Gears of War

by: The Ryan 2 years, 2 weeks, 3 days, 7 hours, 22 minutes ago

Release Date:

11/07/06

Price:

$60

Company:

Epic Games

Series:

Gears of War

 

I’ve finally defeated the most anticipated Xbox 360 title of 2006. Gears of War was a non stop blood fest from beginning to end. The only time that the action let up is when I was on my way to the next area.

It’s Emergence Day on the planet Sera. The humans are getting underway in a war versus the Locusts. Locusts are creatures that have lived under the planet’s surface in a huge honeycomb of underground tunnels. Now, they want the surface. It’s your job as Marcus Fenix and his squad to save the day. It starts with your buddy Dom breaking you out of prison and giving you your armor and standard machine gun. The first level acts as a tutorial on how to take cover and throw grenades. If you play on anything harder than the easiest difficulty setting from the beginning, you will probably have to restart from the previous checkpoint a few times. But once you get the hang of it, the difficult challenge is satisfyingly fun.

If you’ve ever seen a picture or a video of Gears of War and thought to yourself “Wow, but that’s probably not what it really looks like while your playing,” you are dead wrong. The character models of your squad are amazingly detailed and thick looking. Their skin looks rough when you get a close up view and the smallest of scars and skin imperfections on their faces are very detailed. The armor everyone is wearing is exceptionally thick and heavy looking. The locusts are just as detailed in their design. If you get up close to certain character models you can see all of the wrinkles in their skin and even the look in their eyes.

But most of the game keeps you at quite a distance from your enemy. The name of the game is stop and pop. If you run into the middle of the battlefield in an attempt to clear the area of all your enemies in a matter of seconds you are going to be very disappointed and very dead. Each area has more than sufficient coverage to hide behind.  The first thing you do is run for cover wherever you go. Even if you think that the area your walking into looks pretty safe, you gotta think like there’s someone behind the next bend. All types of enemies come out of what they call “Emergence Holes.” These holes appear on the ground and it is up to you to throw a grenade into them to close them. The quicker you close them the sooner enemies will stop spawning out of them. The holes close on their own eventually but can take quite a while to do so if you don’t take the initiative.

When you’re behind cover you can hold the Left Trigger on the controller to stick your head and weapon out of cover and fire a few rounds of ammo at your opponent while staying relatively save. And these locusts don’t drop after a couple of well placed bullets. Sometimes you’ll see yourself emptying out an entire clip to take certain ones out. But you have all the time in the world due to the forgiving health system. If you take too much damage just duck down behind some cover and your health will quickly regenerate. I personally like the fact that more games are moving to this form of health system, and dropping the use of health packs all together. The last thing I want to do is backtrack a couple of minutes through the level to find health.

The types of weapons that Marcus will find during the game are pretty useless aside from the Chainsaw Bayonet machine gun and the Hammer of Dawn. If you ever do find yourself within arms reach of an enemy, and it will happen relatively often, hold down the B button and watch as Marcus chainsaws through the enemy while buckets of blood splatter on your TV screen. It’s a risky move but very satisfying when you pull it off. Now the Hammer of Dawn is clearly unique. Outside is the only place it can be used and that’s because it uses a laser site to direct a satellite to fire down a stream of energy. This is mainly used to fight the huge enemies and most of the bosses. You have to be careful with this though. The satellite isn’t always in range and sometimes you have only a certain amount of time to use it until the satellite is gone. In those situations you have a timer on the top of the screen to add a little suspense to your goal.

The boss battles are nothing short of impressive. With every boss fight I had a smile plastered on my face. Even when I died during a boss fight, I was glad I got to go at it again. My personal favorite boss was the Berserker, which you fight a few times during the game. You can’t shoot these girls (that’s right, girls) because they’re just too big to be affected by your bullets. You have to solve a “puzzle” to get her where you want to get her so you can use the environment to finish her off. Did I forget to mention that she’s blind? That’s right, she slowly walks around until she hears something and then she runs faster than you’d expect towards that sound smashing through anything in between you and her. The first time I faced her I though I was safe behind a pillar, that was until she clobbered the pillar and took me out with it.

The Xbox Live modes are everything they should be. There are the normal Vs. modes with a “team deathmatch” that’s pretty self explanatory. Kill the other team. Up to 8 players per game are allowed making the total number 4 vs. 4. It pays in Gear of War to play in pairs. If someone is taken out by an enemy, all it takes is getting close to them and pressing the X button to revive them. In order to finish off an opponent that you’ve put down, you must walk up the them and curb stomp their head into the ground. That doesn’t sound like anything you can be revived from. The Chainsaw Bayonet and the Hammer of Dawn are also in play during multiplayer. Those two and a couple other weapons offer instant kills depending on how you use them.

The online co-op is also in Gears. This is how I played the game from start to finish. There was no noticeable lag at all during the entire game. It’s exceptionally easier to play with your buddy online, because the teammate AI isn’t the most impressive. Not that they die a lot in battle, but they don’t do that much killing either. They do however occupy the enemies when you need to go off and do something else. There are many opportunities to flank the enemy and your teammates can help distract them while you do so. That’s pretty satisfying, I do wish that they did more to help but it’s not absolutely necessary.

The achievements in the game range from completing the game on each difficulty level, playing through the game on multiplayer and killing people on versus multiplayer. The latter mode is the hardest to achieve all the points. But if you play through the game on Hardcore mode (medium) your looking at a few hundred points at least. It’s too bad that they didn’t link an achievement on how many times you successfully use the chainsaw though.

Epic Games have really raised the bar for third person shooters. The realism and the detail is phenomenal. As mentioned before, the game can get pretty difficult on any difficulty setting. And I can only guess that the insane difficulty is in fact INSANE. But once you get started it will be hard to put it down. Many late nights were spent saying to myself “ok, just one more checkpoint then I’m going to sleep.” Shooter fans, skip the rental and just go out and buy it. If you know anyone who owns an Xbox 360 and can’t think of a gift idea. Here it is.