Gears of War Review

Gears of War is probably the most hyped game this year. Since it was announced, and the first screenshots were debuted, the graphics were what took center stage every time it was shown. It was touted as one of the best looking games of all time. Its gameplay also received much praise due to its “stop and pop” play mechanics. Its multiplayer received massive amounts of hype due to its fast tactics and emphasis on teamwork. Hype is a funny thing. Excellent games benefit greatly from the hype, going down in history as one of the best games ever made. On the contrary, it can also instill expectations in people that it can never live up to, leaving the player disenfranchised and disappointed. Gears of War is one of the few games nowadays that merits every bit of the hype it accumulated.

The game takes place on the war torn planet of Sera fourteen years after the events of “Emergence Day” the day when the Locust horde arose from the depths of the planet, laying siege to its inhabitants. The main protagonist, Coalition of Ordered Governments soldier and general badass Marcus Fenix fought against the horde during that time but received a distress call from none other than is own father. Marcus promptly left his post, disobeying orders and going AWOL. After unsuccessfully trying to save his father, Marcus was arrested and sentenced to forty years in prison for his crimes. After four years of serving his time, Dominic Santiago, one of Fenix’s friends in the military broke him out of prison, telling him that he had received a conditional pardon to help fight the Locust horde.

The game begins in the prison, and the player has the option to go through a brief tutorial section, or jump right into the fight. The tutorial gives you the basics of the rather complicated control scheme. You quickly learn that the A button on the Xbox 360 controller is going to be your new best friend throughout the game as there are many important actions mapped to this one button. Hit the A button near a wall or anything that can be used as cover and your character will slam his back onto it. Once you’re in cover, pressing the A button again will cause you to leave cover. It’s pretty impressive to see how well the cover mechanic is worked into the gameplay. It transcends the level of a simple gimmick (a la the recent Perfect Dark Zero) and becomes an essential part of the game.

This tutorial also introduces you to the “active reload” system. Once you hit the reload button, a meter appears with two small bars and one sliding along the meter. The key is to hit the reload button once more on the smallest zone, or the “sweet spot”. This causes you to reload your weapon much quicker and the bullets added to your clip begin to glow in the ammo counter, signifying that they cause much more damage than standard bullets. If you hit the reload button in the larger zone, you will get a much faster reload, but no damage boost. If you hit the button anywhere else on the meter, your weapon will jam, and will take much longer to reload. Of course, you can hit the reload button once and get a standard reload, but where’s the fun in that? The active reload system manages to add strategic depth to an otherwise mundane task in other shooters.

Holding the A button down causes you to begin the “roadie run” maneuver, which causes you to lower your head and begin running. The camera pulls back and a bit to the right as you begin running as if it were being held by someone running behind you. You cannot fire while roadie running and it obscures the view of things in front of you, so it’s mainly useful as a way to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

The Roadie Run Maneuver

As soon as you exit your prison cell and take control of Marcus Fenix for the first time, you’ll immediately see why this game has received a good portion of the massive hype it’s gained throughout its development…the incredible, eye melting, bleeding edge and whatever other adjective or phrase you can think of that’s synonymous with amazing. Gears of War is the best looking game on shelves this year and will remain that way for some time. It’s just that good. The attention to detail is simply phenomenal. Everything in the environment is detailed to an insane degree. The visually diverse environments all share the “destroyed beauty” theme. You’ll traverse the now bombed out remains of buildings and homes, a stunning underground mine alight with the glow of the “imulsion” rivers that flow there, to a dark, rain-soaked forest, alight with the eerie glow of the moonlight. There is also some great use of subtle motion blur as you’re roadie running or make sharp turns in any direction. The explosion and smoke effect are also worthy of praise, as you’ll find yourself using smoke grenades very often to throw off your enemies.

There is a substantial amount of blood and gore in this game, whether you’re blasting an opponent to bits with a close up shotgun blast, shooting them with a sniper rifle, causing their head to explode in a fountain of thick red blood and bits of skull, or sawing them in half with the chainsaw, you’ll quickly realize that this was intended for mature audiences only. Blood often splatters on the screen, during one of the chainsaw kills and after taking a buckshot round in singleplayer. This is one game that has to be seen in motion to be truly appreciated and there is no game on the Xbox 360 that flexes its graphical muscle better.

