Gears of War

Gears of War is an amazing playing shooter from developer Epic Games. Let’s get this out of the way right now: this game is nothing short of a masterpiece. The great control scheme and amazing sound and graphics make Gears a must-have and the first true “killer-app” for the Xbox 360. Gears of War starts of when your character Marcus Fenix is busted out of prison by his buddy Dominic Santiago, after going through this training level getting to the chopper the story’s biggest plot point is reviled to you. You must find Alpha-Squad rescue them and the Resonator and use it. The game doesn’t really do that well with the story after that cut-scene and misses lots of opportunities to tell you about its characters and honestly doesn’t even really do a great job setting the stage for the game’s world or events. Of course all you really need to know is the Locust Horde came from underground, they are trying to kill you and you have to stay behind cover, but the story could have been pretty cool if it had done a few things differently.

Of course you usually don’t play a shooter for its storyline, you play a shooter to shoot things and Gears does that damn well. The main mechanic of Gears is “stop and pop” in other words hide behind pillars, walls, cars, slabs of concrete, basically pretty much anything that can stop bullets and then pop up to fire well setup shots and then get back down. All this stopping and popping is handled by the “A” button on the 360 controller. It does everything from having you sprint (which I’ll get to more in a bit), slam or slide into cover, vault low walls, swat-turn between to adjacent pieces of cover, to doing evasive rolls. Once you get in to cover it is just a matter of locating an enemy and pressing the left trigger to get a bead on him (in fact if you don’t press the aiming trigger you don’t get a reticule and your shots will be highly inaccurate) and fire away while you can. If you are not in cover you are going to get killed and fast. The enemies are pretty accurate with their shots even on the Causal (easiest) difficulty and on Hardcore you are as good as dead if you can’t find cover in more than five or so seconds when under heavy fire.

The health system works hand in hand with the cover system, when you get shot you’ll see a red gear (called the crimson omen) appear in the middle of your view, the fuller it gets the closer you are to death. So what you have to do is take cover and you will simply and quickly regenerate your health. It’s a great system that allows you to feel threatened by your enemies, but at the same time never get in to a situation that you can’t get out of. The other great mechanic during battle is the active reload system. To reload you simply press the right bumper and you can wait for your character to reload his gun, but it can be more skilled than that. Once you press RB you get a little meter under your ammo counter HUD. A line passes through this meter which has a gray sweet spot which allows you to reload faster if you press RB again within it, inside that gray spot is a white zone which a perfect reload that gives those freshly loaded bullets a temporary double damage bonus. Of course, if you miss before or after the sweet spot, you jam your gun and it takes twice as long to reload than it would have if you didn’t press RB again. It seems simple enough and like something that you would master quickly, but in the heat of battle it is still easy to jam your gun from time to time, which makes things much more interesting.

With reloading in mind, the guns in Gears of War are all pretty powerful and exiting to use, some of them aren’t that creative as there are typical stuff like a shotgun, sniper rifle and a pistol (though the revolver pistol is nice), but there are two big unique standout guns: the Lancer Assault Rifle and the Hammer of Dawn. The Lancer isn’t totally special on its own, though it will be the main gun of your small four weapon arsenal; it’s special because it has a chainsaw bayonet. Yes, that is as awesome as it sounds, if you can manage to get close (or sneak up) to a Locust, you can drive that sucker right through him making a scene of carnage that splatters the screen with blood, leaves your foe a pile of pieces on the floor and you highly satisfied, though you have to be careful the AI won’t just let you walk up to them, you need just the right situation, like say, when your opponent is reloading his gun. The Hammer of Dawn has a limited use in the Campaign mode because you need just the right situation to use it as it uses an orbital satellite to rain down a firey beam from the sky. So you need open sky and for the satellite to be overhead. It mainly used to take down big enemies which are invulnerable to your bullets.

In Gears you can carry four weapons, two of the bigger guns (the Lancer, shotgun, sniper rifle, boom-shot (rocket launcher) or hammer of dawn), a pistol (snub or revolver) and hand grenades. Each gun has a melee attack, with the Lancer’s being the chainsaw, the grenades can also be used as a melee attack, in that case you will tag your opponent with it and he’ll go boom in a few seconds.

