Good graphics, but let down by a poor story and mediocre gameplay
For those that don't know, Gears of War is a third person shooter that uses a 'revolutionary' cover system for the combat. It's powered by the Unreal 3 engine, which is one of the best engines out there at the moment.
So why the low score? Well first of all, is the story. Which is to say, there isn't really one. You play as Marcus Fenix, a COG (Which is why it's 'Gears' of War) who's fighting an alien race called the Locust. The Locust have been hiding under the Earth's crust for centuries, waiting to come out and take over the planet. On 'Emergence Day', they do, and the game begins some time after that. The problem here is, that's pretty much the entire story. Marcus' character is never remotely explored, and the only mention of his background is that he was put in prison for trying to save his father. The same applies for the other characters in the game, there's no mention of who they are besides their name, or anything else about them. Another thing that bugs me is that the main character is pretty annoying. Unlike most video game heroes, who are deep voiced,calm, and utter tonnes of 'one liners', Marcus is loud, angry, and loud some more.
Then there's the gameplay. Basically, you can take cover behind nearly every object in the game, and then jump out from behind cover and shoot the enemies. You can also use the A button combined with a direction to do rolls, swat turns, and other 'useful' moves. The thing is, the use of the cover system is somewhat clunky. When you press A to go behind cover, Marcus takes cover, but for some reason, there's a very short animation where he bashes his shoulder against the cover before you can actually do anything. It's a small complaint I know, but it also makes it more clunky than Rainbow Six's cover system where you simply hold L and that's it. This isn't the only problem though, there are lots of small things which ruin the gameplay. For example, when you throw a grenade, he doesn't throw the grenade and get back behind cover, he instead spins it around twice and then throws it. This makes grenades effectively useless, as it's much more convenient just to shoot the enemies one by one. Speaking of which, the enemies are also irritating because they are effectively 'bullet sponges'. They generally take far too many shots to kill, which doesn't increase the difficulty much, but it does slow down the already slow pace of the game.
As I said at the beginning of the review, the game is powered by the Unreal 3 engine, so the graphics are quite impressive. Before I elaborate on this though, I should point out that whilst an HDTV makes the game look better, playing on an SDTV looks nearly the same only not as sharp (I put this in because there seems to be a lot of people that are under the impression changing from an SDTV to an HDTV is like the comparison between the original Xbox and the 360, which isn't true). The graphics are good, however they aren't as good as some believe. The polygon counts on the models are great, all the models are smooth and realistic. However, the high resolution textures people talk about aren't actually that good. All Epic (the developers) have done is get a fairly low resolution texture and put a very small high resolution patterned bump map over the entire model. As if this wasn't bad enough, there's very little variety of bump map pattern, so many of the walls look similar. Another thing which lets down the graphics is the artistic style. For some reason, every guy in the game is wears humongous armor, which either makes them look very fat or very muscular, depending how you look at it.. The colors are also very drab, mainly consisting of grays and browns. There are no moments in the game with vibrant colors, so the graphics don't look as good as they could do.
The frame rate on the game is okay, there are a few moments when the game stutters, but at some point most 360 games do that anyway. It isn't a consistent 60fps as some people seem to think however, and that's simply because we have no way to measure a console game's framerate.
I haven't got much to say about the sound, because there isn't much to say. The guy who plays Marcus annoys me,as does the guy who plays Cole, however this is because their characters annoyed me, and is no fault of the actors. The other voices were okay but not exceptional. The music in the game is alright, it suits the mood of the moments well, but isn't on the level as some games such as Metal Gear Solid or Halo 2. The sound effects on the other hand, are quite good, and I was especially impressed with the distinct screenshing noise the Wretches make.
There's the multiplayer part of the game, but I didn't play that much. Like a lot of 360 games, there's some lag, and there's the people who just play to annoy other players. This isn't the game's fault, but it still ruins the multiplayer part of the game.
Overall, it's a pretty mediocre game. The single player clocks in at about 6 hours, so it's quite short. There's the multiplayer, but that's not really that good either, so that doesn't last too long. The game might be worth trying, because in the end, it's all down opinion. The points I made are still valid though, so I wouldn't recommend the game.