Reviews » Gears of War [Xbox 360]
Reviewed by Apex
Every so often, a game comes along that totally redefines a genre. Gears has taken everything a third person tactical shooting game can ever hope to be and made simply the best shooter out there. The hype machine started rolling months before release, doubts started creeping into peoples’ minds and the one question everyone wants to know is, “Does it live up to the hype?” The answer is a definitive yes.
Gamers and non-gamers alike only have to take a single look at a screenshot to tell you this game is possibly the best looking game to date on any system. In fact, most people would probably accuse it of being pre-rendered. The Unreal 3 engine is shown at its finest with Gears, and the Xbox 360 throws around its high poly models, detailed textures and particle systems with ease. You’ll be hard pressed to find a single framerate drop throughout all of your experience with the game, single, multi and co-op inclusive. Gears is one of the very few games out there that look so good you literally want to stop in the middle of playing it and admire what Epic has done with this title visually. There are points in the game that stop you dead in your tracks; looking across expanses of destroyed city skyline, being surrounded by an immense cavern with a hundred plus foot tall structure in the center, and gazing over the railing of a dead academy’s seaside barricades are moments that hammer down just how much time was spent on the environment.
Great level design is complimented by the almost total lack of load times, as those are as rare as framerate drops. The game’s cover system makes fairly open areas the norm, and makes otherwise linear levels seem much less so. To top it all off, the game’s awesome visuals are present in all game modes, a problem that has plagued quite a few titles. Epic makes it clear that they would have none of this watering down visuals stuff for multiplayer…it’s all there.
Gears of War stands out from a gameplay standpoint, that much is certain. Despite being Epic’s first venture into the third person shooter realm, they’ve brought so many innovations to the genre it’s dizzying. Simple visual improvements like the minimalist HUD and tooltips to clue you in to what actions you can perform at the time have streamlined all of the junk on the screen that most shooters have. As far as game modes go, the multiplayer modes are fairly standard but again, very refined. The exception being Execution, which plays on the gruesome enjoyment we all get from crushing an enemy’s face against the ground. Cooperative play isn’t just a game mode, either: you can invite a buddy while playing single player and it’ll drop him in as Dominic.
The core shooter mechanics borrow ideas from games like Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, but has milled those ideas into a cover and shooting system of unparalleled quality. Moving from cover to cover, hurdling obstacles, and evading fire by diving is all completely fluid and natural, and takes little conscious effort to accomplish so you can concentrate on actually hitting your target. Blind firing isn’t a new idea, but previous attempts fell far short of the standard Gears has set for it; blind fire isn’t just a neat novelty anymore, it’s a very important aspect of keeping your head on your shoulders. In short, the gameplay has taken complex cover-hopping tactical gameplay and blended it perfectly with smooth controls and a streamlined interface to make it all seem much less complicated. The truth is, it still is. The next time you’re barking orders at team mates in multiplayer, going on about flanking one direction or another and providing covering fire, think about it for a second.
How does the gameplay work though? A vague overview of cover and blind fire certainly doesn’t suffice. For starters, the A button does almost everything, in conjunction with the left stick. If you want to jump into cover, hop a wall, switch sides of a doorway, slip cover to advance or dive roll, you press A. Holding down A initiates the “roadie run” mode, in which bumping into cover will automatically make you hide behind it. The exceptions to the general rule with the A button are ducking and standing in tall cover, which is done by clicking the left stick down, and breaking cover without slipping or hurdling it, which only involves backing off with the stick. Those tooltips I mentioned come in very handy when it comes to determining the actions you can take, and come with idiot-proof pictures of what hitting A at the time will do.
Alright, so that’s all one button, what about the other half dozen or so on the controller? In typical shooter fashion, the triggers are used to aim and fire, left and right triggers respectively. If you’re aiming with a sniper rifle or a pistol, you can zoom by holding the left trigger and clicking the right stick down. The right bumper reloads, and a second tap gives the active reload a try. The X button picks up ammo and weapons, while Y is the “look at interesting stuff and/or locate your co-op partner” button. The B button is your melee attack button, which will smash or whip with every weapon aside from the chainsaw-equipped Lancer rifle, in which case you hold B to rev it up so it can chew up an enemy that you get close enough to. The only button on the controller that is somewhat wasted is the left bumper, which brings up the status of your squad mates in both single and multiplayer, and allows you to give vague and generally useless orders to AI grunts. The control setup is one of the shining examples of how Gears breaks away from other third person shooters.
Probably the single biggest advancement that Gears brings to gaming is the way game modes are handled. Single player campaign, co-op and multiplayer are all the exact same gameplay, on the same engine, with the same graphics. More companies should take the hint here: if your single player game looks and plays fantastic, so should the multiplayer. All of the gameplay described above is present in all game modes on and offline. Gears does this flawlessly, allowing a second player to hop into a single campaign game at any time via Xbox Live or split-screen, while tracking the checkpoints and achievements of both players, and automatically adjusting ammo pickup amounts and enemy AI to compensate. The actual multiplayer is essentially the single game with a scoring system and some rules overlaid on top of it, confined to individual maps instead of a storyline.
The three multiplayer game modes are exactly what you would expect from a game with a chainsaw in it: classic team deathmatch, a mode where you have to kill the other team’s captain to win, and a mode where the only way to kill an enemy is with the most gruesome methods possible. You’ll notice all of the modes are team based, which showcases the game’s focus on team play and coordination. Although the former two elements are usually hard to come by on Xbox Live for most games, that isn’t the case in Gears; they are absolutely essential to victory. Another notable point is the game’s limit of 8 players, which might seem small, but works perfectly in practice. The 8 player limit is matched up with the kinds of firefights you’ll encounter in single player and co-op.
Gears of War - 360
Presentation
The debut of the Unreal 3 engine doesn't disappoint.
Gameplay
The next time you play another third person shooter, you'll wonder why you can't blind fire, curb stomp, or stick grenades to people. Chainsaws are now required additions to assault rifles.
Replayability
Co-op for the campaign on three difficulties, two unique game modes for multiplayer along with vanilla deathmatch, and the insanely fun core gameplay keep this one on your mind long after you beat the last boss. Chainsaws never get old.
Value
Even the Collector's Edition is a good buy, and the massive amount of fun you'll get from this game merits the less cool plastic case version at the very least.
Overall
At the risk of sounding redundant, this game is amazing. Purely and simply, Epic has taken everything in the third person shooting genre and many features from games in general, to a new level. Will it make you buy an Xbox 360? Very possibly. Is it one of the top three games of the year? Absolutely. Has it lived up to the hype? Definitely.