Joining you in the action is the Delta-Squad which includes you as Marcus Fenix and three other big tough dudes (Baird, Augustus “The Cole Train” Cole and Dom Santiago). These guys are great characters, but they aren’t super effective fighters and will get downed a lot. If one of your squad-mates gets downed you can run up him if you have a chance and press the X button to help him up. Of course that doesn’t work for you, if you get shot too much you are dead. After the first act of the game’s campaign you can give these guys three simple orders: regroup, attack and cease fire. The campaign itself is really great and really exciting, the AI is pretty smart (though occasionally they will fail to move if they aren’t completely in cover and getting hit) and challenging (even on casual at times) and all the areas are well designed (with a great checkpoint system) and the boss fights are pretty exciting as well. It takes about 10 hours to finish, but you will want to play through it again and again, because it is so exciting, intense and the areas are so diverse.

The multiplayer in Gears is also really great and helps to perfectly fill out the package. You can play the campaign over Xbox Live or using split screen and the beautiful thing is you can do this at any point in the campaign. Your friend (who will play as Dominic) could join you for one tough area, then leave and you could reload that save and play by yourself from that point. The other difference to playing the campaign co-op is that you can revive each other the same way I mentioned you could with your AI squad-mates, it makes things on the harder difficulties much more manageable. The other difference is that during the campaign (in both solo and co-op) there are some branching paths where Marcus and Dom will have to split-up if either you die during this time (in co-op) the game ends. This keeps it from having one player carry the whole fight, so both players will need to be able to fight well to win.

The other aspect to the multiplayer in Gears of War is the Versus mode which is team 4on4 deathmatch, last man standing wins. This mode is great for some quick action and houses three different game types: Warzone (plain team deathmatch), Assassination (your team must kill the other team’s leader to win) and Execution (when you are downed you can mash your A button to get back up, so you must execute your kills via the satisfying curb-stomp, shooting him more or decimating him). The Versus brings a different style to Gears, but unfortunately because of the need to “finish” kills and the reviving aspect the games almost consist of no shooting (except for the occasional headshot with sniper rifle) and are all about maneuvering to get in to position to chainsaw or shotgun your opponent at close range. The grenade tag move also plays a big part in this “no-shoot” aspect of the Versus mode. It’s overall pretty fun, but unless you agree to play “properly” you are going to get tagged a lot or see very few shots fired.

The graphics are another shining aspect of Gears of War, they are simply spectacular and pretty much perfect. This is the best looking game to date on the 360 and pretty much ever really. The detail in everything is so tremendous. The characters models themselves are heavy looking with fine details like scars on their faces and the deep red thick blood that flies from bullet hits is pretty amazing looking. The world around though, is going to cause your jaw to drop at least a few times, for instance the rain-storm at the beginning of Act 3 is one of the most amazing looking areas I have ever seen. The rain water rolling down the trees, buildings and pouring off the overhangs is all stunning. Not to overlook the other areas, because they all have amazing looks, from the glowing immultion in the underground to the amazing train sequence at the end of the game and even the camera angles bring you right in to the action, like, the amazing “roadie run” camera angle which is a low and bouncy angle so immersing that you will feel the urge to put your head down too as your character runs to the next cover spot, it’s all tremendous in HD or in SD.

Gears of War’s sound is also top-notch. The music is really well orchestrated and really adds to the atmosphere of the game. You’ll know when there are enemies around when the music starts getting frantic and you’ll know when you’re are safe when you hear the clear jingle and the music quietens down. But the sound effects are where the game really excels though. The guns all sound super powerful and the aural cues, like the clicking of a low on ammo gun or a the sound of a bouncing frag-grenade will be key to your success. When playing with headphones or I assume on a good surround system, the ambient sound effect really help you keep aware, while making you jump when things are calm and tense. And the chainsaw makes a grotesque revving and squishing slicing sound that is super satisfying and completely disgusting at the same time. The character voices are well suited especially with the Delta-Squad, they will naturally banter back and forth when they have a free moment, trash talk the enemy and just yell stuff that big dudes with guns yell.

In the end Gears of War is nearly a perfect title, the graphics, sounds and gameplay all come together to create an amazingly exciting and intense action experience, single player or multiplayer. The shortish campaign and the odd “no shoot” action in the multiplayer hurt the game a bit, but overall this is a game that not a single 360 owner should miss and if you don’t have a 360 this is the game is a reason to get one.