As hard as this may seem Gears of War Lived up to all the hype leading up to its release.
It's hard for me to put into words how good the graphics are for this game. Almost every aspect of the graphics could be praised ad infinitum. Even when compared with games like Oblivion, and FEAR this game utterly destroys the level of visual fidelity you can find there. The details are just astounding ranging from how cragged the skin is on various locust opponents to how many little pieces stuff breaks into when destroyed. In fact I want to pay special attention to mentioning how brutal the weapon effects are in this game. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. When you unload a shotgun into something it'll break into all kinds of pieces. Smaller bullets cause different wounds that look more like small arms wounds. Sniper rifles will sometimes cause heads to explode like a melon leaving the body to collapse intact. If you're squeamish about gore obviously you need not apply. I could go on and on and on about the graphics but I think you get the point they're flatly gorgeous. And despite how detailed everything is the frame rate stays awesome throughout the game.
The Audio is no slouch in this game either. The music is entirely non-descript but the sound effects are fantastic. I mostly want to give some respect to the gun sounds. They're absolutely **** amazing. Even on a tv with stereo and no sub woofer the gun shots managed to sound as full as most games do on a machine with a sub attached.
But Gears of War is no show pony, this game has some of the most satisfying shooting of any game out there on the market. For gun play only Half-Life 2 and Farcry on the PC can come close to the intensity of this game. However despite the obvious comparisons to other shooters this game really doesn't play like most other shooters. For one thing a mantra you'll need to learn to play this game effectively is "cover is king". You'll not be running around mowing folks down, you'll be going from barricade to barricade slowly fighting your way forward. However that's not to say this is a realistic tactical shooter. It uses the health bend but don't break style health that we saw in the Halo Series and Call of Duty 2 where there are no health packs which lets you fight all day long without dying if you're smart. Furthermore it throws all kinds of crazy combinations of monsters at you and you just mow them all down in all sorts of nasty ways.
If there was one thing i had to complain about is that the game really has 2 bread and butter weapons and then a handful of situational toys that kind of feel tacked on. For the most part you're just going to be using your assault rifle with sparing use of a shotgun when you're inside tight quarters. Then you have a bunch of other guns that aren't really nessecary and grenades are pretty much useless. One highlight of the weapons is the chainsaw bayonet mounted on the front of your Assault rifle. It's a 2 button combo to use on a melee range enemy and it's extremely effective (i.e. it kills any normal enemy every time)
This isn't an especially long game. Clocking in at like 8-12 hours or so depending on how fast you move through the game. The game has a story--but it's really not even worth discussing. You could play through the whole game and never understand the why of what you were doing and it wouldn't really upset your playing experience. Augmenting this short length is a nice dispersion of points spread throughout single player and multiplayer giving you points for doing things like hitting 5 perfect reloads, playing in a certain number of ranked games, getting a certain number of kills and of course progressing through the single player. The multiplayer is something of a mixed bag because this game has been extremely popular. Last I saw it had sold 3 million copies and the few times i played i ran into jackasses who felt the need to taunt me because I hadn't learned all the stuff yet. However after a few rounds I found i liked it's small team structure in rounds of 4v4 matches creating a more intimate experience versus something with 80,bajillion players. As always with these questions of community your mileage may vary. Commendably Epic already has Free downloadable content which is all the better in this world of being charged for jerseys and cheat codes.
I mean it's hard for me to find much to fault with Gears of War. I mean the few things I have to complain about are incredibly trivial in the grand scheme of things. If you really need an amazing story or a tight knit small community of good guys this may not be for you, but anyone else Game on!