Months prior to release, many were dubbing Gears of War as Halo for the Xbox 360, the killer app for the holiday season. Yes, Cliff Bleszinski’s labor of love had reached an unprecedented level of hype. From specials on MTV to Cliffy himself kicking off Microsoft’s E3 press conference with a demo of the game, there was no avoiding Gears of War and its inevitable release a.k.a. Emergence Day.

So how can destruction be so beautiful? That’s what you’ll be asking as you play through Epic’s insanely over-hyped third-person shooter. But as you take on the role of Marcus Fenix, a former soldier who escapes from prison, and battle your way through planet Sera and the hordes of locust that have inhabited it, you’ll soon realize that the game achieves the near impossible: it lives up to the hype.

The game begins with fellow-solider Dom busting Fenix out of prison, followed with a short tutorial. Fenix and Dom are members of Delta Squad and must find Alpha Squad because they have something necessary for winning the war against the locust. Yes, the story’s about as shallow as a Hollywood action flick: There are good guys; there are bad guys; they fight! However, every other aspect of the game is so beautiful – especially graphically – that you’ll soon forget about the story’s shortcomings.

Throughout the campaign, your mission remains simple: kill and hide. Attempting to just run through the game with guns blazing without taking cover will result in a quick death. Much of the game requires the player to take cover behind destroyed cars, concrete walls, fountains, etc. A blood-red skull begins to appear on the center of the screen as you take damage. Once the skull is fully formed, you’re dead – the harder the difficulty setting you choose, the quicker this happens. The difficulty levels include casual, hardcore and insane.

The game’s campaign is spread out over five different acts, and there is an achievement for beating each one on each of the three difficulties. And fortunately, if you beat an act on hardcore, you also get the casual achievement, and if you beat an act on insane, you’ll get the hardcore and/or casual achievement if it hasn’t already been obtained. Other single-player achievements include finding a certain amount of tags from fallen soldiers and reloading your weapon accurately. Yes, there’s a meter (think golf games) that’s used to indicate when you should press the reload button, which in-turn determines how fast your weapon is reloaded.

In many ways, weapons define a shooter, and Gears of War arguably has most horrific weapon to date in the Lancer Assault Rifle. At first, it seems like nothing more than your typical automatic weapon with average accuracy, but after closer inspection, you’ll notice it also has a chainsaw – yes, a chainsaw. This can be used as a melee weapon to cut your opponents completely in half. However, getting close enough to a locust to use it will take some skill, which ultimately makes the gruesomeness of it all the more satisfying.

The controls in Gears are fairly typical of a shooter with a few twists thrown in to innovate (and complicate). The right trigger shoots, left trigger aims, the B button is a melee attack – standard stuff, right? I also thought the use of the right bumper to reload was quite convenient and should be standardized in the future. However, here is where things get tricky: The A button does way too damn much. According to the manual, A is used to evade, get into / out of cover, mantle (climb), cover slip, make swat turn – and you press and hold it to run. As you can imagine, the multi-functioning of the A button can be problematic. For instance, sometimes when you want to run, you’ll be sucked up next to a wall and vica versa. This will be a bigger problem for some than others, depending on how skilled you are at manipulating the game’s controls.

Aside from a minor complaint, the game’s controls just feel right. It’s hard to explain the feeling of a shooter when it gets the controls right, but you know it when you play it, and Gears gets it right. It’s like when you played Halo for the first time: the timing of everything is right; the movement of your character is spot-on. It’s obvious after playing for only a few moments that a lot of time went into making the game’s controls as seamless with the action as possible.

Gears features probably the best two-player co-op experience of all time. Co-op can be played via split screen, system link and, of course, over Xbox Live. When playing co-op over Xbox Live with a friend, I couldn’t help but think this is the new modern-day Contra. As much fun as it is taking on the locust with a CPU-controlled partner, once you play co-op with another human, it becomes evident that Epic designed the game to be a co-op experience. There’s nothing quite like working together only to emerge from a huge firefight or boss battle victorious.

Of course, in addition to co-op Gears features multiplayer versus action in two different flavors: team deathmatch and last-man-standing. The meat and potatoes of the multiplayer is a mode called Warzone, which is a straight-up four-on-four deatmatch. Unfortunately, eight players is the limit and compared to other shooters like Halo 2 and Call of Duty 3, this is weak. That’s not to say the game’s multiplayer isn’t satisfying; it just seems like it could have been so much more.

Gears is a major graphical achievement and nowhere is this more evident than in the rain and the blood effects. Gears simply features the best blood effects as well as the best rain of any game to date. It simply has to be seen to be believed. As not only the most beautiful Xbox 360 game to date, but just the most beautiful game ever, I don’t know how the amazing aesthetics of this game could possibly be conveyed to someone, other than by letting them play it. Everything from the gorgeous, destruction-laden environments to the thick, macho character models help makes this an ultra-realistic, immersive visual experience. Everything practically glows in a way that makes the whole experience surreal. The title and menu screens were also very well done and are a welcome addition to the overall presentation.

Gears of War Xbox 360 Screenshots

The sound in Gears is on par with the graphics – it’s cinematic. The music is probably better than most of what you hear in Hollywood blockbusters. The dialogue is a bit campy, but that’s to be expected in this genre I suppose, besides the soldiers aren’t rocket scientists. The weapons sound authentic, or how you would imagine they’d sound – nothing about them sounds generic, which is often the case in many shooters. The loud effect you hear once you’ve killed all the locust in an area will be a sound everyone grows to love; basically, because it means you survived. The best sound effect in the game, though, is the short interlude that plays every time you pick up a fallen soldier’s tag – it’s moving!

It will take most players somewhere between 7 to 10 hours to play through the games 30 chapters spread out over 5 acts, which is relatively short, but its such illicit fun that you’ll probably want to play back through with a friend and/or on a harder difficulty level. Once you’re done with that, you have the fun, albeit limited, multiplayer portion of the game to tend to. With 10 multiplayer maps to start out with and probably more from Epic on the way, considering they have a long history of supporting their games, I have a feeling people will be playing Gears for quite while, much like they have Halo 2.

Overall Score: 9.4/10 [not an average]

Gears has done for the third-person shooter genre what Halo did for the first person shooter genre, which is basically redefine it in every way by raising the bar of how console games look and play. Though the game isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it does get close. Tweak the controls a bit and make the multiplayer more in-depth, and the game would be a 10.

• Gears of War Screenshots
• Gears of War Cheats and Secrets
• Gears of War COG Tags Locations
• Official Gears of War Web Site

Review by Michael Ford

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