1. Summary
2. Background
3. Hype

Section 8 is not a game with a backstory like Batman or Champions. Rather, it is a game drawn together by a variety of inspirations, from books to other games to movies. At the core of it revolves around the space marine mythos, and you will find that everything mentioned here is about soldiers in the great unknown of the final frontier. Section 8 takes itself rather seriously on this, and pulls from so many different sources that it may be hard to pin down just what media it draws from. But that's what we are here for.

The most notable comparison Section 8 has to is the book Starship Troopers. Much like the book, you play as a lowly soldier who rises through the ranks thanks to valorous action in combat. This is pretty generic, however, which is why we turn to the suits of power armor and the technology to point us to Starship Troopers. The one thing you can be sure of is that this is nothing like the movie. You are by no means expendable, and there is nothing in the plot or setting that smacks even remotely of the movie.

The first Starship Troopers inspiration is easily the armor. Suiting up, the soldiers don't even look human due to the massive suits they are wearing. However, the suits augment them in every way while allowing them to move about without complicated controls. They can run, jumpjet, and withstand massive amounts of fire with the greatest of ease. Jumpjets are limited, and act as little more than ways to leap over buildings or players. There is even a weapon, the mortar, which pays homage in a roundabout way to the Y-rack of the Starship Troopers universe. Pretty much everything about the armor except for the visual design is ripped straight from the book, and that's how we love it.

Then you come to the technology and military tactics. Battles are fought on a much smaller scale on the ground, and space battles are the primary way of deciding conflicts. Soldiers are brought to the battlefield by being launched out of the guns of orbiting ships, and must avoid AA fire in order to safely make it to their drop zone. In order to leave, they have to call for a ship to come down and pick them up before moving on to the next drop zone. The dropping mechanic alone sounds exactly like Starship Troopers, although it was done differently there (in an egg, not in the armor itself) than in Section 8.

Another inspiration is easily Tribes. Those that have never played Tribes should do so, as it is freeware, and many of the game elements seen in this seminal multiplayer FPS have creeped into other games. In Section 8, you jetpack around and kill the enemy team in power armor while you attempt to accomplish certain objects. You can deploy new stationary objects, or you can deploy vehicles, and deployed objects can be completely destroyed while base objects can not be destroyed at all. The bit about control points that change who owns the objects is even in Tribes 2!

The game also arguably draws from the shooters of Quake Wars and The Outfit. In both games, you call down deployables to be used by you and your team as you progress. In The Outfit, you even get the capability to do this by earning money through objective completion and enemy killing, much like Section 8's requisitioning mechanic. Quake Wars has certain classes calling down unique deployables to give their team an edge, such as radar, anti-personnel guns, and artillery emplacements. Only if they have no other deployables on the field, though. No doubt Section 8 will use a fusion of these two methods to come to a happy middle.