Not perfect... but pretty damn close!!
That was until I knuckled down and let myself become immersed in the best game I have ever played in my entire life... Gears Of War.
The Locust have lived under the planet's crust for... well, forever. And all was well until the Tony Blair of Sera decides it's a good idea to burrow down into the Locust's home and steal their precious yellow goo, known as Imulsion, to use as Sera's newest energy source. Under the command of the enigmatic Locust Queen and her second-in-command General RAAM, the Locust rise up in their thousands and burrow through the Earth to destroy all human life and take down civilization. This is Emergence Day.
Fast forward 14 years. The game starts with lead character Marcus Fenix being busted out of jail by his best friend and fellow soldier Dominic Santiago. But they'll have no trouble skipping over the wall. All the prisoners have been pardoned and the screws have buggered off home. Aside from the fact that the Locust are tunneling through tooled up to the eyeballs to murder and mutilate every last human being in order to make Sera their new home, this would be the easiest prison escape in the history of fiction. But no, that mantle still belongs to Bad Girls' Phyl Oswyn and Bev Tull's bakery van breakout to the Costa Del Sol.
First thing you'll notice is the graphics are the most incredible ever seen in a game to date. The gorgeous (and sometimes less-than-gorgeous) environments and the sheer detail in the characters will leave you drooling. The game is played from a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective, a la Resident Evil 4 and it works brilliantly. One pull of the left trigger zooms the camera right in on your character's shoulder and makes a cross-hair appear for precision aiming. Then a pull of the right trigger unloads a barrage of hot metal into your unforunate opponent. But if you go into these firefights guns blazing, you WILL die, even on Casual difficulty.
The A button utilizes every environment's various covering spots, be it round the corner of a building, a stone block, standing, crouching... whatever's available you'll need to get behind it. From there you can blind-fire your weapon to stay safe, or pull the left trigger to pop out and fire at your enemies until one of you croaks it. You can also hop right up over your cover, do a SWAT turn to another spot or take a flying leap out firing your Lancer as you roll around on the ground. The possibilities are endless, and there's always a hundred ways to tackle every situation. It's down to you to find which one works the best for you.
Any action that needs taking care of can be performed by the X button. Be it picking up guns, ammo or the collectable COG tags, manning turrets, kicking down doors or delivering a final, brutal 'Curb Stomp', the X button's the one to tap.
The game's achievements cover every aspect of the game, and are impressively challenging yet do-able. My favourite! You'll get points for playing the game's Campaign mode on each of the three difficulties, but brilliantly, those of you who go mad and start off on Hardcore difficulty, you'll get the Casual achievements as well. You'll also get a little bonus for destroying the game's more challenging enemies and collecting the COG tags from your fallen comrades. Taking your new-found skills online will net you an impressive amount of points, but it should be noted that you'll only receive them when you play ranked matches.
The game's balance is brilliant. The most ardent Halo fan will say the multiplayer experience is far more rewarding than the solo game, which is a fair comment, but wonderfully Gears Of War manages to capture the magic of it's multiplayer mode in it's Campaign. That's not the say the multiplayer is lacking anything. It's already overtaken Halo 2 as the most played game on Xbox Live, and it is BRILLIANT. Teams of 2, 3 and 4 battle it out in three different game types. Warzone is your typical Team Deathmatch, Execution is similar but encourages horrid, brutal, sadistic slaughter from point-blank range rather than long-distance shooting, and brilliantly punishes defiance by letting your victim stand right back up and continue fighting. Assassination is unfairly tarnished as... well, s**t actually. But it brings a whole new dynamic to the team aspect of the game. One player is elected leader by fulfilling certain criteria within the match, and the others must protect him/her with their life. The leader dies, the opposite team wins.
Never before have I played a game so perfect in every way. The graphics are stunning, the gameplay is top-notch and as far as the sound goes the score is incredible and the brilliant guitar riff that signifies you've won a fire-fight is the icing on the most delicious cake you've ever eaten. My only complaint is the team dynamic in the solo campaign. Your soldier pals really do not know their a**e from their elbow and thus aren't worth the risk to revive since you'll most likely end up dead yourself, and most of the time they'll be dancing around in your firing line - lucky it's not possible to kill your teammates. Well, maybe Baird...
But that really is a small inconvenience that fades in significance to the brilliance of this title. Any shooter fan will adore this. It's not for the faint-hearted but it's a blast, from the opening minutes to the final battle. And when you see the credits roll up you'll be left gagging for the next installment, and know it'll be worth every second.
Andy Fenn