The Live Arcade revolution has picked up serious steam over the past few years, with blockbusters like Shadow Complex, Monday Night Combat, and Battlefield 1943 proving we don’t need to drop $60 to get a “complete” experience; developers can deliver retail quality at a quarter of the price. Section 8: Prejudice is the newest action game to join the movement, and the only thing the meaty sequel sacrifices in its transition to XBLA is the green, plastic box.

For better or worse, Prejudice’s gameplay is largely the same as its predecessor’s. We’re huge fans of scooting around humongous maps strapped into jetpacks and firing rockets at radar — a play style reminiscent of the Tribes shooters on PC — but the objective-oriented multiplayer over Xbox Live is what gets us hot and bothered. Though killing convoys and escorting allied VIPs to safety take attention away from the main fight, the long-term benefits are often worth the risk. These goals nicely complement the standard deathmatch and territorial-control game types, and success either boosts your team’s communal score or funnels a ton of cash into your wallet.

Spending money on orbital supply drops is another great twist on the go-to FPS formula. We called in AA guns to blast enemies out of the sky and ordered tanks to service our aggressive offense. However we tackled a match, we always felt as though we’d contributed to a victory in a major way alongside equally hard-working allies.

Unfortunately, this open-ended approach to competition doesn’t make the jump to Prejudice’s campaign, which opts instead to follow a forgettable, macho military dude through small portions of largely off-limit areas. It’s hardly an offline tutorial for the multiplayer either, as the solo-play A.I. tends to wait for your sniper rounds to do their job instead of going for your throat (usually with a sweet one-hit-kill knife animation) the way bots do in competitive matches. Rounding out this skippable campaign and Prejudice’s competitive online modes is Swarm, a decent Horde-like survival mode where up to four players team up against enemies galore.

Though Prejudice repeats what most of us missed in the first go-round, it’s still an original, must-play multiplayer game, and we’d love to see it take off this time.

On Xbox Live Arcade

+ It’s an attractive, fully featured shooter for just $15.

+ Terrific goal-based competitive multiplayer; cooperative mode (Swarm) is pretty fun, too.

- Uninspired, restrictive single-player campaign.

? How will the upcoming Tribes: Ascend compare to Prejudice?

8.0