Gears of War

The good: Great graphics - awesome co-op – great and fun gameplay - good SFX – using a chainsaw has never been more fun – fun multiplayer.

The bad: Controls could have easily been better – story is weak – Ai is not very smart.


You play as Marcus fenix who has been in prison for nine years for "being a traitor to his country".
But lucky for you your friend dom comes to rescue you.
Marcus tells him he could get in trouble for this and dom replies "not anymore things have changed".
And changed they have while marcus was in prison an alien like race attacked the earth and plunged it into post apocalyptic darkness.
And marcus agrees to help and get rid of them so that humans may once again live there.
The action being almost right after the cutscene and you are given the choice to either go into training or go right into the action.
You will probably not need training since the gameplay is so simplistic yet fun.
You start out with a locust assault rifle it is not all that powerful but it does get the job done.
Later on you will get the lancer. And if there ever was a weapon named right this is it.
The lancer is the COG standard assault rifle with a chainsaw on the underside. So if you get close enough to an enemy you can rev up your chainsaw by pressing the B button and then watch the enemy be sliced in half.
Taking cover in this game is a must. If you don't you will die very quickly. Thankfully there plenty of cover to take cover behind.
By pressing the A button you will take cover behind whatever the closest thing that qualifies as cover.
There are a few different enemies you will face in the game.
Like wretchers which are small locust that are unarmed but make up for it in numbers and some of them can explode after you kill them and their screech is really annoying.
The standard enemy is called humanoid. Which are about the size of humans are not all that hard to defeat.
There is an advanced sort of humanoid that carries a torque bow and can take more damage and look a lot like the honor guards from the halo series.
There are also rocket launcher enemies, which are about equal to hunters in the halo series.
The larger enemies are the berserkers and corpsers.
Berserkers are about twice as big as any human and can rip you to shreds (not kidding).
But their weakness is that they cant see so they find you by hearing and smell and are immune to smaller weapons like assault rifles and pistols and explosives and the only thing that can really kill them is the hammer of dawn.
Now corpsers are the largest of all the enemies. They look like giant spiders and despite being the biggest enemy in the game they are quite easy to defeat.
In my opinion the toughest enemy is the reavers which are locust that can fly.
And even though they are easy to kill they can come at you from any angle and you cant hear them flying so by the time you know its to late and they will have killed you.
You and your guys are covered in armor and it makes you wonder how they heck they even take damage.
But wearing lots of armor does slow you down
But you can roadie run by holding down the A button and you will only want to roadie run if you have straight path ahead of you since if you run into anything you will take cover behind it.
The can also use the A button to dive in whatever direction you are pulling the stick in.

The A button controlling so many things does get frustrating since you might have been trying to dive but then you actually go into cover or be roadie running and run into a wall and take cover behind it.

Taking cover is a must but some cover like old furniture can be destroyed by shooting at it, Therefore forcing you to find more solid cover.
There are also some walls that can be destroyed but not very many. Which does not really matter since the gameplay is so great anyway.
There are some weapons but not as many as I would have liked but the weapons are fun to use so that makes up for the number.
Weapons are pretty much what you would find in a shooter. A locust assault rifle, a locust pistol that looks like a revolver, the lancer, A COG pistol, boomshot (shotgun), longshot (sniper rifle), a rocket launcher, torque bow, grenades and the always deadly hammer of dawn.
The hammer of dawn is a weapon that needs to be outside and a satellite above your position in order to use it. And some enemies are only able to be damaged the hammer of dawn.
And when you see the damage it does you will be amazed.
Reloading weapons in other shooters is just pressing a button but in this game you press the right bumper and a little meter comes up with a line and a bar the object is to get press the right bumper while the moving line Is in the bar. It might seem like a pain in the neck at first but after you get the hang of it becomes natural.
Aiming is also a must since you don't have a cross hair on the screen and it is horrible inaccurate.
But by pressing the left trigger you can bring up a cross hair and makes shot way more accurate.
Some weapons like the pistols and the sniper rifle have an extra zoom by pressing the right stick you can get an even better zoom easy for head-shots.
There are mainly day missions but the night missions are quite creepy since there are bat like creatures called kryl that if you are in the dark to long the will attack you and kill you very easily.

There are 5 acts in all and it took me about 8 hours on casual and will probably take any other gaming vet the same amount of time. I did notice that hardcore did not really seem all that harder than casual but insane is very insane.



The co-op is obviously more fun then single player since playing with a buddy offline or on is just plain fun. Co-op also has some different gameplay. For instance sometimes in the game there will be two paths to choose from whichever you choose the other player goes the opposite and if either of you die while away from each other it is game over since you cant get to the other player and revive him. And the AI is not smart enough to revive you either.
There are a few bosses in the game but the best in my opinion is the last boss (general RAAM).
It took a few times to figure out what you are supposed to do but after you do it is actually probably the easiest boss in the game.
If you down an enemy but he doesn't die you can walk up to them and curb-stomp them which is stomping on the enemies head to kill him. It's brutal and gory but it is satisfying to kill a most hated enemy like that.

This game is violent, gory and has strong language. Now I have nothing against any of these things but if you just don't like hearing them or seeing them there is a setting to turn off strong language and gore.

The single player has quite a few achievements involved. Completing an act on casual earns you 10 gamer points completing an act on hardcore earns you 30 gamer points. This really adds a lot of replay value to the game since may want to try and get all the achievements for beating the game or find al of the COG dog tags which also earns you gamer points.

Let's get this out of the way… The AI is dumb D-U-M-B. Some enemies are smart but others just stand out in the open waiting to get killed.
And if you were to flank an enemy and get on the side of him he won't react at all.


The multi-player is AWESOME either offline (up to 2 players) or online (8 players).
There are ten maps available almost each one is based on a mission but the missions are very fun.
There are only a few different game modes but they are fun.
In the multiplayer one side is the cog and the other is the locust.
The game modes consist of Warzone (team deathmatch). Assassination where one player on one team is the leader and the other 3 have to protect him from the enemy.
Execution is probably the most fun game mode. In this game mode enemies can only drop to there knees where you must then run up to them and execute them before they can press the A button a whole lot and revive themselves.
People say split screen gaming is dead. But it is not as a matter of fact I think that this game is more fun split screen than online.

There are also quite a few multiplayer achievements but they can only be attained by doing a rank match.. Which I feel sucks.. Why limit it only to ranked matches? Why not player matches or splitscreen?
And since most of the players in gears of war have moved on to gears of war 2 most of the achievements will be kinda hard to get.
But not that it is hard to find a match in fact it is quite easy. It's just that not enough people play it anymore to get the serious achievement (10,000 kills in ranked matches).



The graphics are awesome! I really feel that this game set the bar for graphics this gen.
I never really noticed any lag except for online which was just of course someone had very bad connection.
I did notice some very weird glitches where there certain times I couldn't even press any buttons at all or some where I could just press the X button or some where the game took complete control of my character. And it could not have been my controller since it was brand new and I also tried another controller and the same thing happened with it.


The sound is very good the revving of a chainsaw sounds very good. Acting is good not cheesy or corny at all. And landing a headshot sounds really good like ripping flesh off of someone.



So overall I might be a fanboy of this game but I know when there is problem with a game and I going to admit that this game does have it's share of problems (AI, story, controls).
But I was very easily able to look past those problems and I had a hell of a time playing the co-op and the multiplayer.