Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

Thinking back to E3, I recall hearing Cliffy B. talk about Gears of War.  It was infectious watching him describe the game, and it was clear to me that he was excited to take the new Unreal 3 engine out for a drive.  The gameplay looked fast, furious, visceral, and gory as Hell.  The use of cover coupled with the Unreal 3 engine looked like it would knock our socks off.  What I didn’t know is that the next day I’d be playing the multiplayer game against the Ubisoft Frag Dolls.  Teamed up with some random press members, we took on the all-girl team and it turns out that adding a chainsaw to a third person shooter makes the game soooooo much better.  Fast forward from May to today and I’ve gotten to experience the game for myself.  Let me cut to the chase – it took some willpower to stop playing Gears of War so I could review Gears of War. 

Gears of War puts you in the boots of Marcus Fenix, a convicted criminal, locked in a concrete cell.  It seems that on Emergence day, you disobeyed orders, and somebody threw you into a deep dark hole and tossed the key for your dereliction of duty.  40 years is a long time, and while you whiled your time, scratching the years away on the walls, the Locust Horde has decimated the major cities of the world.  Your fellow Gears have seen fit to pop the cork on the penitentiary just as the Locust overrun it.  The Horde will not take the planet of Sera without a fight.

The Unreal Engine 3 powers Gears of War.  Looking back a few years I recall footage of the engine and remarking that it couldn’t be real.  At the time, the Source Engine was the hottest thing on the block, but the normal mapping and graphic detail of this new engine looked light years beyond that.  Again, I thought it would be impossible.  Well, with the release of Gears of War we get the first Unreal Engine 3 powered game and it is beautiful. 

Based on the literally hundreds of games that I’ve played this year, many of them on the Xbox 360, I can say that Gears of War is the best looking game on the platform.  The look of the bombed out city never repeats itself, giving you a visual variety that is often overlooked in shooters.  The structures themselves are organic and look like broken versions of their real life counterparts. 

The creatures you encounter are as detailed as the buildings they inhabit.  Marcus, Dom, Cole, Baird, and the rest of the C.O.G. force look fantastic.  The animation of the Roadie Run adds to the frantic feel of the game, with the camera dipping lower and shaking like a CNN field camera in a real warzone.  Similarly, the animations for entering or exiting cover, mantling over objects, diving, cover slipping, and S.W.A.T. turns are obviously motion captured, and they come out beautifully.  You really get the feeling of how cumbersome the armor you are wearing truly is as your warrior exerts himself lumbering over the top of a rock wall.  It is the little details like the pebbles and dirt that rise from your boots that really define Gears of War – there is a level of detail in this tactical shooter normally reserved for a slower paced RPG.  It is awe inspiring, but also comes at a cost.  Occasionally you will see some framerate hits.  This title sets the bar with a visual assault on your senses.

As I sit here and write this review, I’m listening to Megadeth’s song, Gears of War.  Inspired by the game, Dave Mustaine and his crew put together a great metal song with the same name as the game, and while it doesn’t appear in the game itself, it really conveys the heavy hitting feel of the title.  The audio that is in the game is some of the best we’ve heard in a long while.  John Di Maggio (you’d know him as Bender from Futurama) delivers a great performance growling out the lines as Marcus Fenix, and Carlos Ferro (that’d be Golgo 13, if your game experience reaches back that far, and Spawn in the TV series more recently) handles his lines as Dominic Santiago with ease.  As for the very popular Augustus Cole, if he sounds familiar that’d be because it is the same guy who played Terry Tate, Office Linebacker.  That’s right; they hired Lester “Mighty Rasta” Speight to handle the voice work for the ‘Cole Train’.  The lines he spouts in the game will have you literally laughing out loud.  Keep in mind that this game is rated M, so expect language to match.  I’m sure you wouldn’t yell out “Take that, you ruffian!” if you stomped an enemy’s face into oblivion, so don’t expect Marcus to yell it either.

On the other side of the conflict are the Locust.  The grunts you encounter early on sound vicious and roar out their guttural language with bits of English piecemealed in.  They’ll call out for reinforcements, tell their squadmates that they are reloading, or hiss out things like “Mine!” or “More…” when picking up ammunition and the like. 

Ahh, the chainsaw.  We’ve had it in a few games as a melee weapon, but attaching it to the bottom of the game’s primary machinegun is pure genius.  With a visceral melee weapon right at your fingertips, it is hard to resist the most humiliating kill you can deal out in the game.  The sound of flesh, bone, and brain matter pouring off the bottom of the blade like some sort of gore-fountain is fantastic.  I have never hacked up a body (or I haven’t been charged anyway), but I’d suspect it would sound a little like this. 

