Section 8: Prejudice

At a recent demo-day hosted by Timegate, in which my slightly up-ranked character had access to a few of the unlocks, it was plain to see that there'll be more variety than most online shooters in terms of toys and tools.

A particular personal favourite is the backpack mortar, which sits outside your weapon loadout as a tool choice, and basically turns you into an artillery piece. An artillery piece with a jetpack. And suit-enhanced super-speed running. Boom!

As you might expect, then, battles are frantic and vibrant, fizzing with the splash of plasma and bright tracer-rounds, and the maps are dense with terrain features. One multiplayer game saw us fighting over a futuristic industrial facility, in which the fight ebbed and flowed around key capture-points which enabled players to set up static turrets to assist consolidation.

One of the more interesting multiplayer co-op modes is Swarm, in which a group of players fight off an AI-controlled attack. It's half FPS and half Tower Defence, as you need to keep setting up turrets to defend from the increasingly large and ornery waves of bots. Success depends on surviving for 15 minutes... No small order. And the bots are pretty handy, to boot.

While no vehicles were available to use in the multiplayer maps we sampled, there will be some in the final game. Early on in the single-player campaign though, we accessed the jetbike, which put Halo's Ghost to shame with its skittish manoeuvrability, blazing minigun/missile launcher combo and sheer, glottis-wobbling speed. Timegate also mentioned the battle-tank, which they say will be a game-changing tool of terror if one side manages to attain it.

One of Timegate's innovations with Prejudice is the Dynamic Content Missions or DCMs. From time to time in a multiplayer game, your HUD will twinkle with a new objective; you might have your hands full and choose to ignore it, but tackling the mission can really benefit your team.

For example - a VIP has entered the battlefield and you're required to escort him to one of your player-owned control points. Once there, he'll act as a high-level bot, patrolling and protecting the control-point for your team, and you'll get a victory-point boost for completing the mission.

Individual players can set their own preferences for which DCMs they'll receive, so if you prefer kill-missions over escorts, you'll get more of those.

With a beefed-up single-player campaign and more intricacy and progression in its multiplayer, Prejudice is promising considerably more content than its predecessor. Which makes the pricing structure and delivery method all the more interesting.

It'll be a download-only game, via XBLA, PSN and Games for Windows Live, and while the region-specific pricing has yet to be announced for PSN it'll cost MS platform-users 1200 Microsoft Points.

That sounds like an awful lot of game for £10.20, and if Prejudice can deliver on its promises it might just be the laser-powered shot in the arm that the me-too online FPS scene so sorely needs.