System: X360
Dev: Epic Games
Pub: Microsoft
Released: Nov 2006
Players: 1 - 8
Review by Patrick

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Review Rating Legend
1.0 - 1.9 = Avoid
2.0 - 2.4 = Poor
2.5 - 2.9 = Average
3.0 - 3.4 = Fair
3.5 - 3.9 = Good
4.0 - 4.4 = Great
4.5 - 4.9 = Must Buy
5.0 = The Best

Without going too much into details, the campaign mode tells the slightly predictable tale of the Delta Squad as it struggles over a three-day stretch against the Locust Horde that has decimated the planet and much of the human population. Pacing throughout is pretty solid, especially when it comes to the active combat. Whenever you think that simple cover-fire-change positions-repeat may start to get dull, Gears throws a little surprise at you to keep you on your toes. Just when you think you have slaughtered enough dudes in a factory full of shrieking howlers, the game throws you into a mining cart to continue underground. Enemies fire at you from every possible direction as separated from the rest of your squad, ride along in an automated cart system. Another cool diversion early in the game is in Chapter 2 when Marcus and Dom search for a vehicle after sun set and the creatures known as kryll come out. Anything that sets foot in the darkness for more than a second is instantly shredded by these bat-like creatures, so you spend the entire time searching for propane tanks that you can use to create light sources to advance. Throwing a little hitch in the basic formula definitely helps keep things fresh throughout the length of the campaign and serves for many of the games coolest moments.

Especially if you invite a friend along to play as Dom and back you up along the way. Gears of War has the best cooperative multiplayer this side of Doom 3 on consoles. When playing as Dom, players can support Fenix far better than the computer can, especially since the AI that controls him to begin with is pretty weak. Instead of worrying about a liability on higher difficulties when playing with the computer, a flesh and blood player can avoid all of the poor decisions the comp usually would make. We experienced a slight touch of lag during coop play with others online, but these situations seemed to be random hiccups in the network instead of any particular issue with the game or where we were at the time.

But why fight against the computer when it’s entirely too much fun to blast your friends over Xbox Live? In the little prologue that Cliffy B, the brainchild behind Epic and the director of Gears of War, wrote to gamers in the instruction booklet, he writes that he became inspired to create this game while playing paintball and the multiplayer definitely shows. To sum it all up, the online multiplayer is like a hardcore adrenaline rushed paintball game to the death, where instead of leaving the field when you are hit by a paintball you are carried off the field in a body bag, your head laying three feet away from the rest of your body. Never in any other game have I gotten so into a match and had my world jolted by a sniper rifle blast to the cranium. That level of immersion that the single player achieves is carried over to Live as you and your team of three try to hunt down the enemy.

When we say that the game is very much structured like a paintball match, we are being quite literal. Every level is designed symmetrically with both sides having similar barricades to shield them as they advance towards the middle of the field. A power weapon, usually a grenade launcher, the Hammer of Dawn, or a sniper rifle, is placed in the middle of the stage to create a natural choke point. More often than not, players will find themselves firing at an enemy to keep them from getting to the sniper rifle as they attempt to grab it themselves. The only exception to this rule is the stage called Ascension, which puts one team on top of a hill going down and the other team going up. The stage balances the one team’s advantage of height by providing sniper rifles and frag grenades to the other squad. To make things as fair as possible, teams switch side with every round that goes passes.

As outrageously fun as the multiplayer is, there’s just a little bit lacking in terms of variety. The three modes that are here already (Warzone, Assassination, and Execution) are all great, but they are only variations of the same basic formula. Run to the weapon placement on the stage, hunt down your enemy, watch the flank, curb stomp the last poor sucker you run across. Where is Capture the Flag? The ultimate team game in online multiplayer is nowhere to be seen. I can understand that they went the Counterstrike route by only allowing one life per round and putting a premium on survival, but variety is the spice of life and this structure is pretty rigid. Having said that, Gears, like Counterstrike before it, is outrageously fun and instantly addictive. It’s only a matter of time before we see Gears of War tournaments on professional gaming circuits alongside Halo 2 and the aforementioned CS.

