Gears of War: An Unspoiled Review

There was a lot of hype behind Gears of War months before release, and it was hard to tell if it justified or not. Since Microsoft put a lot of cash behind it, you knew it was going to be a big release. Now that the game has been out for over a month and has sold over 1 million copies in its first two weeks, I’ve had the time to thoroughly play through both the single and multiplayer modes of the game. The good news is that the game lives up to the hype, but with a few hiccups on the multiplayer side.

The campaign mode can either be played with 1 or 2 players locally or with 2 players via online coop mode. You play as the character Marcus Fenix, a disgraced former war hero who is rescued from jail to help with the war against the Locust Horde.

The first thing you’ll notice is the detail put into the environment. The buildings look amazing, replicating what a city might look like in ruins and under attack from an Alien species. The character models are very detailed, down to the emblems and battle scars on the characters’ faces. All of this is possible due to the new Unreal 3 engine from Epic Games.

Gears of War’s storyline is enjoyable with a few plot twists that make you feel like you’re part of an interactive blockbuster action movie. Unfortunately, the game is possibly too short for some experienced gamers who may be expecting more. The controls are done quite well, requiring just over a 30-minute learning curve, depending on difficulty. It’s somewhat non-standard as far traditional games go, since reload is the Right Bumper button, and Left Trigger is the aiming aid for all weapons.

With three difficulty levels, “casual,” “hardcore,” and “insane,” you can customize your experience depending on your experience level, but you must finish the game once on “casual” or “hardcore” before you can attempt it on “insane.” Disappointing, but a good way to keep cocky players from becoming frustrated during tougher battles. Gears of War is nice mix of tactical strategy mixed with straight shooter action. You can’t just go barreling in like you could with Halo. You move from cover to cover, flanking the enemy, to avoid being killed by being shot too much at once, due to a lack of a health bar system, ESPECIALLY on the hardcore or insane difficulty levels.

Without spoiling any of the story from the campaign mode, I’ll move on to the multiplayer portion of the game. Multiplayer is where a lot of gamers will spend the most time. The game play and controls are exactly the same as in the campaign mode, unlike other games where you sometimes have to learn the game controls all over again. The online “versus” mode is limited to eight players (four vs four) in three different game types. These can be played in either ranked or unranked games, depending on if you want to play with friends and/or guests.

The first game type is Warzone, which is a basic run of the mill team deathmatch, that pits the Cog (Humans) and Locust (Aliens) against each other. The second game type is Execution, which is basically the same as Warzone, but with one major difference: When you are shot enough and are not killed, you will be “downed”, and you must then tap the A button to get up before an opponent gets in close enough to perform an execution move. Also, if you are not helped up or executed, you will “bleed out.” The last game type is Assassination, where each team gets a major character from the campaign as their leader. (I’ll stop there so I don’t spoil it for you.) The object of this game is to kill the opposing team’s leader. The player with the highest score on each side for that round will be the leader for the next round. This may invite players to get in a corner and sit it out, but with one major loss: the ability to pick up any special weapons on the map. These weapons are only available once the leader sees them, so teamwork is of the utmost importance.

Online game play is well done, but has a few bugs that have been documented (such as aspect ratio issues with non-widescreen monitors via VGA adapter, and voice chat issues). Thankfully, these problems will be fixed in a future update. With about 8 different maps and a decent selection of weapons, the multiplayer doesn’t get old too fast, especially if you play it tactically with your team. There are a lot of small tips to get the upper hand on your opponents, but I’d leave that to anyone willing to read the manual to find out.

Epic Games has promised FREE downloadable bonus content in the near future to make an already great game even better. Aside from the small bugs, and lack of more multiplayer modes to keep things fresh, the game is executed well enough to be almost as great as Halo/Halo 2. Gears of War will get even better as new content is released. Taking into account that most games released today have some minor bugs, I’ll give Gears of War a 9.5 out of 10, falling short of a perfect score only due to lack of customizability and game play modes.

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