Gears of War Review

Nov 7, 2007

Few games deliver the frenetic, blood-soaked thrills of brutal close-quarters combat like Epic's Gears of War. Since its release on Microsoft's Xbox 360 last November, gamers have been gibbing gleefully in the game's online arena and co-operative modes, and now PC gamers can get in on the action. Taking place from a third-person perspective, Gears moves away from straightforward shooter gameplay by implementing a cover system, forcing players to take a slightly more thoughtful approach than they may be used to in action games. What it offers in terms of engrossing, satisfying combat sequences thankfully outweighs some of its faults, including an absurdly inadequate narrative and occasionally frustrating controls.

Marcus Fenix is the star here, an impossibly muscled gent who speaks almost entirely with his weaponry. Through the game's five single-player acts, he travels with a group of other soldiers of similar physique to whom can be issued limited tactical orders. They are well-armed representatives of the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG), a force striving against the ravenous advance of the Locust Horde, a subterranean race of equally militant monstrous humanoids.

With shotguns, SMGs, space-based satellite lasers, chainsaws, explosive arrows and more you'll tear apart the beastly opposition. There's little limit on the amount of gore and gristle in this game - enemies explode into gobs of goo when drilled by a boomshot rocket, blood splatters across the screen upon a successful chainsaw attack, and even an all-too-frequent hit with a bullet causes a substantial spray of vital fluid to erupt. As much as the game's grisly nature is conveyed with the graphics, the sound effects play just as important a role. Blasting apart Locusts with brutal shotgun discharges sounds like fireworks detonating as someone sloshes around in a mud pond with oversized boots. It's top-notch audio / visual package, drawing you into the fighting, giving you a near unparalleled sense of payoff when you finally crack an enemy skull with a sniper shot or dismember a particularly evasive adversary.

Gameplay proceeds along with a distinctive style. Though it's still very much a fast-paced experience, you have to take cover in this game, something accomplished with the touch of a key. It's set at Space as default, but can be bound wherever you prefer. Our problem with the control setup is that there are simply too many functions bound to the same key. Sprint and roll are tied up with the cover function, with no option through the game's control menu for separation. This can result in confusion while in the heat of battle as you suck into cover when you meant to sprint or roll. It's not something that's going to ruin your game experience by any means, but given how many more binding options there are on a keyboard compared to an Xbox 360 controller, it's odd cover and run were kept on the same key.

Also introduced in the PC version are W, A, S, and D double-tap controls, something which should be familiar to any fan of Epic's Unreal Tournament series. In Gears of War the double-tap acts as yet another method of attaching to cover, sprinting, and rolling, which winds up exacerbating the existing issue of unintentionally attaching to cover. We found it best to keep double-tap disabled. As for the rest of the controls, the mouse and keyboard allow for faster, more precise movements, and feel natural and intuitive. You'll need these too, as many of Gears' enemies are, for the most part, notably aggressive. While the foes called Wretches merely run at you, the Locust Drones and Theron Guards take up their own cover spots and advance on your position, meaning you must remain constantly aware of the battle scenario and adjust your position as necessary. Strangely, at other times, enemies will sit passively behind a wall and absorb bullets into their heads.

Adding to the gameplay is a special reload system where a properly timed press of the R key can award you with a faster animation for slapping in an extra clip and higher damage output. It's a very well integrated into the game, giving players an additional layer of challenge and providing, assuming you're good, a frequently recurring sense of reward on top of splattering enemy faces. It may seem like a small addition to the game, but the active reload helps to make Gears even more engaging, helping to keep the gameplay fresh where it otherwise would have been repetitive.

As for the new content, you get five additional chapters at the beginning of Act 5, which help to fill in a few of the Xbox 360 version's plot holes. The majority of the new content, which took us about an hour and a half to get through, features the same kind of battle setups as the rest of the game. There's a Jack protection sequence, where your invisible robot friend decloaks and spends a few minutes unlocking a door as you keep enemies at bay. There's a slightly different kind of Seeder battle, Wretch assaults, sniping sequences, and cover-to-cover battles around enemy-spawning emergence holes. The one genuinely new section is a showdown against the hulking Brumak, the beast from whom Marcus and company inexplicably escaped in the Xbox 360 version, leaving many console gamers scratching their heads. Overall, it's not must-play content, but it's still entertaining.

Even with a few additional morsels of plot, Gears' narrative is still a fractured mess. The game presents a near-indecipherable ending, tells very little about Marcus other than he was imprisoned, and relates even less about the Horde and why they're attacking. To many this likely won't matter, as the gameplay is more than enjoyable enough to make up for a lackluster plot, but you're frequently forced to listen to Gears' flat, cliche characters bicker only about immediate matters. While it would have been silly to expect characters in the midst of battle to relate their personal histories, such details could have been added through cut-scenes or other means. It's an odd sensation to behold this vividly constructed planet of Sera that Epic created and, by the end of the game, realize you know practically nothing about it.

Also new to the PC version are three new multiplayer maps along with those released as downloadable content for the Xbox 360 version. In all, that's 19 maps and five modes, which includes King of the Hill, a mode similar to Annex where players must capture and hold territory. In King of the Hill the target territory is fixed, whereas it moves around in Annex. The game also has support for co-operative play for two people where one plays as Marcus and the other as Dominic Santiago, a character most recognizable for his frequent exclamation of "Sup, bitches!" after making a kill. If you've got the means to do so, co-operative is definitely the way to go in this game, as the squad AI isn't all that great. COG members regularly get knocked out, requiring you to run over and put them back on their feet. It can be a minor annoyance, but, like the cover controls, it doesn't ruin anything. Keep in mind to gain full access to Gears' online features, you'll need a gold subscription to Games for Windows - Live. Without the subscription you can sign up for a free silver account and get access to all the online modes, but won't be able to participate in ranked matches online where statistics are tracked, and will be barred from a few match hosting and join options. All five of Gears' online versus modes are for eight players total, and there is no option for play on dedicated servers.

You probably already know this, but Gears of War is a gorgeous game. Each character model boasts an incredible amount of detail, the special effects can often be breathtaking, animations are marvelously fluid, and the environments possess a cohesive artistic style packed with gobs of graphical candy. The sound, with the exclusion of the voice acting, does a great job and weaving the illusion that the bombed out cityscapes and underground tunnels of Sera could really exist. Chainsaw roars, shotgun concussion blasts, Marcus' rolls and grunts, the clinks of armor as you slam into cover positions, and even the more subtle near-death audio clue are all expertly woven into the soundscape, further heightening the intensity of battle.

Closing Comments
Epic's year-old action beast proves just as enjoyable on PC as it was on Xbox 360. The mouse and keyboard allow for more precise control, and the graphics have been improved as well. With the additional single-player content, King of the Hill multiplayer mode, extra maps, and a map editor, Gears offers an even more impressive feature set than before. Even with all its improvements, though, Gears suffers from an occasionally aggravating cover and sprint system, and sets its action atop a rickety narrative foundation with cookie-cutter action heroes. Still, it's an undeniably entertaining experience, and one you should definitely consider if you missed the Xbox 360 version.