First-person shooters have always been one of the best genres for multiplayer. From Quake to Halo, fragging your friends has long been one of gaming's best bonding experiences. Section 8, a sci-fi FPS from SouthPeak Games, seeks to take everything fun about the genre and combine it into one huge experience, while eliminating as many tedious and frustrating elements as possible.

While Section 8 will have a full single-player mode according to SouthPeak, multiplayer was what they were showing off at E3's expo floor. Section 8 is a sci-fi team-based game where you score points not only by killing the opposing team, but by accomplishing specific objectives like maintaining control of parts of the map, setting off or disarming bombs, and more. So instead of just having a Team Deathmatch, or just a Capture the Flag match, you have all of these matches going on at the same time.

Needless to say, with so many different ways to accumulate points for your team, the battlefield can get very hectic very quickly. The customization options for your player character multiply the chaos. Instead of having one team member be the sniper and another be the heavy artillery and another be the tank, Section 8 lets you mix and match qualities of them all to tailor your character to your playing style.

In the demo I saw, the SouthPeak demonstrator gave his soldier a sniper rifle and a repair kit. He then sequestered himself atop a hill, built a turret, and let the kills roll in. In addition to the different combinations of weapons, you can assign attribute points to your soldier to change things like armor and weapon damage.

New combat objectives can appear in reaction to player performance. For example, a particularly well-performing player of the opposite team may be tagged as a VIP, so killing him would be worth extra points.

Section 8 was clearly influenced by the likes of Battlefield 1942 and Tribes 2 and isn't afraid to admit it. What the designers at SouthPeak attempted to do, however, was address some of the problems they saw in those games. In Battlefield 1942, if your teammates took all of the Jeeps before you got there, you were out of luck and had to foot it to catch up. To address this potential issue in Section 8, every character can dash and use a rocket-jump to span large areas of the map in relatively short time.

With all of its good ideas thrown together, the question remains whether or not a match in Section 8 would suffer from being too chaotic. It would seem difficult to organize any kind of strategy when players can choose their own spawn point, customize their characters in myriad ways, and when objectives change on the fly. This question won't be settled until fall of this year, when Section 8 arrives for Xbox 360 and PC. Until then, happy fragging!