Roguelites can easily be compared to the myth of Sisyphus with a nice little caveat, which is that things slightly change in your favor with each new day that you push the rock up that hypothetical mountain. To that end, Section 13 recreates that idea of slowly but surely inching towards beating the final boss and completing that elusive run. Still, this top-down shooter simultaneously suffers from technical issues that, for the time being, I struggle to fully recommend.
What Could Go Wrong?
It all starts with its quirky presentation. Section 13’s cartoony aesthetic and sarcastic characters juxtaposed against its gruesome story help alleviate the darker sci-fi undertones without making you think too much about them. Just point and shoot. Simple. You take the role of Red, a security guard who is called into an emergency because there has been a breakout in one of the secret bunkers of your shady contractor, S2P, and it is up to you to find out what actually went wrong behind the scenes. As the genre of this game describes, it is easy to guess what happens next.
Section 13 is on lockdown due to a breakout where almost every worker in this company has been infected with an unnamed virus, making them all mindless zombies that will attack and kill anyone on sight. As you advance through the facility, finding out different types of enemies in the process, secrets start to slowly surface about the type of experiments they were conducting in this confidential base. As is customary in games of this vein, you eventually find a boss that is impossible to beat with your current loadout, and the game begins.
Locked And Loaded
Set up in the center of operations, where you will return every time you fail or complete a run, this accessible space offers a slew of options to increase your chances of survival each time. The roguelike genre lives and dies by how its games slowly reward the player with each new opportunity to achieve the goal of defeating the final boss with ever so slightly better equipment, buffs, or abilities. Section 13’s structure makes sense in this way to make you first unlock the three other characters that are on the roster.
Once Red goes back out into the field for the second time, and as you progress through the deeper levels of the offices, you will unlock other lucky survivors, each with their own perks, weaknesses, and abilities. Not long after you play for several runs, it is clear to see that Section 13 was made to be played with co-op in mind. This is confirmed by the developers as online and couch co-op will be added in June and September, respectively. The distinctive stats of each survivor make much more sense when taking this into account, and I am eager to see how working with others eases or complicates the experience.
Back in the headquarters, after choosing your avatar, there is currency that can be earned during each run to be spent on several machines that can give an edge in the long run. New weapons that range from a trusty shotgun to a strange alien laser, unlockable perks that allow for more damage, more guns, or stronger health kits, and a computer to investigate the lore further for each character are all available. What make each new campaign a gamble are the “Nethercubes,” which give a random ability each time that can make or break the chance to reach the final room.
Broken Things
This brings me no pleasure to say, but the game, in its current state, is in dire need of stabilization updates. It froze on me once near the final enemy, and it would constantly stutter, which simply added to the frustration of the overall experience. I understand that the closer a player reaches to the final boss of a run, the more the developers would want to throw everything at that player, but if the game is not optimized to handle so many enemies on-screen, then maybe they should tone down the intensity until it is.
I can commend the studio for what they are trying to do with Section 13, and trust me when I say I see the fun in it, but in its current state, I would caution anyone to play it, at least on the PlayStation 5 Pro version.
It’s Not Over
The nature of the roguelite genre is to keep you coming back for one more run with the promise of abilities, power-ups, or lore. In that sense, Section 13 is a serviceable game that adds slight changes to the map each time you choose a different character for a new run, enticing you to go even further than the previous time. Sadly, as it stands, it is marred by technical issues that make it hard for me to recommend, but there is a worthwhile adventure beneath the issues. Perhaps it will be amended down the line. I sure hope so.
Thank you to our PR partners and Ocean Drive Studio for providing a review key for Section 13. You can find Seasoned Gaming’s review policy here.