The devastating and gory chainsaw attack

The single player campaign chronicles the battles of Fenix and his squadmates as they attempt to bring the fight to the Locust horde directly. Gears of War ramps up the intensity to high levels from the outset of the campaign and it doesn’t let up until the final credits roll. Despite its incredible intensity, Gears of War not your average run and gun shooter that rewards running around, guns-a-blazing. The action is not constant, but on higher difficulty levels, you’ll be very happy with the breaks. Enemy confrontations are exciting and challenging, assuming you’re playing this on the “Hardcore” difficulty.

As a side note on the difficulty, there are two difficulty settings to choose from at the outset. The Casual difficulty is incredibly easy in comparison to the Hardcore difficulty. There isn’t much of a balance between the two. The jump from Casual to Hardcore is similar to the difference between easy and hard in most shooters. After you’ve gone through the game once, you unlock the “Insane” difficulty, which truly deserves its name. The challenge ramps up significantly, as enemies do even more damage and are even smarter than before, resulting in even quicker deaths if you don’t take cover quickly and effectively. The AI is pretty good, but really unbalanced. The enemies are reasonably smart executing flanking maneuvers, taking cover when they need to and most of the time, don’t charge idiotically into a hailstorm of bullets. You teammates on the other hand, not so much. You’ll often see them go down in heated battles, dependent on you to save them. Thankfully, the majority of the time, they cannot be killed and instantly revive once the battle is over.

The single player campaign is a bit on the short side, spanning about eight to twelve hours, depending on difficulty. In an effort to add replay value, there are a few instances when you encounter a proverbial fork in the road and you’ll have the choice between two paths. The paths are diverse enough most of the time to warrant multiple playthoughs so it makes for a nice touch.

The story itself is one of the game’s low points. Without a good understanding of the game’s back story, much of the story will be lost on you and what there is, is pretty confusing. The story is told well through the excellent movie quality cutscenes (particularly one scene near the end of Act 1) and although the dialogue is rather dry and campy, the voice actors work well with what they were given. The characters mesh with each other pretty well, and you’ll notice the genuine bond they develop throughout the game but like the story itself, they don’t have much depth. The ending is a bit lackluster, as it leaves the player wanting much more. It sets up well for a sequel, but doesn’t stand too well on its own.

One of the strengths of Gears of War is its rather varied weapon selection. The standard array of weapons is present, ranging from the Lancer assault rifle, the shotgun, the pistol, frag and smoke grenades, a sniper rifle, and a rocket launcher (named the Boom Shot here). Unconventional weapons such as the Torque Bow and Hammer of Dawn are fun to use. The Torque Bow fires explosive tipped arrows that you must first charge by holding down the trigger. If you don’t hold the trigger down long prior to firing, the arrow will not penetrate your target and will likely bounce off. The Hammer of Dawn is unique among the other weapons, in the fact that it doesn’t actually fire a projectile of any kind but instead “paints” its target. Seconds later, the orbital laser rains down from the heavens in the form of a concentrated beam of energy, obliterating anything in its path.

The Lancer assault rifle is one of the most unconventional weapons in any game and will definitely go down in history as one of the best weapons in a videogame. Not because it functions uniquely as an assault rifle, but because of the so called “chainsaw bayonet” mounted on the end. Holding down the B button revs up the chainsaw, which creates one of the most intimidating sound effects in the game in a multiplayer situation. Revving the chainsaw and running up to an enemy starts a very gory, un-interactive cutscene in which you lower the chainsaw onto and through your opponent, causing blood to spray everywhere (even covering the camera) and instantly killing your unlucky victim in a most glorious fashion. It’s quite possibly the best use of a chainsaw in any game.

There is a decent variety of enemies, featuring the standard automatic rifle equipped grunts, your slightly more hardy shotgun carrying tough guys, the easy to kill and be killed by snipers, the ruthless and deadly Theron Guard, who wield the powerful and very deadly Torque Bow, the imposing and nearly bulletproof (seriously, it will take multiple clips to take these guys down on harder difficulties) “BoomShot” carrying Boomers, the incredibly powerful and nearly indestructible berserkers and what’s sure to become the bane of players everywhere, the Wretches. As soon as you hear their trademark piercing shriek for the first time, you’ll wish you’ll never have to hear it again. They charge toward you incredibly fast, unbecoming of the type of shooter this is, and not fitting with the game's relatively slow pace. Their rather frequent appearance really upsets the balance and are a constant annoyance, especially in the later levels when you encounter the "imulsified" variants, which explode once killed. On the Hardcore and Insane difficulties, these explosions can instantly kill you adding to the annoyance if you find yourself dead at the hands of a close range wretch explosion.

