The good, the bad and the ugly on Gears of War for the xbox 360.
Graphics – GoW pushes out some serious graphics for a console. GoW has an excellent use of lighting, shadows, and backgrounds to give the gamer a full bodied visual experience. Graphically speaking GoW makes a strong argument for being the most visually impressive game on the 360 to date. The visual experience you get in this game is just flat out excellent and will be a serious contended for game of the year on many lists simply because of the graphics.
Art – The art direction is very good in GoW. The Gears soldiers all look like roided up WWE superstars with very cool looking outfits. The environment you are in is very run down, decimated and truly looks like an urban war zone. I can never get enough of the run mode where your character crouches down and runs from A to B with the camera positioned low and slightly behind. It looks great and adds a sense of intensity to the game.
Characters – Marcus Phoenix and the rest of his crew are very enjoyable characters. The cut scenes are very well done and their commentary in game can be funny all the way to making you seriously focus up for an intense fight. Most importantly the characters were compelling for the story being told. The story might have been vague and the background elusive but for the part Marcus (you) are playing out everyone adds to the experience in a positive way.
Cover combat – Not sure what else to call the style of combat this game encourages other than cover combat. You are provided with every form of cover you can think of in this game from rocks, trees, vehicles, buildings, and even random cement barriers that seem to be placed in some of the most obscure places. When utilizing these objects of cover you can peek out from their sides and fire your weapon only exposing a small portion of your character. A feature of GoW I really love is the blind firing of your weapon from behind these objects of cover. You can pull your weapon out and fire at the enemy only exposing your hand that’s firing the weapon. Now your accuracy becomes horrible but you get to lay down suppression fire and might even take someone out. You also have the ability to leap from cover object to cover object minimizing the time your body is exposed to the enemy. By leaping I mean quickly moving from A to B which is a pretty cool feature to this very cool game.
Challenge – GoW offers three levels of difficulty and they are true to their names; casual, hardcore, and insane.
Audio – Great soundtrack in Gears of War adds a lot of enjoyment to this title from Epic. The in-game sound effects are of good quality. You get an all around high-end audio experience which is always a huge plus in a shooter.
Chainsaw – Yes, a gun with a chainsaw feature. Genius!!!
Fun – The single player game is straight up a blast to play.
The Bad:
Interactive environment – There is no interactive environment. You get a chainsaw in this game and what gamer won’t try and cut just about anything to see what would happen? Nothing happens. Bullets do nothing to the environment, the chainsaw doesn’t cut wood, and other than some environmental objects that you can blow up that are reminiscent of 8 year old FPS games there’s nothing here in this department.
Multiplayer – The multiplayer offers three game types, a few maps, and very few settings for customizing the game on your server. This however is not the biggest detractor to the games multiplayer experience. The biggest letdown would be the actually game play itself as it comes down to who can sneak up onto their opponent first with the chainsaw. Sure you can shoot them from a distance but good players won’t worry about that too much as killing your opponent with a machine gun from a distance is futile. To dominate in the multiplayer you need to master the sniper rifle and head shot your opponents or get the chainsaw on them. This is fun for a short time but more sophisticated online gamers (hard to say that without sounding snobbish because it’s not meant to be) will have a hard time finding more than 30minutes of enjoyment in Gears of Wars online game.
AI – The intelligence of your fellow squad mates is poor. They get stuck in corners, ignore your commands every so often, usually just get downed fast and leave the fighting up to you, generally annoying. Enemy AI is not much better. Often you can put a few rounds into the enemy who hesitate to react.
Weapon variety – Seriously small variety of weapons in this game.
Length – The game only takes about 6 to 8 hours to beat in single player mode. The multiplayer is not going to cut it for quite a few gamers as the style just isn’t going to hold their attention for long. For the money this game fell way short in this department.
Story – Gears of War does fall into one of the two categories for shooter story lines; alien invasion. It’s either that or you have to be fighting the Nazis to be able to have a shooter these days. Gears of War offers a great intense part of that universes history but you really have no clue about how they got to where they are today. Perhaps in the inevitable sequel they will reveal an in detail more information about the history of this world but for now it’s a negative as you are left with some serious questions that do detract from the enjoyment of the game.
The krill – Not sure if I spelled that correctly or not but the krill are some form of psycho mutated bat that swarms you in a second if you enter any dark area when they are around. Sounds cool right? This is the worst idea for a mob, monster, enemy, bad guy, whatever you want to call your NPC opponents that I have seen in a long long time. The krill are around and you know it based on the sounds they make. If you are currently under a light and 20 yards away is another light with about 10 yards in between with no light…yup, you guessed it, they swoop down and kill you in a second.
Final boss – I won’t go into details on the fight as it could be a serious spoiler but what a serious let down.
Price – As with 99% of all next gen console games $59.99 is far too much for this very short shooter. GoW is beatable is 6 hours and the online game gets boring fast. Seriously ridiculous.
The ugly:
Games AI – GoW’s AI can often lead to your squad mates getting stuck in corners staring at the wall while you’re about to engage the enemy leaving you SOL until they manage to catch up to you.
Overall:
Gears of War tops them all in the graphics department which is no small feat. The soundtrack and audio experience are high-end. The games intensity and fun factor are of the highest level. But do these overshadow the lack of an interactive environment, $59.99 price tag, and poor somewhat boring multiplayer experience? That’s a hard call. The game is so much fun to play but you don’t get to play it for very long. If that’s enough for you then Gears of War is a must buy.