Gears of War Review
Score 5/5
Gears of War has been hyped for ages, ever since its debut at E3 2005 where it stole the spotlight from its peers. In every appearance since, it’s managed to impress in small doses and incrementally build up steam. That’s a lot of lead up, a lot of time to build expectations to an unmanageable and unrealistic level. Somehow, however, Gears of War manages to live up to expectations. With a combination of solid gameplay, a stunning and gritty presentation, and online co-op and adversarial multiplayer, Gears of War emerges as Xbox 360’s first killer app.
Let’s get something straight right away: the gameplay in Gears of War is by no means revolutionary. It’s a third person action shooter that makes robust use of a dynamic cover system as its gameplay ‘hook’, so to speak. In fact, the cover system may not even be particularly innovative either. A few games previously released on the 360 just within the last 12 months have introduced cover dynamics well ahead of Gears. So, there’s nothing new here. Regardless, Gears of War manages to nail the cover dynamic and make it both adequately sophisticated and compelling.
The fact of the matter is that you need to stick to cover: if you spend an unreasonable amount of time in the open, you’ll end up dead. Indeed, that’s what makes the cover system a completely necessary aspect of gameplay. This provides a palpable sense of tension throughout the game. Mind you, on the lowest difficulty setting you can take a bit of a beating, but up the difficulty to either the hardcore or insane difficulty and death comes much more quickly.
There’s also a welcome amount of variety. You can hurdle over obstacles, dive out of cover, swat turn across open space from one cover point to the next, and swing around cover points running crouched to the next, for example. You’re also able to blind fire and peek out of cover for more accurate reticule assisted fire. At some point you’re going to need to employ all of these skills; as the enemies become more aggressive, as they outsmart and outflank you, you’ll be madly repositioning in and out of cover points to save yourself and better leverage an offense.
The antagonist Locust are typically vicious and frequently employ clever tactics to gain the upper hand. You’ll often see them move as you would, in and out of cover in an effort to preserve themselves, and flank for the kill. But they’re not always about preservation, and will charge your position. The Locust also have the tactical upper hand because of their ability to appear anywhere from “emergence holes” that tear open from the ground below. Emergence holes will eventually close up on their own, but until then they’ll continual spawn Locust unless you close it yourself by tossing in a grenade.
Different types of Locust are slowly introduced as the game progresses, offering up some behavioral variety. Your dime-a-dozen Drones are complemented by much larger Boomers who brazenly stand out in the open and wield devastating rocket launchers. The female of the species, Berserkers, are huge, blind, charge you tracking by sound and smell, and cannot be killed with conventional weaponry. There’s more, but I’d rather not ruin the surprise. Suffice to say that the pacing of new Locust and thus challenges is expertly executed. As a result, the game keeps you engaged.
You have your standard bevy of weapons at your disposal: pistols, automatic rifles, shotguns, grenades, etc. While each is effective in the expected manner, they’re mostly inconsequential unless you’re playing at the highest difficulty setting. Unique weapons to the Gears’ universe are the Hammer of Dawn and Torque Bow, a satellite guided beam from the heavens and an explosive projectile bow, respectively.
Otherwise, the star of the show is the Lancer, an automatic rifle. Mundane at first glance, but equipped with a chainsaw bayonet. By revving up the chainsaw and walking into a Locust drone, you’ll drive the chainsaw into its chest while it violently thrashes and reams of blood splatter in every direction including all over the screen. This is unbelievably satisfying and massively gory.
There are flaws, of course. You’ll computer controlled teammates are issued squad based commands, but whatever use they were originally intended to have must have been lost somewhere during development - using them doesn’t seem to make a lick of a difference. Also, while these guys are typically great at creating atmosphere and contributing to battle, they’ll occasionally rush head first into certain death. Likewise, the Locust might be clever, but they’re prone to incredible stupidity from time to time: every once in a while a Locust drone will ‘take cover’ on the wrong side of an object leaving them completely vulnerable to a pummeling. And lastly, the controls aren’t quite where they should be: during tense moments you’ll likely fumble with the cover system. What gameplay annoyances do exist are completely smothered by the phenomenal presentation.
This game is flat out incredible looking. Sure, you could nitpick: some textures don’t look so hot, the shadowing on your character doesn’t look quite right, the friendly characters outside of your teammates are noticeably less detailed, slowdown does occur from time to time, etcetera. But Gears is an immediately noticeable visual leap beyond any other game that has come before it.
The architecture of Sera is grandly Romanesque, but everything is in a state of sever dilapidation from years of war. The overall effect is both breathtaking and sorrowful. Draw distances are phenomenal, lighting is second to none, and character detail is downright spectacular; close-ups of your characters faces reveal craggy mugs that have been through more than their fare share of beatings. You’ll likely spend half the game just gawking at the graphics, especially during Acts three and five in particular. It’s during those Acts that the game steers towards the fantastical, taking you out of the cities and below ground and hurtling along on a train respectively.
The sound design and music score in the game are equally incredible. The entire soundtrack is fully orchestrated, the score ranging from subtle and beautiful to powerful and aggressive. The music is also cleverly and dynamically woven into the adventure. There were a handful of moments I was completely taken out of the game from being struck by just how great the music was.
Voice acting was perfectly cast as well. You’ll play alongside three other teammates, each with their own distinct personality and clever dialogue to boot. A notable stand out is Gus voiced by Lester “Rasta” Speight, who brings along tremendous affable personality. The interaction between characters is raw and biting and sucks you further into the experience.
On top of it all, Gears offers full campaign online co-op play and multiplayer. Portions of the single player campaign were specifically designed with interesting co-op scenarios in mind; you’ll frequently split up from your teammates, playing out supporting roles on separate branching paths. The ability to play alongside a buddy and strategize dynamically through real time chat is definitely worth at least another play through of the campaign.
Online multiplayer includes, at this point, simple variations on team deathmatch. Despite these limited options, the multiplayer is surprisingly great fun. There’s enough new in Gears that makes multiplayer feel fresh and original as well. In any of the modes, if you get ‘killed’ you’re actually immobilized until either a teammates revives you or you’re shot further or executed. This simple mechanic adds some depth and tension: Should your risk your own neck to either save your teammate or rush in on a downed opponent to finish them off? The visceral thrill of the chainsaw kill is carried over here, along with the ability to “curb stomp” a downed opponent. Both of these execution style kills are the third-person shooter equivalent of a Mortal Kombat-style fatality, and are phenomenally satisfying.
The maximum amount of players is 4 on 4; while low, the player count makes for a much more intimate experience. The maps themselves are correspondingly small yet full of complexity offering plenty of opportunity to strategize and put the cover system to good use. Remarkably, the 10 multiplayer maps are just as beautiful and in some cases actually better looking than the single player campaign.
Gears of War, as you might have gathered, is raw, violent, and gory. Other touches such as clever shaky documentary style camera tricks, context sensitive cinematic moments, rivulets of blood ejecting from characters as their shot, and so on, all contribute to this dark motif. It’s a vision of great consistency and coherency. That’s a good thing too, since the narrative is as barebones as it gets. You, as Marcus Fenix, are a typical bad-ass military type caught up in a mission to deploy a weapon of mass destruction that will completely destroy the Locust, a race of underdwellers that have arisen from underground to reclaim their planet. That’s really it.
The sum of Gears is one of excellent craftsmanship in every way imaginable. It’s the marriage of gameplay and presentation where it excels in creating both a fascinating setting and fantastic combat experience. For a game that once had its gameplay summed up as simply “stop and pop”, Gears is remarkably deeper than most would have expected.
peachey @ November 7, 2006