Let me get something out of the way first so we don’t have to deal with it later; this game is worth the hype, it will far exceed anyone’s expectations by a mile. I was probably the biggest skeptic about the hype that surrounded Epic’s masterpiece that was to become Gears of War. What started as a demo reel to show off the power of the Xbox 360 turned into a full out game with everything a gamer could want included in the box. It does help when the lead designer is a genius named Cliff Blezinki who is responsible for more excellent video game content than most people on this earth. The backing of publisher giant Microsoft never hurt either. From the first interview he gave about Gears of War he mouthed off about this revolutionary gaming style he coined as “stop and pop”. This gameplay along with the graphics, audio experience, and online modes add up to what could easily be a top contender for game of the year.
The meat of any game is the gameplay; Halo would be nothing without it’s great gameplay style. Gears of War took a different direction than the average action game because they mixed bullet-flying action with strategic stop-and-pop to make the perfect game. I never thought it would work as well as it did, but 40 hours and no sleep later and I have to say I’m convinced. The storyline is pretty slim and basic. Your name is Marcus, you are what’s known in the storyline as a Gears (basically an elite soldier unit with badass weapons) and your purpose is to end the war, saving the world at the same time. What starts off as a very intense, involved storyline slowly trickles down into nothing; leaving a lot of story points unanswered. It is quite disappointing because with the amount of time put into the development of the game they should have been able to include one hell of a story. There are two or three gripes I have with Gears of War and this is one of them, they are all miniscule at most though. Luckily you do not have to take on the Locust’s (bad alien bug/humans) by yourself as your team of 3-5 other soldiers will be with you at most times. At some turning points in the game you are with just one other soldier but rarely, if never, are you battling alone. All of the characters in the game are unique and when they go down you actually want to save them, emotion is something that has always been hard to do in interactive media.
The control scheme is like nothing we have seen before but it is simple enough to learn after a few minutes with the game. Time practicing will improve your skills and I can tell you first hand that people who have played the game longer than others are just better. The left analog stick moves Marcus around while the right stick moves the free-hanging third person camera. Using the A button you can quickly move to cover or hop over cover. If you are in cover pressing A will actually swap you between covers, a great tool when you are in a tight situation and your cover is being destroyed by incoming bullets. The Right Trigger shoots and the Left Trigger zooms in. You can throw grenades with another button but the most important button of all is the B button, this button controls your chainsaw. Anyone that hasn’t been living under a rock the past year knows the “wow” factor of Gears of War are the death scenes, many caused by the chainsaw attached to the end of your gun. Melee attacks are cool but you will eventually have to use your gun for shooting. After unloading your clip of bullets you need to reload, this is where it gets interesting. Gone are the days of a one button reload, in Gears even reloading takes some skill. Epic included something called “active reload” which is basically the field goal kicking of a shooting game. Press the RB button once and it starts the reload, press it again at the exact right time and you get a super fast reload along with a bonus of “power bullets” that take off more damage. You don’t have to try an active reload every time though, because if you push the RB button too soon or too late then your gun will jam causing some major problems. You can always be a wuss and just push RB once, doing a normal reload that takes a significantly longer amount of time than a correctly done active reload. This little feature can cause huge swings in both the single player and the multiplayer aspects of the game.
