Gears of War

What can be said about Gears of War has been said, and will be repeated, I'm just here to give my own impression of my likes and dislikes of this system selling worthy title.

Gears of War, at its core, is a over the shoulder shooter with a tactical cover twist. You play as Marcus Fenix, a bad ass, super tough, (and did I mention uber-cliche) space Marine type. Fenix is living on a world that has been invaded from underneath, as in underneath the ground. The Locusts are the alien invading force and Marcus, with his rag tag group of bad asses, are just the guys to stop them. Not much is there in the way of a story, but very little is really needed for a game such as Gears. Just be aware that Fenix is busted out of jail by his squad mate Dom, Fenix was in jail because of something involving his family, and it’s got him in a really bad "I wanna kill something" mood. He gets a gun and the fun begins.

The thing that will immediately grab players of Gears is its audio and video splendor. I can safely say that Gears is probably the best looking (as of right now) game of all time. The detail on the work that went into things like the architecture and animations is really so far above what has come before that you enjoy some of the slower moments in the game just to have a look around. At the beginning of the campaign I found myself thinking that if the rest of the game looked liked those first few levels, I was probably going to walk away disappointed, but the game eventually rolls out a nice variety of locales. They are similar within the theme of the world, but varied enough that it doesn't feel like the same trip over and over. Some of the later levels, including the rain and train levels, are spot-on perfect as far as I'm concerned and they actually add nicely to the suspense of the pacing. The audio is also going to give your surround sound a MAJOR workout (big explosions and bullet whistling aplenty). It's really a very nice show piece title for flexing what the 360 can do from an audio/visual standpoint.

The other big plus for Gears is its cover mechanics and how well it's implemented. If you go into this game thinking you can play old fashion FPS run-and-gun style, Gears will slap you back down to Earth, hard (or at least it did it to me on Hardcore difficulty). The game absolutely requires that you use cover and I'm glad that it did. It forces you to throw all your preconceived FPS notions about how to approach an enemy out the window. At first I felt as if I was never going to affectively learn this system of "stop and pop", but by the halfway point of level 1, and a couple of trials by fire, the cover mechanic does become second nature. I have to give Gears props for changing my perceptions, ever so slightly, about how different a shooter can be.

With all the glowing aspects of this game, I would be lying if I didn't say the game had its share of slight flaws. The flaws are pretty minor and deal with things like poor squad A.I., some gameplay flaws, and some of the more uninspired swipes this game has blatantly borrowed from another certain franchise.

There were many, many, many times when the NPCs in my squad were more of a crutch than they were a help for me along the way. Lots of times they will do bone headed things like take my position of cover, run thru my line of fire, or sometimes just stand in the way of my progress. The game also maps a lot of major moves to the “A” button, and while practical in an average run of the mill fire fight, some of the bigger boss battles really made me wish that a few of these moves required a different button press. When you battling someone like General RAAM during the final battle, where every misstep can cost your life, and wanting to sprint to the next piece of distant cover only to mistakenly end up taking cover at your enemy’s feet because the control scheme doesn’t know the difference, can be frustrating a lot of the time. Add in the inferior A.I. and you have moments where you’ll feel like you’re fighting the control scheme more than you’re fighting the enemies.

This game also (and it was really only an itching in the back of my brain) owes a lot of gratitude to Resident Evil 4. It may have a slightly quicker pace than RE4 and a nice military coat of paint, but the overall mechanics and feel are there. The POV of Marcus when you zoom in for precise shooting is straight up RE4, The Berserker enemy is a carbon copy of RE4’s, and the quick reload mechanic really made me feel like I was playing a mini version of the button press mechanics from RE4. Even the look of the buildings and overall mood of the game was very RE4-ish. Not that any of this makes Gears a bad game (RE4 rocked!), but it does make Gears feel a little bit less fresh than it probably would have if I hadn’t already played RE4.

But, even with my slight negatives, Gears of War is absolutely worth your time if you enjoy visceral sci-fi shooters. It doesn’t get much more visceral than chain sawing bad guys in the face, curb stomping their heads, or luring enemies into a low lit area just to watch them get chewed up by the Pitch Black-ish Kryll. Welcome to the new bar for game presentation and the first game to actually earn the right to be called “next-gen”. Gears, from a technical standpoint, is, superb.