Gears of War is a game that whose hype and pre-orders lived up to that of Halo 2. I personally believe that Gears would have sold tons of copies even if it had sucked, just because of the hype and pre-orders. But we don’t have to worry about that, because it definitely lives up to the hype and is easily the best shooter and one of the best overall games for the Xbox 360. But is it the 360’s killer app? I’m not sure, but it is definitely one heck of a game!
Now let’s get the boring technical stuff out of the way first. The first thing you notice when you fire up any game are the graphics. Gears of War’s graphics are amazing. Everything in the game looks beautiful. All of the environments are greatly detailed and really pull you into the war-torn destruction that has befallen the once-beautiful planet of Sera. All of the character models are wonderfully detailed too. The game pays great attention to detail. For example, if you kill a Locust Boomer, you can still walk up to his corpse and blow chunks out of it with your shotgun. The sound and music are equally stunning. The music is wonderfully composed, but you won’t really worry about the music. The sounds of battle are great. The constant rattle of machine gun fire, the sound of your clip clicking when it starts to run dry, and the scream of a locust as you gun it down. The voice acting is also great. Your teammates will yell out Locust positions, the Locust scream and yell disgustingly, and your characters constantly curse every time they miss a reload and their gun jams.
Now let’s move on to a more interesting subject. Weapons. Epic Games has come up with some great, and realistic, ways to kill a Locust. Most are pretty brutal. Sure, you can just gun them down, but where’s the fun in that? If you shoot them enough without killing them, they’ll go down to one knee. You can then run up, hit X, and smash their head with your boot. If you have a sniper rifle and you score a headshot, the enemy’s head will explode in an awesome shower of blood and gore. If you hit an enemy with a point-blank shotgun blast, they will blow apart into huge chunks. Shoot them with the Torque Bow and they will just completely explode. Arguably the coolest however, is the chainsaw bayonet attached to the end of your Lancer assault rifle. You rev it up, and run up to a guy, you’ll stab it into his chest. It’s great! The enemy just starts shaking, the camera zooms in, and blood splatters across the screen as your enemy falls down in gory chunks. Woohoo! By the way, this game has some awesome blood. It’s really thick and ropey. It looks really cool!
A bit about the story: it’s hard to follow, but basically, on Emergence Day the Locust Hoard came from underground and basically ravaged the planet of Sera. It’s fourteen years later and you are Marcus Fenix, a member of the elite Gears unit. Your buddy Dom breaks you out of jail, and you basically have to go around shooting up every single Locust you can find. Fine by me!
But forget the story, what you really care about is the gameplay. Good news: it’s great! It uses a unique and highly innovative stop-and-pop style, similar to kill.switch on the original Xbox. It’s also incredibly simple. Pretty much all you use is the A button. I like t call it your all-purpose-don’t-get-shot-button. You hold A to dash. Tap A to roll. Tap A to enter cover. Tap A to dive out of cover. Tap A to quickly pivot out of cover. And my favorite, tap A to SWAT turn between cover. It’s incredibly fluid, simple, and works wonderfully. While in cover, you hold L to pop up a shoot your enemies. You can also hit R while in cover to blind fire over the top of your cover (ok, so it technically isn’t blind-firing because it’s a third-person game, but you get the idea.) There are some instances when the A-button doing everything idea can be a little annoying, however. For example, you could be fighting guys and turn around to find a guy’s machine gun in your face. You hit A to dive backwards, but instead you just stick to some cover and get shot up. Thankfully, these moments are few and far in-between, but they do get quite annoying during the final boss battle where it got me killed many times.
Gears of War also has a good variety of enemies. There are basically five common enemies. You have your basic grunt that can take a moderate amount of damage and are pretty dangerous in groups. Then you have Retched, little creatures who swarm you and carry no weaponry. However, they are almost no threat given that you can kill them with a simple melee hit. Next up are Krill, creatures of the night. They can’t be killed under normal circumstances, except for one mission. You are only safe from the Krill while you are in the light. Then there are Throne Guards, which are basically beefed-up grunts. They carry bigger weapons, take more damage, and are far more dangerous than your average grunt. Last is the Boomer. They’re huge and they carry rocket launchers. They are impervious to chainsaws, and on higher difficulties, it can take up to an entire clip of powered-up shotgun shells to bring one down. Yeah, this game is rough.
Gears also has some incredible pacing. The game gradually gets harder as you go, but never gets so hard that it’s overly frustrating. And on top of that, the game never stops moving every time you finish off a wave of enemies, you may have thirty seconds before more enemies pop out, tops. The game has three difficulties that are all uniquely named. You have Casual, which is described as “you play the occasional shooter” and Hardcore which is “you know how to make a headshot.” Beat the game on one of these and you unlock Insane, which is borderline impossible. God, I can’t tell you how many times I died trying to kill the final boss on this difficulty.
When you finally finish Gears of War’s single-player, just jump onto Xbox Live and play some matches with your buddies. There are four game types. Warzone, which is basic deathmatch and Assassination, where you have to kill a specified player on the opposing team to win. There’s also Execution, where you only get points for point-blank kills, headshots, chainsaw kills, and curb stomps. Last is Annex, a new game mode. It’s basically Territories, Gears-style. Gears also supports downloadable content over Xbox Live Marketplace. Epic Games has released two great map packs each selling for 500 Microsoft Points each. Gears’ multiplayer is the main reason the Gears disc will be in your Xbox 360’s disc tray for long, long to come.
Overall, Gears just has the makings of an insanely great
game. Back to my previous question now. Is Gears of War the Xbox 360’s killer
app? I believe only time will tell us the answer to this question, but one thing is for sure: Gears will forever remain one of the best games to ever be released on the Xbox 360 and one of the best, innovative, and long-lasting games of this console generation.