Why does Anya look like she's wearing makeup and had her hair done in a salon every morning? Isn't this the last stand of humanity? Things look pretty bleak, right? Everyone else looks pretty scruffy. She's wearing COG armor and fighting alongside you now, so why does she still feel the need to look extra pretty? I appreciate an attractive female as much as the next guy, but this is kinda silly.

The Silverbacks are infuriating. Way to block most of the screen. Seriously, I don't mind the over the shoulder perspective of third person shooters, but the Silverback armor just takes up way too much screen real estate, to the point where the crosshair sometimes gets obscured. This is just unacceptable. Find a better perspective.

Claudia Black does her usual great work.

During the sequence where you have to run from cave to cave, avoiding the bombs from the gas barge, guess what? Your AI squad members can actually get killed by those explosions. In singleplayer! I avoided em just fine, but Cole somehow died. How the hell was that my fault? I can't do anything to help AI Cole survive. The AI is in control of that character, there's nothing you can do. Why did they make the squad members killable?

The other problem with having all these squad members now is that they're also quite prone to walking into your line of fire right as you get a bead on an enemy locust. When it was just you and Dom, it was pretty rare to see him block your fire. But with three or four other characters running around, it becomes much more likely.

Cole's football flashback is fucking retarded. Seriously? We're supposed to take this seriously? If this isn't the definition of tone deaf, I don't know what is.

If anybody's watched Plinkett's review of Episode 3 Revenge of the Sith, it perfectly summarizes my problem with the entire Gears of War series.

"The word is tone. And for those of you who don't understand what I'm saying, tone is how a movie feels. Movies are either like comedies, or dramas, or action movies, or thrillers. If they waver on the tone, you don't know what it is and your brain starts to hurt. Typically you should establish what your movie is in the first ten minutes or so. Take Ghostbusters. You establish your characters. They're witty and funny and the audience gets that this movie is gonna be some kind of lighthearted comedy thing with ghosts in it. There isn't a violent rape on a pinball machine in the first ten minutes of Ghostbusters. Nor is there a pie in the face gag in the opening of Citizen Kane. In Revenge of the Sith, what appears to be a general space adventure film is punctuated by a brutal decapitation, mixed with bizarre attempts at slapstick humor. This whole sequence from the beginning to the crash landing goes from an intense, confusing, and complicated space battle, to awkward slapstick, then suddenly it becomes dark and violent, then back to awkward comedy, then I don't know what the hell the tone is supposed to be here, if it's supposed to be funny or exciting or scary. I can't feel anything."

Duke Nukem 3D and DNF are really dumb and stupid. But that's okay, because they own it and they know that they're dumb fun. They're not trying to be something else, you just either buy into it or you don't. It's a knowing sort of wink. With Gears of War, it's dumb and stupid like Duke, but it's as if they don't know it. They're not in on the joke. It feels like CliffyB is still just sitting in his office replaying that "Mad World" trailer again and again, just nodding his head like, "Fuck yes, that's what this is gonna be! That trailer just nailed it! Bro, we're gonna iterate and iterate until we get that same sort of mood and pathos in our game. Love it!"

And then you play the game and hear these gems:

"It's pirate time!"

"Ugh, that's the last time I fly on a low-budget airline."

"Cole Train don't go woo woo. It go WHOOOOOOOOOO!"

And it's insane, it's just insane.