Gears of War

Late but great, the definitive review...

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How short is too short? A question that has plagued an insecure mankind throughout our conscious history if ever there was one. It's is also a poser that has recently worked its way into discussions about games. Modern titles are often stuffed full of flashes and bangs yet are typically over before you've really had the chance to settle down and get into the rhythm. People have started to wonder if all the time and money spent on making an impressive spectacle might be better diverted to making the experience last a bit longer. However, amongst all this angst the old maxim 'it's not the size that matters but what you do with it' has consistently rung true and Gears of War does little to overturn that particular convention.

Played on the hardest difficulty setting that is initially available it shouldn't take more than ten hours or so to drill through GoW's campaign. Sure, there's an extra difficulty level unlocked on completion and an impressive package of online options yet it is impossible to get away from the fact that for the majority of 360 gamers GoW will have shot its load in the same time it takes to watch all three extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies. Which, when you consider that GoW will set you back around 40 British pounds, that seems an expensive way to entertain oneself.

Ah, but such rarefied and engrossing entertainment it is. Set in a desolate and apocalyptic future Gears of War plays out against the background of humanity on its last legs. Nearly annihilated after more than a decade of war against the insectoid and merciless Locust, the situation has gotten so bad that Marcus Fenix is sprung from jail to lend his considerable talents to one last effort to rid the world of the scourge of its oppressors. Permanently teamed up with his friend Dom and often receiving the aid of a couple of other squadmates, the player must guide Marcus through five acts of what is now known as stop'n'pop gameplay. This third-person shooter is not about rushing into a room and unloading clip after clip at whatever rears its head but about measured and thoughtful use of cover, outflanking manoeuvres and intelligent marshalling of weaponry as you deal with relatively dumb grunts and staggeringly gigantic bosses. With some spectacular set pieces and a storyline that generally succeeds in engaging the player, GoW has been designed from the ground up to impress.

Most immediately it's apparent that GoW is a visual tour de force, a veritable bull rampaging through the china shop of visual ecstasy. I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say in all my years of gaming I have never played such a graphically awesome game. The Unreal 3 engine is Cerebus' nuts and while the art direction may not be to everyone's taste (and could certainly do with widening the palette beyond 'brown to murky brown' - what is this, Quake 2?) the fidelity of the graphics are a sight to behold. And to show off; Gears of War is unsurprisingly the title of choice for anyone trying to sell a 360 this Christmas. It's not just crisp detailing and expansive arenas that impress. There are bucketloads of scintillating effects and some nice touches on the animation front, with the hunkered down camera angle that you get when you spring from cover-to-cover a particular favourite.

So it's a shame that the actual cover dynamic still could do with some work. The principle is sound - use cover as a defensive weapon. Without cover you will be mown down, so dash from safety zone to safety zone and try to find a good firing position. Getting into cover is easy with a flick of the stick in one of the available directions and a tap of the A button quickly moving your soldier from place to place. Along with standard rolls and sprints there are the very cool SWAT moves where you do a little pirouette from one side of a doorway to another. You can also hop over the blocks of cover which so liberally inhabit each level that you being to wonder when the giant boy who keeps dropping all the Lego will appear as a boss. It was about a third of the way through Act II that the cover aspect really clicked with me and from then on in I really felt a part of the game. Yet even by the end of Act V I still experienced an all too frequent frustration when Marcus decided against hunkering down behind the concrete block I had desperately guided him to. Or he would refuse to leave cover and engage in some fisticuffs with the Locust who was trying to bash my head in. Getting in and out of cover will sometimes present an independent challenge with more than a handful of deaths attributable to Marcus' insistence on standing tall and proud rather than cowering behind cover as I was desperately hoping he would. It's far from game breaking and in the grand scheme of things only a minor annoyance yet with a little more tweaking I'm sure this frustration could have been eliminated altogether.

Then again, there's always the chainsaw melee weapon with which to vent some anger. Surely the greatest addition to the shooter arsenal since the shotgun, the chainsaw lives on the end of the standard machine gun and can be activated by pressing and holding down the B button. Do this with an enemy close by and the spinning bars magically work their way into the top of its head and proceed to bisect the beast. Even after my 115th chainsaw kill I was cackling maniacally - this is a weapon that just does not get old. A claim that sadly cannot be made for the rest of the armoury. There's nothing here in the guns department that is even mildly exciting with the only weapon of any note - the Hammer of Dawn - being the targeting device for an orbital beam weapon that can only be used in a handful of clearly defined sections of the game. GoW really misses a mini-gun (no, the rubbishy emplaced weapons will not suffice) or a flamethrower or at least one gun of wanton destruction. As it stands everything is a dull projectile weapon and while they do the job it's a shame to ponder how much more satisfying GoW would have been with some weapons to match the kick-ass-and-take-names demeanour of the game's characters.