All of these great sound effects are held firmly in place by a rockin’ soundtrack that keeps the mood tense during the ‘quiet’ moments, and makes your adrenalin pump during firefights. 
The audio is pretty fantastic, but you’ll probably want a few more one-liners when you start getting into multiplayer.  Picking up a weapon, smashing an enemies head, picking up a grenade, failing an active reload – all of these things tend to make the voiceovers repeat.  It is a really minor thing, but there nonetheless. 

The controls for Gears of War appear to be the standard fare for a third person action title, and for the most part they are.  The left and right analog control movement and looking around, with R3 toggling a zoom function if your weapon supports it.  The left trigger allows you to aim, and the right trigger fires your weapon.  The left bumper shows you objectives and your position relative to your team, as well as allowing you to issue basic commands to your team.  The right bumper is used for your active reload functions, which we’ll look at in-depth in the gameplay section below.  The X button uses objects in the environment, and the Y button looks at areas of interest pointed out by your team such as emergence holes and creatures.  The B button allows you to bash with your weapon, or fires up your chainsaw when held.  It is the A button that gets 7x the function of all the other buttons. 

The A button is the key to the cover system.  It allows you to evade by jumping and rolling in the direction you select with the left thumbstick.  It also allows you to get in to and out of cover, mantle over objects, cover slip, perform swat turns, and when held down, you can do a Roadie Run.  This means that the bulk of your actions are triggered by on-screen visual cues and the A button.  This is convenient as it means that you can quickly evade, then Roadie run, slide into cover, and then mantle over it.  It is a lot for one button to handle, and it is very context sensitive, and thus prone to a little bit of confusion, but once you have mastered it, it will be the difference between life and death.

The D-Pad controls your weapon selection in the game.  By hitting the D pad in a particular direction you can select from two rifle-length weapons, a pistol, and grenades.  You can’t have more than this as they are visually displayed on your person, so choose wisely.  Do you hang on to the Hammer of Dawn, or do you trade it out for the close combat Shotgun?  These decisions can make the game much easier, or much harder, so be conscious of this.

No soldier I’ve ever known just steps into combat and dukes it out with their enemy face to face, even using cover.  To that end, you can blind-fire your weapon over the top of almost any obstacle, as well as throw grenades in this same fashion.  It is a bit random and ammo-wasteful, but you would be surprised how effective it is in a close-quarters battle. 

Speaking of close-quarters battle, this is one of the areas that could use a little tuning.  While chainsawing your enemies into giblets is cool, the close quarters movement can be quite awkward.  Your weapon never feels accurate in close proximity, and aiming is all but out of the question.  Also, you tend to walk a little strange with the chainsaw fired up, almost as if you were aroused…oh…I guess that makes sense doesn’t it?  Nevermind.  Still, you look and move funny when you are up close for melee.  It’s a minor nuisance, but it does detract from the otherwise fast and furious gameplay.

The crew at Epic has never disappointed me with one of their games – it is very clear that they know what makes a game enjoyable. They took the incredibly powerful Unreal Engine 3 and coupled it with a new way to use cover to create a new way to handle 3rd person shooters.  The concept for Gears of War is simple – using running, gunning, cover, chainsaws, squad mates, and occasionally vehicles, kill everything that isn’t human.  The enemy is ruthless and determined, so they’ll be doing their best to do exactly the same thing to you.  Since the Locust Horde are a fairly smart bunch (most of the time), you’ll find that this will probably be the hardest game you play all year.

Starting off in your concrete cell, you escape from the jail where you are housed just as the Locust arrives.  You cut your teeth in the confined halls of the penitentiary, but quickly find yourself moving into the open courtyard for a great showdown moment.  Boarding a helicopter at the last second, you are whisked off to a makeshift command post to receive orders on your next mission.  Throughout the game you’ll find yourself venturing through several destroyed cities, a refinery, digging underground, and much more.  In fact, you really won’t see a repeated area to speak of, and that is refreshing in a shooter.  How does this relate to gameplay?  It means you won’t have the strategy all laid out as you’ve been to an area just like this one.  The enemy changes tactics pretty often and displacing over and around debris will have you using different tactics through all three difficulty levels of the game.  There are moments where you’ll fight through an area only to find that the enemy has flanked around you and are firing at you from your originating position. 

As you can see, the AI is fairly smart most of the time.  I say most of the time as sometimes the Locust simply forget what they are doing.  Like a Jack Russell Terrier with attention deficit disorder, they’ll occasionally start off with a Roadie Run towards a wall, then suddenly decide it’d be better to run back where they came from.  They’ll also jump over a wall and run right past you to shoot at your friends.  Compound that with the fact that they’ll occasionally sit behind cover and get flanked and shot to death without so much as returning fire and it can make some areas far more easy than they should be.  Your squad can be equally braindead at times, but these moments are mercifully few and far between, so it doesn’t affect the overall experience too much.

