Like a lot of people, I've been playing
Gears of War on my 360. Since its release I've played a a few ranked games with strangers and quite a few more games with friends. I've also finished the campaign on Hardcore difficulty. I've had an amazing amount of fun playing this game and I haven't been this motivated to sign into Xbox Live in a long time.
The Good
The game looks amazing. It's likely the best looking game out there to date, all existing Xbox 360 and PS3 games included. It's a little monochromatic for my tastes, but I think the color palette helps them achieve both the fidelity and look they were going for. The character models, both Cog and Locust, are extremely well done. The environments are rich and surprisingly varied, from the various city locations, underground caves, mansions, and trains. If you've got a high-def TV, you owe it to yourself to put this game in and experience it.
The sound is well done, but the speech could have had their levels tweaked a little more. There were definitely some parts where it would have been impossible to understand if I didn't have subtitles on, and that's already with the in-game music turned down a little. It could simply be an artifact of my setup, but then again it's not an uncommon problem in these games. The dialogue is a little frat-boy and meatheaded, but it's actually pretty appropriate for the genre. Unfortunately if the dialogue were in a movie, it would be a B movie and somehow not appropriate for this season's first true AAA title. But it does its job by giving you a little wit, albeit it's a little light on actually moving the story along or giving you some more background information on the conflict. The voices themselves are pretty good, and I personally love the the Locust antagonist voice that sounds a little like
Dame Judi Dench. Jack, the floating droid, sounds way too much like R2D2.
The campaign has 3 difficulty levels with the most difficult, Insane, being unlocked once you complete the campaign in another level first. Personally I hate it when games do this - I would prefer that they're all available and let the user choose how they want to play it. With that out of the way, I have to say I love the fact that you can play through the campaign alone or cooperatively via split screen or on Live. I don't remember if you can do it over system link. The ability to drop in anytime via Live is awesome. The full campaign is a little on the short side, but I really don't mind since I don't have a lot of time to invest in a long, drawn-out campaign; however I would concede that I'm probably in the minority here as most people, especially worldwide, would prefer their games these days to have a campaign that's at least 15+ hours. Generally I spend a significant amount of my time playing multiplayer, and with GOW that's no exception. However there are a lot of people out there who are all about the single player campaign, and if that's you, it might be a bit short unless you decide to do everything in campaign, including playing it through in Insane after you unlock it. They have also inserted a collection game within the campaign, where you find 30 Cog tags (military dogtags) scattered throughout the game. You get 3 Achievements for doing this, one each for getting 1/3, 2/3, and all 30. It's pretty fun to find them, and in my run through I got 21. I'm actually motivated to go through it again on Insane and find the remaining 9. Curse this Achievement and Gamerscore system! Maybe I'll need to get a friend to go through it with me since Hardcore can get pretty difficult. I found that the difficulty across the game isn't very consistent, but it's manageable. Oddly I found myself breezing through a couple of the boss fights but die repeatedly in some of the intermittent firefights.
Multiplayer is very fun once you get pretty balanced teams. There's a nice variety of maps, and like many shooters there are immediate chokepoints on all of them, usually based on weapon pickup locations. It's a little confusing sometimes that most of the maps are essentially completely symmetrical, as calling out locations to your teammates becomes more difficult unless you have all memorized the maps. At any rate, once you're in a game, it's great fun and you can lose a couple hours easily doing this. It is extremely satisfying when you get your kills in this game, especially if it involves the chainsaw, grenade tagging, or headshots. Being on the receiving end is appropriately unsatisfying, as you have to wait until the next round as a voyeur chatting with the rest of the unfortunate dead.
The reload mechanic is awesome. Like most shooters, you can press a button to reload your weapon. In GOW, when you reload you get a progress bar below the bullet display. You can just wait for this to complete to get your reload, or you could press the reload button again when the reload bar is within a smaller highlighted area on this bar - it's a mini rhythm game. Doing this right gets you a quicker reload and some bullets with additional damage, whereas missing this area results in a longer reload time and your character cursing. It's a great new mechanic that every shooter from this point onward should consider, in my opinion.
Cliffy B's been promoting this "stop 'n pop" gameplay versus "run 'n gun", and he's achieved it. Going in with guns blazing will get you and your teammates killed, whether in campaign or multiplayer. Getting some cover is the only way to win. The controls are tight, and it won't take anyone who has even played an FPS on a console much time to get used to it. In Gears, you use the A button for all movement-related actions. The "roadie run" is great - you hunch down and run if you hold down the A button and push forward. Your steering is reduced, so it's this great balance of speed vs. precision and you get this cool jittery camera effect. That effect has come close to giving me motion sickness, BTW. Anyway, you also press the A button to hide behind objects in the game and get some needed cover. It makes movement simpler to manage, but with a caveat (as I'll explain below).
