System: Xbox 360
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Epic Games

Let’s skip all the foreplay and get straight into the rough stuff. You want to know whether or not Gears of War is worth all the hype it’s received the past year and a half. Well, quite frankly I’d say the title hasn’t received enough hype or had light shed on some of its brightest points.

Assuming the role of Marcus Fenix, players are in control of a squad of commandos that literally are man’s last stand against the Locust Horde creatures that emerged from the planet’s crust. The mission you’re tasked with carrying out, if successful will finally put an end to the 14 year war that has left the majority of the planet Sera destroyed and without hope. Gears of War constantly thrusts players into a series of non-stop, nail biting action sequences glued together by well acted and voiced in game cut-scenes.

The controls of the game have been discussed before and deserve mention again. Gears of War provides many actions and things to do, yet only requires a few different buttons to enact them all. Not only are the actions context sensitive based on your position and other factors, but the game has a way of showing you exactly which of the actions you’ll take before you press the button. For example if you’re behind cover with an open space and another cover spot near you, if you hold the analog stick towards that cover, the icon will show you that if you press ‘A’ now, you’ll do a SWAT style switch stance that will have you taking cover in the new location. However, if you move the analog stick forward instead, the icon will alert you that if you press ‘A’ in this situation; you’ll roll out of cover and charge forward in that direction instead. It’s done in a very intuitive way that doesn’t distract or get in the way of what’s going on.

Gears of War producer Rod Fergusson of Epic Games fills us in on what seperates it from the rest.

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There are some other nice gameplay innovations such as the active reload feature. You can reload at any time by pressing the right bumper. However, it takes quite some time to swap out magazines and get the gun locked and loaded. What happens when you reload the weapon is that a little meter appears under your ammo count. A sliding bar progresses down the meter and passes through a very narrow white zone and a slightly larger grey area. If you tap the right bumper again during the white zone, you’ll get a perfect reload that will have you reload very quickly as well as giving a slight damage boost to your bullets. If you land the bumper tap during the gray area, you’ll just reload faster. However, if you miss and tap the button outside of those ranges, your weapon will jam and the time you’ll lose on that will be greater than if you would have just done the standard reload. Learning to master the active reload is crucial. Just imagine hiding out behind the cover of a low wall, with a Locust soldier taking cover on the other side of that same wall. You’re blind firing at him, trying to back him up, and you’ve only got two bullets left as he’s jumping over the wall to drop you. It’s times like this that make the skill invaluable.

Gears of War will brutally punish you if you try to use the same run and gun tactics currently in use in most shooters. The game forces players to run in, take cover, quickly and accurately assess the situation and their surroundings and then take decisive action. If you take cover too long, either your cover will disintegrate, your enemy characters themselves will get into a better position to take you out or both.

This brings up the excellent AI. Mind you, I played the game from the get go on Hardcore mode which no doubt had a huge impact on the enemies being smarter. The enemies do everything you do. They take cover. They throw out blind fire while moving into better positioning to take you out. They even do active reloads. On Hardcore, the enemies are very challenging and make very worthy adversaries. While it is difficult and you’ll die a lot, you’ll never feel that the difficulty is artificial or that it’s the game’s fault. It’s very satisfying and makes you want to just get better and adapt to the situation quicker.

Earlier, I spoke about things in the game that never got hyped but truly make it shine. Imagine you’re with your squad and you hear a strange noise. Marcus asks ‘What the f*ck is that?’ One of your squad mates replies ‘That’s a berserker sir. She’s blind and doesn’t hunt by sight, but she can hear us…she can smell…us.’ The camera switches over to the huge creature who’s chained at her arms and legs and being led by a number of Locust soldiers. At the sound of hearing your squad talking, she flies into a rage and kills her own kind and starts charging for you. The camera pans back to your squad as Marcus asks command to advise him of what to do in this situation. You’re told that the only way to kill it is to use the Hammer of Dawn. Essentially this is a weapon that allows you to ‘paint’ a target with a laser sight. You have to hold it steady on the target and hope that your squad mates will keep any attackers off you while the satellite triangulates the coordinates and fires off the beam. What are the other downfalls to this weapon? It will only work in open sky and when the satellite is in your area. You’re in an underground tomb, you can’t go back the way you came, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know where the berserker is coming from as you hear her knocking down walls and crashing through everything to get to you. What do you do?

It’s moments like this that remind me of the first time I played Half Life when I realized that the game wasn’t simply a shooter where you could run circles around your enemy and just shoot it until it died. The game is full of situations and circumstances just like the one I just described where you have to come up with tactics and ideas on the fly to take out your adversaries in unique and challenging ways. The cool thing about it is that the game just keeps on hitting you with these situations. This is what Gears of War designer CliffyB meant when he said he wanted the game to contain ‘water cooler’ moments where you’d have these cool experiences that you could tell your buddies about. All I can say is ‘Damn bruh, you pulled it off.’

We don’t even need to talk about the graphics in Gears of War. You already know how tight it looks as it’s the part of the game that’s been hyped the most. This game looks so good that it’ll make your standard def TV THINK it’s an HDTV. The graphics, sound, constant banter between your squad mates, in game cut scenes and tight story integration with the on screen action all comes together to make a presentation that’s second to none. There simply is no better looking title on any platform out there. Period.

Overall, Gears of War is a solid title that does what Microsoft needed. It shows that the Xbox 360 can keep up with the Playstation 3 and it has proven to be the system’s killer app. Hell, I’ll even go so far as to say that this isn’t just the Xbox 360′s killer app, but this is the Next Generation’s killer app. While Microsoft didn’t provide a Halo 3 to combat the Playstation 3 launch, they didn’t have to. When gamers get their hands on Gears of War, they won’t NEED Halo.