Rock, Paper, Shotgun

While I’ve been having a right old laugh in the beta for Section 8, as detailed here, we’ve not heard much about the single player game, until today. ‘Neath the click is a trailer that SouthPeak sent over, which features the TimeGate team talking about their single player campaign. It’s not clear how linear it’ll be, as it looks like it’ll be a bot-driven series of objective-based battles to intro you to the game concepts, and the story of the battle between the two factions. The game footage in this clip has it looking fairly awesome, anyway, with some serious robo-stomp tango. They’re obviously proud of the mech smashing humanoid opponents, and I was pretty stunned when I saw that happen for the first time in-game.
Read the rest of this entry »

Right, it looks like I was a bit confused on this front: the next stage of Section 8’s testing is a European beta, since the first lot was North American, and it does have limited places. You can sign up here. That European beta will start on the 10th. For my recent impressions take a look here. Kristan at Eurogamer was also pretty positive. As I understand it, an open beta, presumably for both continents, is to follow. The game is scheduled for release worldwide on August 28th.

The past few days I’ve been absorbed by Timegate’s closed multiplayer beta for sci-fi shooter Section 8. I understand that there’s actually some single-player element to the game, which will explain some of the sci-fi story which underscores the action, but what I’ve seen so far is a multiplayer game of fair complexity. It’s a Unreal 3-powered amalgam of jetpacks, drop-pods, and guns that go dakka. I want to say up front that I’m having great deal of fun with this. It’s the kind of game I go into for five minutes to take a screenshot, and emerge from two hours later. Read onwards for why.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bombastic strategy-FPS hybrid Raven Squad is set for release on the 11th of August, and to celebrate that fact Evolved Games have released a cheese-tastic movie-style trailer, which sets the scene for this unusual take on the jungle man-shoot with some troubling dialogue. There might be a top-down strategy tactics and co-op cleverness in here, but for now they’re focusing on the explosions, of which there are many. The game proper looks moderately entertaining, thanks to the way the action swings between strategy and twitch run-n-gun, so perhaps we’ll take a closer look when it hits. In the meantime, go examine the action with your eyes.
Read the rest of this entry »