Gears of War [PC]

When not fumbling with control imprecision, Gears responds very well to your commands with the mouse and keyboard. The back and forth between shooting and partaking in the active reload mini-game has a definite flow, giving the firefights a unique feel as compared to other third-person shooters. You get standard machine guns, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, and shotguns, along with more exotic weaponry like the torque bow and hammer of dawn. Though part of the arsenal may sound mundane, the top-notch weapon models and effects give them personality, and their individualized reload timers make a surprising difference in how they handle.

Packaged alongside the entertaining gameplay is an impressive feature set, particularly the option for online co-operative play. To make full use of all the online features, however, you'll need a Live gold account, which costs money (Editor's Note: Apparently the preceding two sentences were misinterpreted and caused a bit of a firestorm. To be perfectly clear, you can play co-op with a Silver account.) Though Gears is entertaining, we can't say it's worth signing up for yet another service when so many other titles out there offer full access to their online features with no additional cost. If you sign up for a Live Silver account, which is free, you can still play in non-ranked multiplayer games, though your experience is feature-limited. Assuming you already have an account, don't care about the additional cost, or are content with having limited access to the online functions, then there's plenty here to enjoy. You get five multiplayer modes and 19 maps, which should provide for lots of entertainment. For Achievement junkies, Gears PC gives you points on top of what you may have already earned with the Xbox 360 version. So even if you've beaten the game on Microsoft's console, you get credit for all the same Achievements again on PC.

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Fans of the game are sure to be curious about the new single-player content, which consists of five new chapters stuffed into the beginning of Gears' fifth act. It adds an hour or two of extra gameplay, depending on how many times you're killed and forced to restart from checkpoints, and offers much of the same gameplay as you've already had before. Throughout the entirety of the five new chapters you're tailed by a Brumak, the heavily-armed monster Xbox 360 gamers never got to actually battle at Act 4's conclusion. You do get to fire bullets at the guy in this version, and it's a challenging fight playing solo on the either hardcore or insane difficulty settings. When playing co-operatively you'll notice a significant drop in challenge level, mostly because Gears' friendly AI just isn't that good.

Then there's the question of performance. Gears is still a gorgeous game, but in both DX9 and DX10 we noticed it would stutter on a regular basis. Things would run smoothly otherwise, but the regular occurrences of dropped frames were distracting. As for our system, we're running 32-bit Vista on a rig with an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU 2.40GHz, a 768 MB GeForce 8800 GTX, and 2 GB of high-end RAM. Granted, that's not exactly the best kind of rig to determine a game's performance since it's a much more powerful system than most probably have, but that's all we've tried it on so far.

We're still waiting to post a full review, since as of right now there's absolutely nobody online for us to play against. This makes sense, as the game doesn't ship until November 6th, so expect the review to appear sometime around then so we can add in what we think of the new maps, new mode, and multiplayer as a whole. If you're chomping at the bit to know how good the game is, we'll say it's definitely an enjoyable experience. The active reload and shooting mechanics make for a different, satisfying and entertaining style of gameplay, though it's marred by odd control binding limitations. Story and characters are flimsy and poorly realized as well as smothered by a deluge of steroid-infused machismo, though some might actually appreciate and enjoy this style. Think of Marcus Fenix as channeling the spirit of Arnold Schwarzenegger's John Matrix in Commando, where his appeal stems from his total inability to express himself at anything beyond a third-grader's level of intelligence. For all its strengths, we've definitely seen better single-player games release for PC already this year.

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