Perhaps these gears should have gotten an extra oil change before release but that doesn't mean the gears can't grind!
GoW is a third-person shooter and you control the character named Marcus Fenix who is in prison for a crime we don't really know what is. But soon Marcus' friend Dom (or Dumb as I like to call him) breaks him out and it starts a tutorial level where you can get comfortable with the controls and weapons etc. The game takes place on a distant planet populated with humans and some alien species known as the Locust Horde. These aliens dug a massive network of underground tunnels through the entire planet and hence the humans are trying to stop them and we have the usual war-torn environment. But let us not kid ourselves; we don't really care about the story in a game such as this. The best way to describe GoW is to compare it to a summer blockbuster movie – It's a fun ride but just be sure to wake up your brain afterwards.
The thing that sets GoW apart from other shooters is its cover-system. With the touch of a button you can "stick" to walls and hide behind most obstacles in the level. When you are behind cover you can use various moves like a side-roll, forward dive and jump over the obstacle. You can also shoot your weapons from behind the cover by either blind-fire (shoot without aiming) or peak your head up and aim your gun but still stay behind cover. This system is the meat and potatoes of the game – that is the entire "gimmick" of the game. There are some good things about this and some bad ones as well. I will say that the system mostly works well and it sets the game apart from many other shooters out there. For the 10 hours it takes to beat the game the system never got "old" for me and I quite enjoyed it. It gives combat a very visceral feel and I actually liked the system more in GoW than the ones in Mass Effect or Rainbow Six Vegas 2 that also uses this. But when a game so heavily relies on one gimmick the designers must make absolutely sure that it works and it doesn't always work here. The worst offender is the fact that the game uses the same button for "run" and the "cover" button (that is also used for going for a dive). This means that there is countless times where you will run through a street and all of a sudden "stick" to a wall or sometimes your character won't stick to something and instead starts to run out in the open and gets killed. In tighter environments this became worse and just getting through these could be a pain. Out in the open with good cover to hide behind the system worked like a charm. So to sum it up the cover-system mostly works but do have some minor hiccups.
Another point for debate is the level-design of the game. Due to the cover-system there are chest-high walls everywhere and you can always tell when a fight is about to start because of the increase in walls or other cover spots. This is clearly contrived and Epic didn't even try to mask this. But the thing is that it didn't bother me that much. If you can accept that the level-design is made with the specific goal in mind to set up some great fire fights then you will appreciate it for what it is. The graphics are provided by the Unreal 3 engine. The game looks good but has that annoying "shine" (bloom) that most Unreal 3 engine games have. It can either be run in DX9 or DX10 but it has a stupid feature that means that if you will use DX9 then you can't use AA also. Never mind the fact that games have been using AA for the past 10 years or so but now thanks to good old Microsucks we can't do that anymore. I have a fairly okay PC and yet almost all Unreal 3 engine games stutters and sputters on my PC. It doesn't seem to matter what happens on screen or what settings I use but games like Mass Effect, UT3 and GoW runs like crap on my PC. Crysis on the other hand ran like a dream in DX10 on high settings and looked a hell of a lot better than GoW. But the stuttering was never enough to be real annoying and it didn't happen that often. Sound is pretty much what you would expect from a high profile title like GoW i.e. good. The voice acting is good and the party banter is funny as hell. It's the usual macho-BS and one-liners and you will either love it or hate it. I absolutely loved it.
