Gears of War is more than just a milestone in technical achievement; it's a right of passage for xbox360 owners.
Here's an in depth breakdown of what makes this game so good, followed by some noticable awkward elements that may make the game look shaky under a critical eye.
Good stuff:
The game looks stunning, and flows incredibly well. I mean really well. Virtually everywhere you go there's amazing scenery, visceral action, moments of near panic, humor, and a definite sense of accomplishment along the way. All that and the frame rate really never drops. I probably played the first level with my mouth open. It's that kind of feeling; you almost can't get over just how crazy everything looks. The campaign itself isn't incredibly long, but I don't really think that's a bad thing. If it were much longer with its brief story, it might have gotten a tad stale. But in a sense, the short succinctness of the Gears campaign lets you get a good run of action done without being too repetitive; and gives you the opportunity to think about trying the next difficulty level up to see how you do. The actual story and campaign elements are probably the weak link to gears, but even with all the negatives I can think of (see the Bad Stuff: section below) the good essentially overpowers any kind of negative criticism I could come up with about the story. So to hell with why we're in these infested caverns! Let's keep killin' crap!
Controls: They're pretty manageable after a level or two of play, and every time you get a chainsaw kill you will likely give yourself a mental pat on the back. The reloading feature is also pretty entertaining. If you can time the reload right, you'll get a damage bonus on your next clip, but if you time if way off, your character will just curse and beat the gun with his fist as it gets jammed for a few seconds. There's no worse feeling than jamming your gun right before an enemy runs out into the open and stands there, while you can't shoot at it. Or maybe you panic and jam your gun as you get rushed bye a number of wretches, who knows. It's fun to see when you can pull it off and when you fail miserably.
The difficulty also scales fairly well. The lowest setting aptly named 'casual' will give you a challenge here and there until you've mastered the controls and game play. And once you've figured that out you can either play through it again for fun to dominate those locusts that gave you problems the first time around, or up the difficulty to see how far you can push your skills. The cover element and revive system are also great. There's usually always some place for you to duck down and unload a clip, or maybe blind toss grenades or blind fire. The revive system itself you probably will use more in multiplayer, since it’s hard to keep track of the ai in some of the bigger single player areas, and they tend to wander off on their own and die. But if you manage to finish off the enemies around you, your fallen teammates will spring right up, and you can continue on, so you don't have to worry about getting them up that much if you're confident you can finish off the enemies near bye.
And speaking of AI, it’s pretty much on par with how AI is in these types of games. They might stand their and get killed or lag behind, which actually turns out to be funny in some cases during tense low-on-time-moments when you can catch yourself yelling, "Jesus man, COME ON." (I'm pretty sure I swore Dom out a half dozen times in my first run through the campaign) And yet while the AI might lag or die foolishly sometimes, they also manage to save your life here or there with a chainsaw to a flanking enemy or just some good shooting on the wretches that rush up on you. Also if they end up getting stuck somewhere they will teleport to you once you reach the next checkpoint, so there's no real need to go back and get them if they get lost.
And then there's the multiplayer. This is one of those things that will take some time to really evaluate, because no one knows for sure yet how human players will mold the game play, whether it be through strategies, or even lame cheating. *cough* halo2
But so far everything seems really legit. After seeing trailers for this game I was a little worried that weapon damage and health would be a balance issue, because it looked like it took people forever to die, and that seemed kind of lame to me. But as it turns out, the people in the trailers just didn't have very good aim, because if you can keep a line of fire on someone’s head, you're going to bring them down fairly quick. The tricky part is that if you can't manage to bring them down completely and they get away, within a short time they will have regained all their health, so you will have to start all over damage wise. Basically that ends putting a large emphasis on lethal surprise attacks, either with the chainsaw, shotgun, or sniper rifle. The game encourages you to use cover while firing, position yourself well, and deliver a killing blow when you’ve got the upper hand. While also keeping a third eye on your teammate - in case you need to rush in and play medic before he gets curb stomped.
