Gears of War is being haled as the reason to own an Xbox 360, it is good but is it that good?

User Rating: 9.1 | Gears of War X360
By mjolnir334 | Review Date:
Gears of War has a had a mountain of hype. It is being flagged as the reason to own an Xbox 360. The real question is, is it? First the game play. Gears of War is a bit more complicated then say...Halo. The controls are much like that of any third person shooter. Left thumb stick is move around, right thumb stick is look around, right trigger is fire, so pretty basic, but it's the cover system that makes the game unique. It does take a little while to get the cover system down pat. It's actually fairly simple. Press A and your character will throw himself to the nearest piece of cover, and if there is none roll in the direction that you're walking. Once in cover you can choose to blind fire by just pressing right trigger, or you can can choose to look out of cover by pressing left trigger and this will allow you to aim properly. And you can do a number of action moves to dive out of cover such as a swat turn, or dive out of cover. The majority of the game play consists of moving from cover to cover and take shots at your enemies, it sounds repetitive, and maybe some do find it repetitive, but I found it incredibly fun. The reason you have to move from cover to cover is because of how easy it is to die. It's been said over and over, but if you stand out in the open you die. This difficulty made the game a hole lot more fun in my opinion. I had been getting sick of all the easy games, and it's quite refreshing to play something challenging. I'm not gonna go too deep into the graphics of the game. You've seen the screen shots, the trailers, etc. Yes, it does look that good, and it does run stable. The sound was something that really surprised me. I wasn't expecting a hole lot from the sound department, but it's actually one of the highlights of the game. Every single one of the guns sound awesome, and just wait till you rip through your first enemy with a chainsaw. In short, the guys doing the foley for this game earned their pay.

The single player, at least in my opinion, is the heart of this game, sure the story may not pack as much punch as those other shooters, sure your allies A.I. may not be the smartest, but at every moment there seems to be something to get you off you seat. There are never any parts of the game where you fight off large numbers of enemies, but that's because fighting off a handful can prove hectic. Over all the single play is an amazing thing, and must be played.

Now on to my problems with the game. The game is developed by Epic, the guys behind Unreal Tournament so I expected great things. Now I know they were focusing on the single player, which as I've already stated is awesome, but I felt they could have added more on the multi player side of things. It's four vs four in all of the game types. It's pretty standard fare, and nothing really feels too special. Sure, it's fun to know that your killing another person with your chainsaw instead of some computer, but it's just kinda...meh. Although it already has been addressed that Epic is releasing a patch, to improve the multi player. But as it stands right now, Gears won't last as long as Halo 2 did. My other problem with the game is the story. Now as I've said in the past, if I want a good story go read a book, but it had potential to be a good story, but it's just kinda boring. There's no character development, and it leaves it with a cliffhanger ending.

Overall Gears of War is a good game. The single player is incredibly fun, the graphics are amazing, the sounds better than I could have asked for, but there's just some reason I can't call this a game worth buying a system for. Many people say it's reason enough, but with a single player that lasts only ten hours and a multi player that is begging to be expanded, I just can't recommend this as a reason to buy an Xbox 360. If you like shooters, and do own an Xbox 360, then by all means buy this game. You won't regret it.

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