threatening as they deal modest amounts of damage but can be absorbed for free health when they die. This is because Deckard is marked with a totally sick tattoo sigil after opening Pandora’s Box which lets him harvest and store monster souls Animus Vitae from dead mythical creatures as a type of portable medic kit. He also has the ability to perform a modest AoE stun, but honestly why stun when you can gun?

As such the enemy creatures function as unruly healing supplies and each have their own unique annoyances. You’ve got the fire lizards which deal a bit of AoE damage if they die too close to you and that have a nasty habit of spawning infinitely from blazing fires in the early areas (at least until you utilise the magic E button on your keyboard to activate various glowing objects to extinguish those fires). You’ve got the werewolves which are a pushover when using the shotgun but will regain all their health if you don’t shoot their head when they go down, which can be annoying when dealing with a group of them (or when they rag-doll into a spot that makes hitting their head near impossible as their big fat bodies are in the way). Then you’ve got the two other types of Werewolf, namely the Alpha werewolf which just has much more health, plus the Ghost werewolf which only appears twice in the entire game but requires you to double-tap your ability key to use that aforementioned stun which makes them vulnerable.

Carrying on you’ve got the Nari which are the most sinister enemy in the game due to the fact that they are invulnerable except when about to attack and can phase through walls, but they have very little health so they’re still more of a hassle than a threat. You’ve also got the very tanky Gryphons and Minotaurs both of whom essentially function as mini-bosses due to their very high health pools and identical attack patterns (they walk at you and try to hit you, OR they run at you while destroying objects in the way and try to hit you). Rounding things off you’ve got uh… tentacles which have low health but are almost impossible to avoid due to the narrow spaces you’re in, with the developers deliberately placing them so that they grab you at short notice. Should you fail to shoot them while grabbed quickly enough they’ll instantly kill you, but this only happened once to me so I wouldn’t worry about it much. Last and certainly least, you’ve got egg sacks queen blood spiders which spawn little scurrying ticks blood spiders endlessly until you shoot them. I’m willing to forgive the tentacles as they do add a tiny sense of foreboding to the overwhelmingly frequent sewer sections (6^th reg flag!) but the blood spiders can suck ma boab.

Fortunately you don’t need to face all these threats alone, as shortly after being betrayed by their mysterious benefactor – who is part of an illuminati-esque group called The Black Order – our dynamic duo team up with a group called The Council who are a different but less evil illuminati secret society. This means that you often get to team up with generic FPS mooks who don’t have helmets due to the fact that they barely have brains worth protecting. They are very, very dumb and really only serve as a distraction for enemies, but due to the aforementioned hit-scan baddies this actually makes them pretty useful. Unfortunately they die in one creature attack and have a bad habit of throwing grenades at themselves. You shouldn’t feel guilty for letting them get killed though as they manage to not only die 24/7 in the cutscenes but also die constantly due to multiple “cinematic” instances that occur during gameplay where temporarily invulnerable enemies pull off scripted kills. According to the DEEP LORE of Legendary both the Black Order and The Council are comprised of ELITE special forces infantry but honestly Deckard is the only person in the game with an IQ above room temperature, and even then he literally opens pandora’s box so it’s fair to say that everyone in this game is perpetually drooling on themselves.

As for this DEEP LORE most of it is contained within your handy PDA (a twee reminder that this game was made before the nightmarish combination of social media and smartphones ruined everyone’s minds) which serves as a repository of shallow information. It turns out that the Black Order are seeking to control the creatures that are trying to eat everyone, that The Council think this is a bad idea and that the head commander of The Council is a dorky military type who might not be trustworthy. It also contains very, very basic descriptions of each weapon (e.g. The pistol is a basic semi-automatic weapon that doesn’t deal much damage, Molotovs are cheap and deal damage over time, the Heavy Machine Gun is big and good at shooting things but takes a while to reload etc.) and a bunch of notes and generic flavour text which are generally two or three sentences long per entry. Most of them are variations on “COR BLIMEY GUV’NA THERE BE MONSTERS WE GOTS TO LEAVE I RECKON” or “DEAR MY WIFE I AM TRAPPED IN THE BUILDING AND THERE ARE SPOOKY WEREWOLVES I WILL DIE BUT I LUV U D:” or “CHARLIE TEAM ECHO BRAVE HAS SECURED THE EVAC ZONE SEMPER FIE” although I did find the one saying “I shouldn’t have called you crazy for having all those guns” to be pretty funny.

At this stage there really isn’t much more that can be said about Legendary because, well, it’s only got 6 levels (7^th red flag, so there are more red flags in this game than levels) and so I beat it in under 5 hours. It’s probably worth pointing out this was after encountering a crash-to-desktop bug and another bug which causes you to fall through an elevator’s floor to your death (pro-tip, stand in the corner next to the control panel) with both of these occurring in the final level btw. I’d talk about the ending but [[[SPOILERS]]] the game abruptly ends on a quasi-cliffhanger immediately after you blow up the big bad guys doomsday machine, with the game basically saying “Then Deckard and Veronica realised that the illuminati are lame and so they escaped to tame the beasts the end :-D”. It’s abrupt to the point that it feels as if the developers planned to have an extra level or two where you team up with the beasts to fight the boring council dweebs and thus end both secret societies, but either Legendary ran out of budget or the QA department ran out of patience.

[[[SPOILERS OVER]]] but instead of further berating Legendary over it’s many, many flaws (like the laughably bad facial expressions, the frequent habit of NPCs to unbudging stare at walls with guns drawn or the utterly forgettable two-instrument aspiring to be rock soundtrack) I’d like to wind down this review by mentioning a handful of moments that actually managed to be amusing or cool. Firstly the Nari are little shits and they occasionally mess with you by possessing doors that you’re trying to open or locking you in an area while they try and kill you in creative ways, such as by turning on a big ventilation fan that sucks you in or using vending machines to throw soda cans at your face. Then you’ve got a segment later on in Legendary where you use homing missiles to lock onto and explode those pesky gryphons, which is silly and gave off real “Reign of Fire” vibes. Finally the section where the big bad guy dies is so excessively over-the-top that it’s earnestly amusing, he gets attacked by a werewolf, falls out of a window, gets picked up mid fall by a gryphon that attacks him and then impaled onto a big spike and electrocuted – with that big spike being part of a massive bomb that then explodes.

With those niceties over, I’ll summarise by saying Legendary is a pretty bad game that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Even if the FPS combat is just about serviceable and it’s true that there are a couple of cool enemies to shoot, the game is a bit of a mess. Everything about it is just so lacklustre in every aspect, from character animations to story to weapon selection to the level design through to the abrupt ending and obligatory multiplayer mode (that has 4, count em, FOUR maps).

I don’t regret playing through it as bargain bin games are the sorbet of any game players backlog, enabling them to appreciate the next game with a clear palette and appreciation for all the effort that’s involved in making a genuinely polished game. But with that being said, even if Legendary deserves the bad reviews I do still hope the people who made it did OK and went on to do better things as it’s clear that they tried their best to make a campy FPS game. Based on the tongue-in-cheek credits and the tiny departments involved, it’s obvious that this is just another example of PS2-tier developers struggling to successfully land the transition to the AAA dominated industry that the 7^th console generation heralded.

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