The weapons in the game feel good and there is a wide selection to choose from. Unfortunately you can only carry two primary weapons and one secondary weapon plus grenades, and this means you are more or less forced to pick the assault rifle and shotgun or sniper rifle. The more exotic weapons like a bow shooting explosive arrows or a satellite guided laser can only be used in such limited situations that you won't want to carry them. My biggest complaint is with grenades that are utterly useless in this game. It takes 7-8 seconds to switch from you weapon to the grenade, throw it, and then switch back to your weapon again. Most of the time your guy will be dead before he even throws the grenade. Why can't game designers never get grenades right? GoW also follows a trend in modern shooters where enemies need to be killed with an insane amount of bullets (unless you hit the head). You can empty entire clips into these baddies and they won't go down. Even hitting them in the head is no guarantee that they die. As the game progresses you learn to cope with this and you learn the tricks, but when you first start out it is annoying that these baddies can take so much damage. The overall level of difficulty is over the top if you ask me and was clearly designed with the Xbox's auto-aim in mind and possibly co-op play via Xbox Live. I played the game on "Casual" ("For those who play the occasional shooter" as the game taunted me with) and still the game is insanely difficult in some spots. Often the enemy will swarm you or flank you or use grenades and because it takes an hour to kill each enemy even when you stay behind cover, this means often you simply can't kill them fast enough. The enemy AI is quite good and they will use cover and flanking manoeuvres and retreat when wounded. Unfortunately the same can't be said for your teammates. You will often have from one to three squad members following you and you would expect these highly trained commandoes to be good but sadly they aren't. I honestly think I have to go back to my Commodore 64 days to find AI as bad as your team. These men are borderline retarded and fails to show even a modest sense of self-preservation. They will attack machinegun nests head on, they will jump from cover and stand out in the open, they can't kill anything and worst of all they constantly get in your way. It's simply embarrassing for Epic to release a game with such horrendous team AI (especially when the enemy AI is so good). One extra thing that adds to the level of difficulty is the checkpoint save system. You can't quicksave and the game saves only in one spot so once you reach the next checkpoint all previous points are lost. This means you will be playing some parts over and over again, and Epic made the retarded decision to sometimes put a five minute cutscene right after a checkpoint and this means you must watch this cutscene 5-10 times (you can't skip it) or how many times you will die before getting it right. I do want to say that as the game progressed and I learned to use weapons and cover properly the game became more manageable and for the most part the checkpoints are actually located close to each other. But still why can't we get the option to quicksave on the PC?
Now for the ugly parts of Gears of War: The installation takes an insane amount of time to finish. It took more than 30 minutes and then I was only halfway there because I was forced to spend another 30 minutes setting up Games for Windows Live. GfW is just about the most unintuitive system I have ever seen. The user interface is a mess and you must set it up in order to play the game. Once the game was installed I tried to start it but the game crashed and told me to reinstall it. After a google search it turned out that I needed to patch it and after that the game worked. During the game I did experience one CTD due to Alt-Tap out of the game and I did get stuck on terrain a few times. The load-times in the game are only 10-15 seconds and normally that wouldn't be bad but when compared with the high level of difficulty those 15 seconds can seem like a long time when you have just died for the seventh time in less than five minutes. But the worst part was that when I was about halfway through the game I suddenly lost my savegame meaning I had to start over. This is a common problem even after the patches and you can find a 40-page post over at Epic's forum about it. Luckily it only happened once and replaying the game wasn't that bad. But the game was clearly not tested before release.
In the end Gears of War is a surprisingly good game but the bugs and missing savegames simply means I will give it a lower rating. The controls mostly work well enough but mapping several different moves to the same key is not a good idea. Also I can't quite escape the feeling that the game was designed for the Xbox and what we got for the PC was a half-hearted port that didn't take the PC's better controls and possibility of a quicksave into account. Also it must be mentioned that with so much focus on one single game mechanic like the cover-system there is a danger that the game can become repetitive. It didn't for me and I had a blast playing it all the way through, but I wouldn't want to replay it any time soon and I honestly don't think I would be interested in any sequels for the PC. The game can best be compared to a summer blockbuster movie – sometimes these movies can be a fun ride but once the sequels and spin-offs starts to hit the screen the franchise tend to go downhill fast. So my best advice when playing Gears of War is to make some popcorn, buy some Pepsi Max, and then enjoy it while it lasts. It's not a classic and you won't remember it years from now but I had a hell of a lot of fun playing it.