Controlling your character gives you a great sense of weight - you look and feel like a badass soldier. Seeing yourself carrying the weapons you're supposed to have looks and feels right. On that note, the weapons are great. Your basic rifle with chainsaw bayonet and shotgun are already among the best weapons in the game. You have your standard sniper rifle and rocket launcher ("boomshot"). The fun really starts with the Hammer of Dawn, a powerful satellite-based weapon with a long charge time but gruesome results, and the Torque Bow which requires some practice but rewards your efforts greatly. Oh, the joy.
The Bad
There are a few things I really don't like. First, as you can imagine, is the user interface. Changing your options is a confusing process. An example is changing your Y-axis from default to invert. You need to select Options from the game's main menu or from the in-game pause menu. From there you select Xbox 360 Controller which has six options, the first one being Y Axis. You need to push left or right to change the selected option, then press A to accept which takes you back to the previous screen. Pressing B instead takes you back to the previous screen as well without making changes. Either way, you can't really tell what you did, and I found myself (and others when playing system link games) going back to check. They could have made this much easier by putting a button at the bottom of this menu that said "Accept". I think that picking a scuffed up typewriter font makes their UI harder to use as you don't easily read some of the helpful UI text that they're trying to provide.
Setting up a multiplayer game is annoying as heck. For example, to select a map to play on you have a horizontal spinner that cycles through the available maps. One option is Custom Cycle, but then you need to press the Y button to go to a different screen to select which maps you want and in what order. Once you get to that screen, it's another confusing UI to do all that. Oh, and one last thing - the UI forces even teams. You join a lobby, and you're in the middle between the Cog and Locust team columns. You go left or right depending which team you want to join. However, if there is one person in the lobby with you and they're on the Cog column, you can't join them in their team until at least one person is in the Locust column. But until someone selects a team, you don't know who's in the lobby, so getting teams in order can be annoying. Especially if that particular session gets hit by the bug where one or more people can't speak to anyone else or there's this horrible echo that makes all speech unintelligible. I hope that the voice bugs get tracked down and fixed in a future update.
I don't like how "sticky" you are with your environment. It's very common to stick to walls when you don't want to. This is most annoying when you're in a firefight and you're trying to get out of the way. Pressing A and pushing in any direction makes you roll that way, helpful to get out of the line of fire. Unfortunately, you can try to be doing this and inadvertently push against a wall. Before you know it, you're stuck against a wall being peppered with bullets instead of rolling out of the way. I wish that they could have tuned the behavior such that if the player is pulling back (down) on the left stick (and maybe 45 degrees either side) and pressing A, it will always result in a roll; if there's a wall in the way, you just roll as far as you can go but you still don't stick. That way when you're moving back or away, you are less likely to stick to something you didn't want to or didn't even see. It's like your body armor has Velcro hooks and the environment has loops. Or vice-versa. At any rate, you stick even when you don't want to.
Last thing is back to multiplayer. One of the best reasons why Halo 2 has the online popularity it continues to have for over 2 years is its robust matchmaking system, enabling individuals and groups to play pick up games or stay with a group and change the game to their hearts' content. In Gears, once you've set up a game, you can't change any options without quitting!
Bungie really set the bar for console games here, and unfortunately GOW didn't meet that. It doesn't seem to be hurting the current
popularity of GOW on Xbox Live today, but without it I don't know if it will have the long-term playability online. In addition, I don't like the fact that there are only 3 game types in GOW: Execution, Warzone, and Assassination. Each one is just a variation on killing the other team. There are simply no objective-based game types that have become a staple for shooters, like CTF, territories, etc. Again, Halo 2 set the bar for being able to tweak the game every which way, and it's disappointing not to get anything close to that with Gears. Don't get me wrong, I love playing Execution, but I sorely miss a great game of CTF. I hope that Epic provides updates in the future that not only provides new maps, but new gametypes and an improved matchmaking system.
Summary
I think Gears of War is a great game and one that arms the Xbox 360 extremely well in the next-gen console wars which has finally and truly begun. You can't get a gaming experience quite like it anywhere else, and I expect that it will finally give some fence-sitters the reason they've been looking for to pick up an Xbox 360. The UI and stickiness issues are, at the end of the day, annoyances which won't hurt the game's long term playability. The multiplayer matchmaking and game types, on the other hand, will keep GOW from being as fresh and fun today as it can be in the following months or years. Here's to hoping that this gets addressed in a future update. It's rated M for Mature, so no one should complain about the violence and gore as it's clearly marked as being appropriate for those 17 and older. However, there's nothing that can keep me from recommending Gears of War as one of the best shooters out there today.
Rating: 9/10
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