There's a solitary driving section crammed into the middle of the game and while mildly diverting it's not anything to send a coded message home about. The cutscenses, on the other hand, are worth a marvel or three. Although every one uses the in-game engine they, like the game itself, are packed with the kind of visuals which would have wowed us a few months ago in a pre-rendered cutscene using exclusive assets. Paradoxically it is only during the occasional cutscene that I ever witnessed any slowdown, with the final panning shot of the game being the jerkiest of the lot. Other than these baffling oddities, GoW runs flawlessly and has obviously been the object of much loving attention. So much so that for a fairly linear shooter (occasionally you get to choose between one of two diverging paths that always wind up meeting back together after a few more Locusts have been sent to the great insectarium in the sky) is certainly worthy of a replay or two. Not only are there thirty tokens hidden around the game to collect but there's the wondrous co-op mode to get stuck into as well.

Completing the game on Hardcore difficulty is a blast. Playing on the trickier Insane with a friend - either split-screen or online - is fantastic fun. The entire campaign can be run through in this mode and while it certainly makes the game easier (unless your friend has the same penchant for running into fields of fire and valiantly laying down his life for no discernable purpose, a thrill the AI is not always able to resist) it's also a lot more enjoyable. Those split sections that I just mentioned come into their own here with many of them requiring a focused amount of co-operation as each player will have to shoot through gaps in the walls to help out their buddy. The only fly in the ointment is the rather ridiculous fact that each profile can only have one campaign checkpoint saved at any time. So if you want to play some co-op with a friend you had best make sure that any previous co-op games, or even a single player game, was last paused at the end of an act. This cries out for fixing in the patch which is supposedly inbound before Christmas.

And while the online co-op potentially opens the campaign game out to a ridiculous amount of replayability the selection of other multiplayer modes do their bit to flesh out GoW into a complete entertainment package. There are a total of 10 multiplayer maps and only one of them is directly ripped off from the SP campaign. Gears presents you with three modes to get your chainsaw teeth stuck into. Warzone is your typical deathmatch, Execution is deathmatch with the twist that you must get close and personal with your victim and despatch them with a melee move lest one of their team-mates revives them and Assassination, which is a touch similar to CS's VIP mode where the killing of the assigned leader of either side leads to victory. Each multiplayer game is limited to four players per team so it's fortunate the maps have been designed to encourage close quarter combat. The chainsaw will oft be heard ripping through the levels and in a most amusing touch fighting with a grenade equipped will plunge the explosive into the side of your foe who then has a few seconds to run around in panic before exploding to death. Dying enemies can also be despatched with a 'kerb-stomp'. If you've seen the film American History X you'll know where the inspiration for this unique killing move comes from.

Lag is not really an issue in their multiplayer matches and while the intelligent use of cover is again advisable for extending one's life beyond the first twenty seconds communication with your teammates is of even more paramount importance. A verbose team will invariably nail a collection of mutes and it's this essence of teamwork that makes the various Versus modes so consistently entertaining. So it's a real shame that Microsoft continue to prohibit people from entering ranked matches in pre-made teams, doubly so as all multiplayer achievements can only be unlocked during a ranked match.

Saying all of this there's something about Gears which left me feeling a touch underwhelmed. I think the most likely culprit for this is the hype machine. While Gears is undoubtedly a triumphant technical showpiece and a fantastically entertaining piece of software it could never live up to the high standards the boosters and PR men had set for it before it ever even emerged. This is not the fault of the game for it is indeed a solid piece of work, even if it is not the second coming nor the kind of game which breaks new boundaries. Rather it refines and codifies the advances that prior titles have made before it and packages all these lessons in what are undeniably sumptuous visuals. Gears will probably eventually fade from the gaming public's mind as it is superseded by newer and flashier titles but that will never be able to detract from the reality that this is a tightly packaged piece of entertainment which ticks all the right boxes and does exactly what it says on the tin.

As we look over the swirling wisps of black smoke and try to ignore the smell of chard flesh that lingers in our nostrils we can hopefully agree that Gears of War should not be marked down for the brevity of its SP campaign. Even if you have no access to Live and for some reason have no interest to play the game through a second time, the sheer spectacle of that campaign game should be enough to leave one feeling satiated after besting the final nemesis, Ramm. If you do have access to Live, or a just a friend with some spare time on their hands and a willingness to experience Gears of War with you, then the game soars to even greater heights. However, I am going to give one score for this game and in my opinion it thoroughly deserves:

83%

83%

By Sam Gibson