You gotta love being a games reviewer – every time you get fed up and jaded with the games industry and start to fear for its future, a game or games come along that rejuvenate your enthusiasm, get your adrenalin pumping again. The fact is that Gears just plain cheered me up because I was beginning to think a certain format would never get a true, original ‘AAA’ title…
You may have noticed that Halo 3 hasn’t arrived yet and the 360 has been waiting hungrily for a sci-fi shooter with this sort of quality and playability. Gears differs from Halo in almost every way - it’s set entirely on Earth, it plays from a third person perspective and it also manages to mix tactical action and survival horror like few games before it – it plays a bit like Resident Evil 4, a bit like GRAW (without the bugs and glitches) and with its heavy reliance on “shoot & cover” tactics also plays lot like virtually unheard of and criminally ignored PS2 title Kill.Switch…
Gears of War thrusts you kicking and screaming into a violent, harrowing and exciting story of humankind's battle for survival against an invading horde. Not too original you might think, but these monsters don’t come from outer space but from the bowels of the planet, bursting through the surface via ‘emergence holes’ - through the very ground you might be standing on, and they’re a truly nightmarish mixture of creatures to be sure.
In the campaign mode you play as Marcus Fenix. A human tank and former hero disgraced for deserting his post to save his family, Marcus seeks survival and maybe some personal redemption as he leads his squad of grunts (also known as “Gears”) against the onslaught of the merciless Locust warriors. The first job is to escape from the prison into which you’ve been thrown, fortunately fellow ‘Gear’ Dom sets you free and you’re soon being put through your paces – the escape form the prison acting like a training mode. Like the Halos you can also play the campaign in split screen co-op, the second player taking the role of Dom – unlike the Halos you also get to play the co-op mode with a buddy via Xbox Live – cut scenes and all – and it plays superbly. Divided into acts and chapters, which form save and restart points, you’ll never have to replay too much if you die – and you’ll certainly die a lot as soon as you up the difficulty from the default ‘Casual’ setting to ‘Hardcore’ or ‘Insane’.
Gears has an 18 certificate and is violent – extremely violent, and even its blood effect (that looks rather cartoon-like close up) can’t detract from a gritty war shooter that will from time to time have you charging at the enemy with pure bloodlust in your heart. This bloodlust is aided and enhanced by some truly imaginative and vicious enemies, and also by a set of weapons that allows for all kind of combat, from distant sniping to up-close-and-personal hand-to-hand melee attacks. Melee attacks are some of the most gruesome this side of Resident Evil, and include chainsawing (the Gear’s very own Lancer rifle has a built-in chainsaw that Master Chief himself would be jealous of) an enemy in two, or ‘curb stomping’ a downed enemy to death.
Several games have tried cover modes and many have failed – Gears’ works superbly for approximately 99% of the time, but when it doesn’t you’ll probably end up dead. By pressing ‘A’ your Gear will take cover behind and object or wall, and is then connected to it until you move him backwards and away or perform one of the optional moves; you can leap over some objects, shift quickly from one side of a door to another (called a SWAT turn, this works if any two cover opportunities are close enough too), exit cover running forward or do and evasive roll to the side. You can blind fire or lean out and aim accurately, and your damage gauge soon tells you when to get back in cover and hunker down.
Along with the Story Mode, Gears of War also has a multiplayer mode, which can be played over system link or course over Xbox Live. There are three game modes that ship with the game, and they are all based around team games. The three modes are: Warzone, Execution, and Assassination. Warzone and Execution are the same with the exception of how you kill your enemy. In Execution, when you “down” an enemy, any weapon from a range of a couple of feet will finish them off in one shot, but the downed enemy can revive themselves by constantly pressing the ‘A’ button. In Warzone you cannot revive yourself if you are downed, your teammate must do it for you in the same way you revive your team mates in the Story Mode. Finishing off an enemy also takes a varying amount of shots depending on the weapon used. Finally there is Assassination, which puts one team member from each side as the leader, and the other teammates most protect him or her, whilst trying to kill the leader from the other side. If a player kills the leader, they will become the leader of their side on the next round.
Ten multiplayer maps are included with the game (with more promised via Xbox Live Marketplace), and there really isn’t a bad one in there. They are all cleverly designed with many areas within each one, which have been heavily tuned for crazy cover-based gun battles. You can see lots of design and refinement would have gone into each and every one to get the most out of the cover mechanics. They are all themed differently, mostly based around environments you come across in the story mode. Wrecked city streets, fuel depots with chopper pads, even Marcus’ father’s mansion is included in one of the maps, and makes for some incredibly intense battles. Destructible objects can make cover not always guaranteed, So if you hide behind a sofa or wooden cupboard, don’t expect to live through an enemy firing off a Lancer clip at it the object, it will get destroyed and you cut up in the process.
As most multiplayer first person shooters these days have lots of different game modes such as capture the flag, it’s unusual to see modes like that not being included in Gears of War. Personally I think the four on four-team games work well with the game, and also fit in nicely with the style of the story mode of the game. I wouldn’t say no to new game modes, but I love Warzone so much that I really don’t miss other options.
Graphically Gears is never short of impressive to look at, with a smooth and steady frame rate even with all kinds of mayhem going on around you. Visually the entire cityscape has slightly washed-out look that suggests that little of the 360’s colour palette is being used, but it mirrors the smoky, dusty appearance that many real-life war torn cities have so well that you’re unlikely to miss a bit of colour. The game uses Unreal Engine 3 technology which allows for high-definition designs, and you’ll notice that huge buildings, massive creatures and the smallest details are given equal attention.
Gears is a hugely important title for Epic Games and the 360 itself, and a strong advertising campaign coupled to its undoubted quality means it’ll surely sell extremely well and build up a strong fanbase in the same way that Halo did. The only flaws in its heavily armoured skin are a mild feeling of repetition from time to time, and a solitary and rather tacked-on driving level that was both unnecessary and well below the quality of the rest of the game’s acts. You almost feel like some games have driving sections in just because vehicles were such an integral part of Halo – which remains the benchmark for this type of game. When you analyse Gears closely it doesn’t have a great many original ideas of its own, but the overall quality of design means that everything from the use of a cover mode to darkness as a game element or even just the inclusion of co-op play have seldom, if ever, been done better. Go buy it, it’s top gear.
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