Gears of War uses a health system that is beginning to become the norm for shooters.  While a headshot with something high-powered will render you headless, taking damage anywhere else will result in a red Gears of War logo on your screen filling in from the edge.  As that logo fills in, you are progressively closer to death.  If you are playing co-op, if you die you can be revived by your friend, but otherwise you just stay dead.  Staying out of the line of fire for a few moments will allow you to ‘heal’ back to full health.  Pretty simple. 

When you start Gears of War, you’ll have access to two difficulty levels – Casual and Hardcore.  Like any well-paced game, the action starts off pretty easy and ramps up significantly by the end.  You’ll find that the difficulty of the game ramps up at the same time as the scale of the enemies.  Some enemies are so large that you’ll have to use alternate tactics to take them out, such as satellite weapons, or environmental weaknesses.  By beating the 8 to10 hours of single player, you can unlock the aptly-named Insane difficulty level.  The achievements are set up in a similarly tiered system, so beating the game on Hardcore nets you all of the points for Casual.  You can pick up most of your points for completing the game, but some will require co-op play, or multiplay to round out.  One particular achievement makes a nice segue into a discussion of a new element that Gears of War brings to the table – Active Reload.

Active Reload is the new ammo reload system in Gears of War.  When your clip runs dry, you are presented with a bar under the weapon.  There is a light grey area that you have to hit to get a ‘perfect’ reload. Timing it just right nets you a faster reload and bullets that do additional damage.  If you miss, but still fall into the lighter grey area, you’ll get a successful reload that is fairly quick, but the bullets don’t do any additional damage.  If you totally flub the reload, you’ll jam your weapon and it takes twice as long (or more!) to clear the jam and then reload.  If you skip trying to hit the right bumper at just the right moment, you’ll eventually reload on your own, but you’ll need all the speed you can get when Banshees are swarming the hallway you are in, so learn the Active Reload system early, and use it often.  Pull it off several times in a row and you’ll net an achievement for it. 

The cover mechanic and great pacing makes Gears of War an obvious hit for this holiday season.  The multiplayer aspects of the game only extend that experience and leave you wanting more.   

The single player game for Gears of War clocks in at roughly 9 hours.  To beat it on Insane will cost you a lot more deaths and will probably bump that number to 12 hours for that second run.  Playing through it again with a friend in co-op mode will once again add to that amount respectively.  After all that, you still have the multiplayer to talk about.  Gears of War may not be the longest game, but it is packed to the point of bursting with content that will likely have you coming back multiple times.  Very few games can make that claim!

The multiplayer in Gears of War comes in a few flavors – the aforementioned co-op play, as well as modes called Warzone, Assassination, and Execution.  In Warzone, a team of humans is pitted against a team of Locust, aka Team Deathmatch.  In Assassination, both teams have a leader which the other side is charged with killing.  When that leader is killed the round ends, and the person who killed them becomes the new leader for their side.  The highest scoring player on the losing team takes the leader spot for their side.  Execution is very similar to Warzone, except that you can revive yourself if you hit A rapidly when you are taken down.  You respawn until a certain killcount is achieved or time runs out.  All three are pretty straightforward and easy to learn.  Unfortunately that is also the problem – simplicity and brevity. There are very few maps to choose from, and I see few people playing Execution compared to Warzone.  More modes would have been a good thing, and more maps would be even better.  I’m sure the carrot of downloadable content will appear soon enough to solve the map issue, but new modes might have to wait for the inevitable sequel. 

There is one area where Gears of War does not shine – bugs. Four big ones affecting multiplayer are fairly widespread.  The first bug is the sudden inability to change weapons.  Without rhyme or reason, you will be unable to switch from your primary weapon to any other, including grenades.  The second is less impacting, but occasionally you will be unable to chat during a multiplayer game.  The icon will appear, but nobody can hear you.  Both require a restart of the game to fix.  The third bug affects your ability to stay connected to matches.  Suddenly you will just be dropped from the game, and there is no indication why.  The fourth bug I encountered involved being stuck on furniture.  I found that if I chainsawed the furniture placed in the buildings I would occasionally get stuck and would have to restart my game or disconnect from my multiplayer game to be freed from my upholstery cage.  Minor bugs, but they are widespread and repeatable.

Gears of War is obviously Microsoft’s flagship title for the holiday season, and in that regard it does not disappoint. Somehow, this title has managed to meet and exceed the mounds of hype that have been heaped upon it. The voice acting, visuals, and overall level of polish make Gears of War a must-buy for any fan of the genre. If you haven’t purchased this game already, you should seriously ask yourself why, but you should ask as you are in line buying it. Why are you still reading?!

Gaming Trend Score

91

1. Graphics: 98
2. Audio: 95
3. Controls: 90
4. Gameplay: 90
5. Value/Replay: 80
6. OVERALL:91