There's always a point in online gaming, that 30 second downtime period, the moment between your death at the hands of another player and the resurrection that allows you to continue and seek vengeance, that I always hate. Loath in fact, because when I'm playing an online game particularly one that involves a lot of running and even more shooting, I want to play it from the second I enter a server to the exact point at which I leave. Waiting to respawn after death might only take a few seconds, but it so often feels like an age, slowly trawling through the scoreboard and checking out different class selections might be enough of momentary distraction, but I just want to play, not sit in some state of limbo hanging there as my tolerance start to wear off.

One of the great discoveries of Timegate's little heard about online action game Section 8 is how it makes you feel connected to it's world even in death. In a futuristic war, soldiers aren't deployed on the battlefield, they're rather unceremoniously shot out of the back of a dropship thousands of feet in the air and then have to guide themselves through anti-aircraft fire as they seek to find a suitable landing spot. You get to do this every time you spawn, hurtling towards the ground as that small green blob slowly turns into a huge island fortress before the skies erupt with the smoke from guns trying desperately to shoot you out of the air. It's perhaps one of the most audacious methods of entering an online game ever, and the first clue that Section 8 is more than just a carbon copy of every popular online FPS out there.

Not that the game hides it's numerous influences well. Just about every cliché of recent FPS games is present. The uninspiring futuristic armour suited super soldiers fighting other armoured super soldiers comes right out of the Unreal Tournament series, the rechargeable armour suits are ripped straight from Halo, the jet-pack combat quite clearly influenced by Tribes while the large scale maps and vehicular combat are taken directly from the Battlefield games. This is a game playing it by the numbers, it's weapons, setting and game modes are exactly the kinds of thing you'll have seen many times before. What Section 8 does do differently is meld these various types of game-play elements into a coherent whole, all while adding a dose of it's own unique take on the genre.

This is primarily an online game. A story lead single player mode also comes packaged but it's tale of the 8th Armoured Infantry fighting the sinister Arm of Orion in an interplanetary war holds few surprises. There's betrayal, revenge, honour and all that hokum, but the single player never feels anything other that what it essentially is, a tutorial mode teaching you the ins and outs of how the game works while you battle with and against AI controlled bot's. It's the multiplayer you'll come to Section 8 for.

Each match take place on a large map, and given the nature of your entrance into the game, these maps allow you to land practically anywhere you choose, so long as it doesn't involve flying towards a well placed anti air defence system. The goal of each game remains the capture and holding of key strategical bases that are dotted around the map, capturing these unlocks that base and it's turret defences to your team that you them must use to ensure the enemy doesn't sneak in and capture it for themselves. The longer you hold these bases the more points you get, the team with the most point wins the game. But that alone would be too easy.

Games very rarely pan out the same. Throughout, each team can take part in side missions that activate randomly and can vary from capturing and securing enemy intelligence to escorting important VIP's back to safety. Completing these missions can greatly boost the score, but with those points also being awarded to the enemy should they interfere and prevent you from completing them, these secondary missions can often see as intense fighting as is often witnessed around the bases. It gives the game a dynamisms that prevents it from feeling samey and repetitive, while also giving you something a little more interesting to do than hunt down enemy gun turrets.

Further adding incentive for your efforts to attain the highest score, for every kill you achieve and objective you successfully complete, you are awarded money. This can then be spent on a variety of new items the most powerful and expensive of which are the hover tanks and battle mechs. Unwieldy and very costly, these vehicles do at least give you the edge in battle and if a team does extremely well in gaining the lead, they often show off that fact by kiting themselves out in these vehicles. The more tactile player might instead rely on the cheaper alternatives, Minigun, rocket and anti-air turrets are also available for purchase, not only are these more cost effective they can be deployed anywhere on the map, used to close the gaps in a bases defence network, or more cunningly, placed in areas where enemy troops are known to land and sit and wait ready to ambush them.

Where Section 8 falls down is with it's own lack of any striding ambition. Whilst it does have ideas of it's own, you often leave feeling as though Timegate could have done more, and certainly built on the world they've created how ever unimaginative it is. There's just nothing here at all that feels remarkable or new, and if you've played (or continue to play) any one of those game from which Section 8 has taken inspiration from, it's doubtful you'll really find much to warrant your sustained interest.

There are also some mild flaws that spoil the whole experience. The unbalanced weapons for one, the assault rifles and machine guns all perform as you'd expect, heavy, loud and capable of causing a massive amount of damage, switch to the rocket launcher however and you'll struggle to cause the same amount of damage regardless of how accurate you are and the fact that you're firing a huge explosive rocket. It's odd thing to find a game where a pistol can be more effective at diminishing a shielded enemy than a rocket.

The graphics might also lack the kinds of detail we expect these days, it's hardly the greatest looking of games and it's design etiquette has been ripped straight out of the Epic book of futuristic design, but, it can still be a pretty game handling large scale open areas very well even when things are busy, and as bland as the art direction is the design of this futuristic world certainly presents some stunning looking vistas. Sound also ticks the boxes and nothing more, the weapons do tend to sound rather generic but at least provide a suitable thump that gives them a meaty weight, these feel like the oversized powerful death dealing tools they look like. But regardless of these flaws, Section 8 is saddled with one very major problem, a problem that to extent may even effect the console versions as much as the PC. There just isn't enough people playing it.

It's likely as much to do with the almost complete lack of any kind of publicity leading to the games launch, appearing without hardly any kind of fanfare, for any online game to build a reputable online community it first pays to get as many people interested in the game before it's release as possible, and that just hasn't seemed to have happened here. This PC version also suffers from the fact it has the Games for Windows Live service attached, and despite Microsoft's best efforts to try and bend to the whim of PC gamers by making the service free, it still appears too few PC gamers seem willing to to take chance with this service. As such servers remain largely empty, and although many do offer Bot support to fill in the gaps, with the AI switching between rather challenging to stupid, playing against these is in no way a substitute for playing against real people.

And so the problem, it's an online game without much of an online community. Section 8 might be a rather unimaginative game, it may very well borrow many of it's ideas from more established franchises but it's not without it's own merits. Some of it's own ideas are well implemented, it's online battlegrounds can be hugely enjoyable places to fight across when there are actually people there to experience it with, it's a game I've had huge amounts of fun with and would hope to continue to do so for months to come, but with too few people currently playing I fear this little gem of an online game may become lost which would be shame. If any game is more deserving of some recognition, Section 8 certainly take it's place at the front of the queue.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).