So basically when you combine all these good elements, you essentially get a game that is really in a league of its own in terms of intense action, stellar graphics, and just fun gameplay. Once you start playing , it's really hard to stop until you've beaten it, mainly because frankly it just puts a lot of other games you might have been playing to shame. But that being said, nothing made by human hands is perfect, and there are definitely some quirks to gears that stick out in the back of your mind while playing.
Bad stuff:
(Don’t read if you don't care about ticky tack problems)
The main problem I have with the game is that the campaign story doesn't really make any sense. A couple different times, in fact. It doesn't fill you in on what the war is all about, and given the fact that so much of the scenery is completely destroyed, you can't help but ask yourself what the heck is going on with the planet earth during the game. and yet the game never really tells you. You basically have no clue how many humans are left alive, but it doesn't really matter since it will only take the few commandos you meet to deliver the games generic critical blow plotline. And yet there's weird stuff like the invisible drone thats sole purpose is to follow you around until you reach a door you can't kick down, which it will then decloak and cut through. To me it seemed a little weird that the humans could have an undetectable stealth drone that could fly with some kind of weapon or tool mounted on it, and still be getting their asses kicked in a big way, -based on how the cities look.. The enemies don't have anything that can turn invisible. And why can't the stealth drone do something more useful, like bring you ammo or intel or just shoot. But then again you just don't really know if the humans are losing or not, because the game just doesn't tell you. So everything is pretty much left up to your imagination, which for me imagines a lot of strange answers to questions littered along the way.
The stealth drone, to one end, actually just turns out to be a part of an objective based campaign that just barely fails to do a convincing job. Gears of War is not without its fair share of gimmicks, and when they're used 2-3 times each throughout the campaign they can start to stick out like a sore thumb. The hammer of dawn weapon, and the stealth drone can both fall into this category. For example
There's times when you need to use the hammer of dawn weapon to kill a pseudo boss, but the gun only actually works on rare occasions because "the satellites in space need to be aligned right," for it to fire and on top of that it can only work outside. So since the game itself only sets those conditions correct around the boss encounters, (you'll even get a cute timer sometimes as to how much 'sattelite' time you have left) and throws the gun in a corner nearby, Gears of War is basically saying, "Look, when you get to this boss, get this gun and shoot it, then throw it down and be on your merry way, cuz it won't work anymore after this room." (until you get to the next boss, in which case we’ll have another gun in the corner for you again to grab and use, then drop again) In the end it's all a little too convenient that the one human corpse in a certain boss room has that exact gun you need for that situation, and that the sattelites happen to be aligned perfectly at that very moment.
The stealth drone also shows off its gimmick status when it will start to cut a door, and you're objective will read "defend jack (your drone) until he cuts through the door"
Well it turns out, he will finish cutting through the door, -right- after you've killed the last monster in your room. every time. And if you suddenly decide to just hang out with the monsters and not kill them, you will end up waiting for jack a very long, long time. because it’s not actually doing anything, it’s just waiting for you to clear the room, which isn’t really different from the other 5 or 6 rooms you fought through to get there.
Little things like making the hammer of dawn actually useable like a real gun instead of a means to an end, and better scenario coding like actually putting a timer on jacks cutting, would have gone a long way to shoring up the scripted elements in the campaign game play. But regardless, even if the story were worse, and the gimmicks more gimmicky, the core combat game play of Gears is more than stellar enough to carry the games value on its back, and receive high marks in the process.
And as far as a technical standpoint, there was also very little to complain about. The game runs so fluid the whole way through that if something does chop up for a moment (make sure your xbox is getting air because this game will heat it up) you might be taken a-back for a second to realize that you’ve been playing the whole way up to that point without any kind of stuttering whatsoever. I also had one glitch with some car debris that I was supposed to push that didn’t move right, but I rebooted and it was fine the next run. Regardless, the game plays and looks fantastic, everytime you boot it up.
Conclusion:
So if you own a 360, you really need to play this game through at least once. Whether you rent it or buy it, it’s up to you and how much you are actually into shooters. But the fact remains that this game is a testament to what the 360 is capable of, and what games are capable of in general, and you owe it to yourself to see what that looks like, and maybe ponder for yourself what might be ahead in the future.