This game has set a new standard for shooters throughout gaming.
In the single player you start out as Marcus Phoenix, a marine who is currently in prison. Your friend Dominic Santiago comes to get you out to help fight an ongoing war against a mutilated human species, the locust. The locusts are an excellent A.I. They look frightening, and when you get the rare occasion to hear one, you will be frightened. There are five levels that take an accumulated time of about eight hours when you go through it the first time. You will want to go through it again for fun with your friends. There are epic boss battles throughout the game, and cut scenes of cinematic proportions. Even though the single player is short, the multi-player will have you coming back for a while. There are only three game types, but it has been announced that there will be an additional game type, thanks to the Xbox Live marketplace. The game types are execution, assassination, and war zone. In assassination there is a team leader on each team, and you have to take out that person in order to win. In execution each player has to be killed by an execution, a curb stomp, a head shot, a grenade tag, etc. My favorite game mode is war zone. War zone is like team survival; you get only one life to live, so make the best of it. There are new maps as well. In general the first maps were large, and only meant to be played with a full room. There is one map that has been released called Raven Down which does the opposite of this. You could have fun with this map with only two on two, and possibly a head to head battle. This game is great, and the graphics and sound only make it better. This game looks so crisp, and I have yet to find a constant glitch that I have encountered. I have played a majority of the bigger named games on the Xbox 360, and this game blew every other game out of the water at its release. The sound is done well, but there aren’t any stand out parts that have an immaculate sound that I can remember, one thing that did bother me was that when you shoot water, there is no reaction, the bullet simply seems to go through the water invisibly, without sound or visual proof that it hits the water. This is a minor problem, because not only are there only few parts that you can shoot water, but it is made up for throughout the game because of how incredible it is.
Gears of War I believe has loosely the same control scheme as most shooters on other consoles. This game is easy to pick up and play because of how good it looks, and how fun it is to chainsaw your friends online, and I even find it fun to get killed, because of how cool it looks having your blood splatter all over the screen either because of getting chain sawed in half, or merely getting your limbs shot off by a shotgun.