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The frontrunner for 2006’s Game of the Year. Some games nail the gameplay mechanics, others have an amazing art style, some are incredibly fun to play, and yet others are amazing technical achievements. It’s rare that a game has all of those qualities, but Epic Games’ Gears of Wars does. It’s an incredible looking game with a superb visual style and an unbelievably fun shooter to boot.
In Gears of War, you play as Marcus Fenix, a tough former soldier of the Coalition of Organized Governments (COG). The COG decided that Fenix was a traitor and sent him to jail, but you’re busted free at the beginning of the game by Dom who becomes your main ally in the war against a new group called the Locust that want to take over the Earth. Although the game does give you pieces of the story (told through in-engine cinematics) as you progress through the five acts, it just serves as a way to get you to a new location to pull off some sick gameplay. The highlight of the story is probably the fact that the game sets itself up for a sequel.
The gameplay in Gears is always hectic, chaotic, and enjoyable. You’re joined by at least one other squad member in all of the chapters and sometimes by three others. You can revive your squadmates with the X button. Although they aren’t incredibly helpful, they do take care of some enemies for you or at least distract them. With this squad, you have to take on tons of Locust enemies. The Locust themselves range from beings slightly bigger than humans to massive, gorilla sized monstrosities. Aside from the main troops, there are other smaller enemies that attack you quickly to others that take up the entire screen. The game is pretty good at alerting you if the enemy has a particular weak point, although aiming for headshots is a safe bet.
The game’s primary weapon is a machine gun with a chainsaw attached to it. This will probably be your default weapon most of the time since it’s fast and provides good melee action. It’s awesome to use afar or up close. Aside from this, you’ll find variations of an automatic rifle, shotgun, pistol, rocket launcher, and grenades. The game also has a weapon called the Hammer of Dawn, which you can only use in the daylight, and is required against some of the tougher bosses. The game lets you carry four weapons at a time, two of which are occupied by the pistol and grenades. Gears gives you a bonus for paying attention when you reload. If you hit the reload button, and hit it again when the reload bar hits a certain level, you’ll have a faster reload speed and stronger bullets. If you go for this and time it wrong, though, your weapon will jam and your reload speed will increase.
Part of the reason that the gameplay is so intense is because you’re essentially forced to be behind cover. If you stay out for too long, chances are slim for you to reach the next chapter. The cover mechanics work extremely well. You can easily take cover over almost anything, move from one cover to another, roll out of the way, lean over to take shots or even shoot from behind cover. The last option isn’t the most accurate but a good way to get a few shots in while your health regenerates. Like other modern shooters, Gears of War doesn’t have a health bar per se. Instead taking shots fills up an onscreen icon. If you fill up this icon, you’re toast.
Gears offers both casual and hardcore difficulty settings when you boot up the game, and an insane difficulty mode when you complete the game. As you bump up the difficulty settings, you’ll notice that the AI becomes meaner and more aggressive. You can get by without always being under cover in the casual difficulty setting, but trying this on the other two—though especially insane—will result in a rather quick death. The game has achievements for all three difficulty modes, but some of the most interesting ones can only be unlocked in the hardcore difficulty setting. A particularly cool feature is that if you beat the game on hardcore, you also get the achievement points for casual.
Gears of War supports an excellent cooperative mode. You can play the co-op via split-screen, local network or Xbox Live. The game lets you switch between co-op and singleplayer at will, but you’ll really enjoy the game if you play with another player. As with the singleplayer game, either partner can revive the other (or one of the AI controlled squad members) most of the time. There are a few times when an enemy will outright kill you or other times when you’re separated but by and large, you have a second (and third, fourth, etc) chance when playing with a friend.
The game also supports multiplayer for up to eight players (in two teams of four) via local network or Xbox Live and two players split-screen and 10 maps. The game includes three different multiplayer maps: Warzone (team deathmatch), Assasiniation (one of the team members if the lead and the others have to protect him), and Execution (where players can revive themselves). There are no respawns once you die although you can be revived by a team member. To make sure someone is really dead you can stump their face in once you kill them or keep shooting them. Keeping someone around you to revive you once you die becomes a really important gameplay tactic and works really well. The maps are very well-designed and give you plenty of opportunities to work with team members and even more opportunities to use the chain saw.
Gears of War is easily the best looking game on the Xbox 360. The character models are extremely detailed, animate very well, and have some of the best textures I have ever seen. The same can be said about the environments. You’ll fight in a number of different environments, all of which have amazing architecture and richly detailed textures. Everything in the game looks amazing from the lighting to the particle effects to the blood that splatters when you ram the chainsaw on someone’s throat. Even the running animation looks great. The camera zooms in and your character and this sequence looks better than some of the CG in other games.
The audio is just as impressive. The voice acting in the game is well done, if a bit over the top. Nonetheless you end up believing the tough-guy attitude that these guys portray. The sound effects are amazing. All of the weapons in the game have that extra oomph, and sound great and powerful. The soundtrack is seldom used but sounds epic when it is used. You could easily mistake the game for a blockbuster action movie.
Gears of War is the best game available on the Xbox 360 and the likely winner of 2006’s Game of the Year award. Every Xbox 360 gamer owes it to his or herself to pick this game up. It nails everything from the gameplay to the graphics. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Dec 10, 2006
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