Its about time something like this came along to swipe Halo of its mantle piece :)
The campian itself is relitively short, as I completed it on Hardcore In one day and played through the Insane mode In another day aswell, this left me rather dry. I then get my buddy round and decided to go through the Co-op mode on Insane with him, this is where the game really picked up and obviously showed itself as a built from the ground up co-op game. Not just some tagged on mod. Gears really forces you to use tactics and teamwork, as much as other games boast about teamwork etc such as BF2142, no other game really compares to gears. If you dont work as a team, you might aswell be on your own, It just doesnt work, you need your team mate to give you supressing fire so you can move round and flank the highly inteligent enemys, then you can flush them out with a nicely placed grednade and watch your buddy snipe them off. No game gives you this much feeling of worth and satisfaction when you pulled off some sweet tactical manouver that allowed you to take out the enemy stronghold. The graphics were obviously going to be beautiful, but I was always sceptical about frame rates, but thankfully to the Unreal 3's technology that is no problem with constant high frame rates, I only noticed a slight drop in the cut scenes were they bump up the textures etc, and that was running on HD. Running on non HD the frames never dipped.
After playing through the campain i moved my interests to multiplayer which I was absolutely blown away, it has got to be the best multiplayer expereince I have ever played on every platform! It even takes the buscuit over AVP2 when that first came out!
Nothign beats when you have got a few m8s round, 2 360's with 4 of you working together against 4 other people on xbx live. I am so glad that its no more than 4 a side or it would end up being a cheap frag fest. Keeping the teams to 4 keeps the tactics tight, usually splitting you up into 2 teams of 2 enabling you to flank out the enemy, provide supressing fire, smoke grenades.
This has to be one of the greatest games of all time, without doubt, It has been so long since ive seen a game with this much polish and addictive gameplay. This is a must have for any gamer, and is definately worth buying a 360 for, and even a HD TV. The only thing i found with this game is that the Chainsaw on multiplayer is majorly overpowered, not because of the damage it inflicts, but the fact that everyone starts with one, its almost like if everone started with a sword on Halo 2?? Also playing this game on HD and then seeing my m8s on non HD, my game almost looked like a sequel. This game definately suffers with non HD TV's.
TM