Is Gears of War as good as everyone says it is?
Gears of War takes place on the planet Sera where this Alien race started to break through the planets crust and kill everything in their path. The COG is the human's race last hope and they have to rely on an inmate to defeat the Locaust.
Yeah, yeah I know that story has been done to death so many freaking times I've almost stopped caring about the story in my Sci-Fi shooters. The sad thing is what I just described above is about as deep as Gears of War's story gets and the campagin feels more like fragment of something great. The campagin will take you roughly five to six hours to complete spanning five acts. All of which are fun to play except the driving sequence which is the worse driving segment in a game I've ever played. Luckily for Gears of War the gameplay here is simply amazing. You take cover by pressing the "A" button and thats pretty much the only button you use for cover. From their you can S.W.A.T. turn, roll out of cover, advance out of cover, or jump over your cover by move the thumbstick left, right, or up and pressing "A". You can also dodge, and roll by pressing "A" and sprint by holding the "A" button down. The down side to this is sometimes you will want to do one thing but your character will do another which is very frustrating in the Single-Player and Multi-Player when people are shooting at you.
Along with cover you also have a varaity of weapons to kill your oppent with. One of which (the Lancer) has a chainsaw for a bayonet which is very satisfying. Now as you kill the Locaust blood will spew out their body and the chainsway will desmember their bloody bodies onto the floor in a pile of blood. Yes this game is very gory, but this can be turned off in the Game Options menu, to make the gore more like Halo where its just blood, no extreme blood or dismemberment. You also have a squad to order in the game but it isn't fleshed out as you may think. You can tell your retarted squad members to Regroup, Attack, or Cease Fire. None of which they seem to listen too and your squad mates are simply stupid meat bags that couldn't kill a Locuast if their life depended on it. Luckily their is Co-Op and it seems that this game was built arround Co-Op if you play this game with a friend, your exprence is going to be far greater than if you played it by your self.
For the Mutiplayer part of the game you can go online in either a Ranked or Player match. Unfortunately matchmaking is nowehere to be found so players who have an hour of experence will end up against players who have been playing sense the Gears of War launch date. And much like Halo 2, there are numerous exploits that have yet to be fixed along with some weapon ballance issues. I recomend that you stick with Ranked matches unless your playing with your friends becuase lets face it in Gears of War online your a noob what ever you do, and in Player matches the majority of the hosts are d-bags that will kick you from the game for simply killing them. Online everyone just shotgun rushes each other most of the time to get the power weapons which are really over-powered. Take the Longshot for example. If you active reload it, and shoot someone with it, its an instant down no matter where you shot them. Now melee with the weapon and you instantly down down a person.
Finding matches is also a pain in the arse as it uses a Server Browser so you won't get to play ever map and will ussually play the most popular maps over and over again. And every time you fail to connect to a host, the browser takes a minute to refresh itself. And people quite matches in this game like now other which hampers the experence when it becomes 4 v 1 online in a Ranked match.
On the sound and graphics side of things this game is excelent with very few flaws to see other than it sometimes takes a bit for the game to load its amazing details.
All in all Gears of War can be a lot of fun in the Single-Player or cooperatively. You can sometimes find good people to play with online but the community has become so bad that it will hamper an otherwise fun game online. Gears of War deffinately not as good as some people make it out to be but that doesn't stop it from bing an overall blast to play and thats what games are about, fun.