Is Gears of War a perfect shooter? No, there are more than a couple flaws that blemish an otherwise perfect package, like the quirky controls, the iffy ally AI, and the lack of variety in multiplayer. But Gears trumps all previous console games, including the fabled Halo franchise, for its production values and addictive multiplayer. This title will have a greater impact on 360 owners than Halo did on the original Xbox. If you are reading this and haven’t picked up your copy, then slap yourself silly and run to the nearest electronics store as fast as you can.

Features:

If the name Unreal Warfare doesn't sound familiar, don't sweat it. That's what Epic's Gears of War started its development life as. We're assuming that the name change might be due to the Unreal moniker saturating the gaming market lately.

According to designer extraordinaire at Epic, Cliffy B., Gears of War was never intended to be part of the Unreal universe. It started out as a tech demo and then was completely scrapped and started again when the Unreal 3 engine tools became available.

The scope of Gears of War is much deeper than your average Unreal game. While intended to be a FPS, the emphasis would be on the single player experience rather than multiplayer; which is a switch for the developers who enjoy releasing upgrades to the action packed Tournament series.

Forget Aliens and sci fi for the moment and allow Gears of War to infiltrate our human history, kind of. As Cliffy B. tells it: "Gears takes place on a planet called Sere. Sera's not at all unlike Earth. It's a beautiful planet, and it's a planet that was where humanity was in a Renaissance. The great masters were building novel architecture and everything was going along swimmingly until this amazing energy source called "Emulsion" was found. You'd think that would be a great thing, but what happened with Emulsion was, it set off a series of wars, where city-states began clashing over this because it was such a great energy source. These wars went back and forth for twenty years. They were called the Pendulum Wars; humanity was essentially just whooping its own ass. Well, all of a sudden, a third army came into the fray, the Locust Horde. Humanity banded together as the Coalition of Ordered Governments, the COG."

Yeah that's all fine and well, but where is the Sniper Rifle Cliffy? At E3 Mr. B. (short for Bleszinski) handed out hardcover books chockfilled with concept art, designs and expanded on the storyline of the game, which he promises will be engrossing. Unfortunately for the humans, the Locust Horde proves to be extremely powerful and able to overpower whatever the humans throw at it. "Humanity on Sera generally has a very big technology dependence -- they count on robots and vehicles for a lot of their dirty work," says Bleszinski. "Whereas the Locust Horde, coming from the underground of the planet, generally tend to use more organic means, beasts and whatnot."

"At the center of the whole game is this character named Marcus Fenix," Bleszinski continues. "Marcus is what I describe as an intelligent bad-ass. He's the kind of guy who'd kick your ass in a bar fight, but he'd far more want to talk you out of it, before it ever came to blows. He's been in military prison ever since the war with the Locusts started. The day the war started was called the Virgin State; that was the day that the Locusts emerged from the underground of the planet, just bursting forward and causing chaos everywhere. You never know when they're going to hit -- a tremor or two will hit and a digging creature will come from the ground and a whole army will burst forward and start kicking ass."

Showing the extremity of this situation, Marcus is supposed to be in jail. "Marcus was abandoning his post on Virgin State to go help out his father, and for that he wound up being jailed," Bleszinski says. "Now the war with Locusts has been going on for entirely too long, and the Coalition now needs bodies. So what they're doing is they're cutting prison sentences short, and they're grabbing guys out of jail, putting them into the war, and having them fight this nasty conflict."

Thanks for the motivation to press the trigger button Cliffy. We know Epic and those guys have warfare down Add vehicles, ducking for cover, environmental destruction (including what you're currently hiding behind) and melee attacks and by jove, Gears of War is starting to sound pretty good. We watched Mr. B demonstrate the game and while it wasn't close to the perfection I was hoping for, it was still extremely impressive nonetheless.

One of the gameplay areas least talked about was multiplayer. Although it's not like we don't know what to expect. What DID thrill us though was the talk of Co-op play that won't involve you and a friend bumping into each other constantly. The co-op mode in GoW will allow players at set intervals to separate, while one goes one way and one the other. Just so this style doesn't feel like you're both playing different games, the separations will only last 30 seconds at the most, although I don't see why they couldn't stretch that out a little longer. How can I miss you if you don't go away?

So far Gears of War looks to be the FPS to beat on the 360. We'll have more soon.