Yep, it's all it's cracked up to be...
The single player, as stated, COULD be longer. But in this review, you will not find the griping to the extent of other reviews. Anything this great is too short. And if you play on the upper difficulty levels, hell, it's pretty damn difficult too! You play the game as Marcus Fenix, a recently pardoned soldier in the Coalition of Governments army (COG). It's over a decade past "Emergence Day," the day that the main bad guys, the Locust Horde, sprang from below the ground. The story, unfortunately, is almost nonexistant beyond that, and leaves alot of questions unanswered, though the ending leaves it open for a sequel, so hopefully these will, in time, be answered. There are three difficulty levels, though the hardest, Insane, is initially locked until you play through the campaign once. The default, Casual, is the easiest and if you're even remotely familiar with shooters, this will probably be too easy for you, and yeah, you'll blow through it in a couple hours. Once you grow a pair and jack up the difficulty, however, you'll find yourself actually having to use the cover function quite a lot, as you'll take less damage before you fall. Speaking of taking damage, the health meter in this game takes the continuing trend of Halo 2-esque health trackers, where you can take a few shots, but if you can avoid the action for a bit, you'll go back to full health. For this game it works, and it keeps the pace moving briskly.
Speaking of pace, to say what many reviewers have said about this game being slower paced would be false. True, you can't run and gun through this game, the intuitive cover system is proof enough for that. However, when you're in the heat of a firefight, "slow" is probably the last word you'd use to describe what's going on in the game. Your enemies' use powerful guns, are pretty good shots, and won't hesitate to advance on your position from all sides.
Graphically this game is amazing. Every environment is the same yet wildly different at the same time. You can tell with each environment that it's a post-apocalyptic world and that all Hell could break loose with the turn of a corner, but you'll spend time outdoors, indoors, during daytime, during nighttime, running through cities, running through houses, and even battling through a taken-over high speed train. The character design, some people will love, others won't care for it. Simply put, they're all big, tough, men. They look like massive gorillas with their bulky armor on, but you can't argue that they look great regardless. This game is all about the subtle things. Your vision blurs at long distances, when you run and crouch, the camera follows behind and shakes in a documentary-esque style, blood splatters on the screen when someone scores a particularly nasty hit on you. It's hard to be impressed by these things by reading a review, but in practice it makes worlds of difference.
The sound in this game was definately not an afterthought by the developers either, and it's refreshing to see so. The music picks up during frantic scenes and does a good job of making you feel tense. The sound effects are as top notch as the music. Your guns sound painful and when your bullets hit, you can hear the bullets ripping into your enemies, and it's just overall very satisfying. One of the more particularly awesome sounds is the chainsaw when you connect with an unlucky subject. You hear the engine kick into high gear and you get that squishy, bone cracking ambience that makes you feel all warm inside.
Playing the game is as much fun, if not more so, than looking or listening to it. The cover system is very intuitive. Systems like this have been implemented in the past, in games such as Kill.Switch, but it's very refined in this game. Simply hit the 'A' button and you'll go into cover, ducking or standing depending on the height of the object you're using for cover. From there you have a number of different options. Hit the Left Trigger to pop up over or out of the side to pop off some shots. Hold on to forward and hit 'A' again, and your character will either mantle over low cover, or rush out right into a run from the side. Or, if none of those work for you, hold the analog stick to the side, hit 'A' again, and if there's other cover nearby, your character will do a SWAT turn to change your perspective and hopefully let you get off some better shots.
The guns in Gears of War are, in part, the same tried-and-true guns with some interesting twists. You have pistols, such as your Snub pistol that has a bigger clip than, but is also less powerful than, the Magnum. The Gnasher Shotgun does it's job superbly of spreading alot of lead around. The grenades are your standard fragmentation grenades, hold on to the Left Trigger and you'll get a parabolic representation of where your grenade will land. The Longshot is the sniper rifle of the game, and operates probably how you expect it to. You have a weird kind of submachine gun almost that fires in three round bursts, but you'll soon trade this for your mainstay gun, the Lancer. This is the notorious gun that has... get this... a chainsaw for a bayonet. How many times have you told yourself, "Ya know, this gun would be alot cooler with a chainsaw attached."? Okay, probably not too often, but it's a fantastic idea and actually works great in practice. Enemies will often try to rush you by jumping over the low cover you've been using as a shield, but they just become mincemeat for that beast on the front of your gun, and body parts and blood fly everywhere, whoo, it's almost poetic. Probably the most interesting gun in Gears of War is the Hammer of Dawn. This is, in actuality, not a gun at all, but rather a targeting laser that you point on the ground or at a target and it calls in a strike from a satellite orbiting the world. The strike is devastating and will gib any smaller enemy in it's immediate vicinity, and it's actually required for some of the larger baddies. Because of the nature of this weapon, it can only be used at certain times, when the "satellite is overhead", so you won't get to use it that much, but you can get creative with it and help it to clear out groups of smaller enemies during the single player game. And in the weapon category lies one of the VERY few complaints I have with the game. The weapons they included are great, but there could definately be more of them. And you'll pretty much be carrying around the Lancer the whole time as it's the only weapon that's good in every situation.
The multiplayer is one of the more exciting aspects of Gears of War. It pits teams of four human soldiers (COG team) against four of the alien soldiers (Locust team). There are three modes of play here, the main one being Warzone. In Warzone, it's a simple team deathmatch. When a character is hit enough in multiplayer play, they go down to their knees and you can either shoot them all the way down or run up to them for an especially grotesque execution style kill that has your character curb stomping the poor bastard. In comparison to Warzone, there is Execution. In execution, you MUST run up and execute the opponents, there is no staying in cover to finish the job in this mode. The third mode is Assasination, and it sets one player per team to be the leader, and the objective is to kill the opponents' leader.
Gears of War is a fantastic experience that anyone with an XBox 360 should not miss. The developers did a fantastic job with just about every aspect of the game. The achievement points will keep you coming back for more and more, and will keep you busy for a while to come. Definately a candidate for Game of the Year, and this reviewer believes it to be a, if not THE, top contender for the title.