The Multiplayer experience in Gears of War is the reason you’ll continue playing this game long after you’ve finished the main campaign. As exciting as it is, the Single player experience simply doesn’t compare to the intensity and fast tactics of the multiplayer modes. Epic, experienced in creating entertaining and exciting multiplayer shooters, demonstrates once more that they know how to create a well balanced and thoroughly entertaining suite of multiplayer modes.

Even the campaign mode benefits from the multiplayer touch. At any time while you’re playing the solo campaign mode you can either plug in a second controller for splitscreen play or invite a friend to join your game via Xbox Live. When the second player joins the game, they take control of Dominic. This makes the battles even faster and more intense. You’ll probably notice early on that you now have the option to revive your partner once they go down as you would the computer in the solo game. That is unless the character is instantly killed by an explosion, point blank shotgun blast to the face, chainsaw, etc. or you’ve been separated from your partner during one of the few sections in which you have the choice between two paths. Going through the campaign with a friend is great fun, as you set up flanking maneuvers, point out enemy hotspots and watch each other’s back.

The biggest draw however is the several versus modes. While splitscreen play is awfully limited in design (only offering play for two people), the system link and online modes are much more robust. There are three versus gametypes to choose from, but they share a few things in common. There is an eight player limit, are all team based and you only have one life per round. Once you die, it’s off to the dead channel for the remainder of the round, where you can watch the duration of the round and chat with the other players who have died (regardless of which team they’re on).

When you begin searching for or hosting a match, you have the three gametypes to choose from. Warzone is your straightforward team deathmatch. Execution differs from Warzone in the fact that you have to perform an instant kill (chainsaw, grenade tag, etc.) or close up execution to your foe once they’re in the bleeding out stage in the form of a point blank pistol bullet to the head, curb stomp or otherwise and long range shots will do no damage. If you don’t perform an execution, they will recover from the bleeding out stage and rejoin the fight. Assassination requires your team to kill the other team’s “leader” to win the match. Once the leader is killed, the round is over.

The play balance, while good overall, could use a few tweaks to make it truly shine. First off, the Lancer assault rifle which is automatically equipped at the beginning of each round, is a favorite among many players for its instant kill potential via the chainsaw bayonet. Some players rely on it entirely to rack up kills. Thus, if you see someone running towards you with the chainsaw revved and you’re not quick on the draw, or extremely lucky, you might find yourself on the wrong end of a chainsaw attack. Most of the time if you shoot them before they get within slicing range, they will stagger backwards and stop their attack, allowing you to get a quick kill. Occasionally, I’ve shot my opponent point blank with a shotgun or another weapon and they’ve still managed to get the attack.

Second, the “grenade tagging” mentioned earlier is far too easy to pull off. From long distance, the other player won’t have the opportunity to get close and tag you, but some are crafty in their pursuit and can manage to get close before you can squeeze off enough shots to drop them. There are also a few problems with collision detection when tagging someone. I’ve observed players being tagged when the attacker was several feet away.

Overall, the multiplayer is an incredible experience and really demonstrates Epic’s knowledge and experience creating great multiplayer games. It demands teamwork, is visceral and fun, and highly competitive. There are a few issues with play balance, the rather low player limit, and longevity in the form of the game’s lack of traditional multiplayer modes, but these issues aren’t at all game breaking and likely won’t hamper your enjoyment of this excellent multiplayer experience.

In the end, Gears of War lives up to the enormous hype it accumulated over the course of its development. The graphics are everything they were promised to be and stand out as a showpiece for the Xbox 360. The single player campaign is a bit short, but satisfying all the same. The story is a bit convoluted and could’ve been fleshed out a lot more than it was. The multiplayer experience is simply awesome and shows that Epic truly knows how to make a multiplayer game work. Gears of War is overall an excellent and well polished game. Its few flaws are easily overlooked and in the end, it’s a great addition to the Xbox 360’s library.

Pros

• Excellent graphics and consistent framerate
• "Stop and pop" gameplay is intense and fun
• Addictive Multiplayer

Cons

• Lacking story and character depth
• Multiplayer is limited to three similar modes

Gameplay - 9
Graphics - 10
Sound - 9
Value - 9
Tilt - 10

Overall - 9.5