Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

The new “Space Marine” shooter Section 8 has gone into open beta, with a client available here. I’ve been spending some time with it, and here’s what I’ve found.

First up, this is only a multiplayer beta, so there’s no story (although I don’t expect it would be much more than “Gruff bald space marine falls from the sky and shoots things. Enemies die, things blow up. You win.)
but it’s more than enough to get a taste of the gameplay.

The first thing you can do is customise your loadout. There’s a pretty basic array of weapons (assault rifle, machine gun, pistol, etc) and you can have a mix of any two. Then there’s equipment (grenades, radar jammer, knife, and more), and finally the passive bonuses (10 slots for your choice of weapon damage boosts, shield boosts, speed boosts, and other stuff).

Once you’ve picked your gear, you’re ready to jump in. You can choose your landing zone freeform (or spawn with your squad) on a top-down map,which shows enemy positions, and also the map areas covered by anti-air guns (unless you have piled all your points into the A-A-dodging bonus, you will die VERY quickly),and once you’ve chosen, you can propel yourself into the fray. Once you’ve reached a certain altitude,
you can put the brakes on, enabling a certain degree of manouvering. If not, you just smash into the ground, which doesn’t actually damage you, but it takes you a few seconds to pick yourself up. Maybe it kills opponents if you land on them. I haven’t managed it yet.

Once you’re on the ground, you get into the game itself. It’s pretty standard FPS fare – you can aim down the barrel and blow your enemies away. If you press ‘e’ in iron-sights mode, you can lock-on for a short time, although there is a bonus which can resist it. You can sprint by holding down ‘shift’, and after a few seconds, the camera pulls out to third-person perspective, and you can watch yourself sprinting. If you hit people while going at this speed, you can do some damage, or you can use it to build up momentum and use your jetpack (sorry I forgot to mention: You have a jetpack) and jet over things.

At the moment, there are only two maps (well, variations on two maps), but I think (well, I hope) there will be more over the course of the beta. I don’t have any real issue with the maps, but they can get a bit boring after a while. The games have the basic objective of capturing strategic points, but at various intervals, the game will throw in secondary objectives, such as protecting a VIP, or getting a convoy to it’s destination.
As you kill people, capture points and destroy turrets, you gain money, and have the option to puchase various extras, such as giant robotic exoskeletons, supply drops, and more things which are locked in the beta.

Overall, I found the game to be fun, but fairly passe, not bringing enough new things to the table. I enjoyed it, certainly, it has the same appeal as all first-person shooters I do like the dynamic objectives system, and the ‘jumping in’ is quite exhilerating, and while it’s not stupendous, it is solid and perfectly workable,
but may need tointroduce more variety to keep people interested. I would recommend you check it out – nothing world-shifting, but for free, it’s definitely worth a look.