As I swam through the internet a few days ago looking for a new game to sample, I happened across several old ads and praises for GoW. Luscious screenshots of giant, pissed off Marines fighting an alien invasion at 6000 rounds a minute, combined with the praise many of my friends had given this game, managed to tweak my shooter button just right. After affirming that it had been ported to the PC, I set up a date with the old girl, threw on some Old Spice, and prepared to settle in for what I hoped would be a good and possibly even memorable experience.
Well... I turned out to be half right. It WAS memorable.
System Specs:
Video Card: nVIDIA 8600, 256 MB
Processor: AMD Athlon 6000, Dual Core
RAM: 3.25 GB
Operating System: Windows XP, Service Pack 2.
STORY
Gears of War started me off with a short intro scene that mentioned the date was 14 years after something called E-Day, and then jumped to some guy pacing around in a jail cell, presumably the one I'd be taking control of. Another guy then kicked down the jail cell door, tossed me a bag, and told me to get dressed. From the way these two interacted, I presumed they knew each other, and that my rescuer would be how the game laid out the setting for me. Maybe with a casual conversation of how things had changed since I'd been locked up, some mention of how things used to be better before E-Day, whatever. Some explanation of why I was in a derelict prison, (where, judging from one exchange from Marcus and his friend Dom, something sinister and secret had been going on), and why the world around me looked a video reel of London during WWII.
In fact I got none of this. Even if you opt to go through the training in the beginning as I did, the game treats the player as if they already know why and how we came to be at war with these things, what these things are, and why the hell you were in prison in the first place.
My first time through the game, GoW did a fine job foreshadowing the answers to these questions, giving me little tidbits of information here and there. Apparently Marcus was thrown in prison for something that got him branded a traitor, as one character refers to him, and another later regards him with distrust, saying "I know about your trial", while yet another mentions that "His trial was a sham, sir."
By this time I had a list of questions I wanted answered, like "What's the deal with this guy? Apparently he was a soldier of some renown once, but something he did got him branded a traitor and hucked in prison. I wonder what? And what was so special about this trial? Why was it a sham? And why are these creatures on this planet? How did they get underground? Are they invading aliens? Did we create them?"
I could go on with the questions and comments, but let's just stop here. Since it was early in the game I was willing to take it on faith that they'd reveal a lot of these mysteries eventually. Maybe over time as I played, or maybe in one giant revelation towards the end. Little did I know how I was deluding myself, even then.
The game I played NEVER answered a single question I had. Nobody ever elaborated on Marcus's history, which, since he was apparently a famed traitor in some eyes, should've at least inspired some gossip among the men. Why he was in jail, or why they didn't trust him, or why the f*** earth was suddenly overrun with long, tall, and ugly.
Instead, it simply drags on like these questions don't exist, and then towards the end of the game, pops in with even more mystery, mentioning Marcus's father, (who apparently had an estate and was some scientist guy who was trying to do something to prevent the war) and for some reason had a whole map of the enemy's tunnel system in his mansion.
When you arrive at East Barricade Academy, which is where, ahem, Fenix Estate is located, it's obvious the place has been long abandoned. The statues, stone steps, and fountains are overgrown with weeds, the buildings are dilapidated and close to collapse, and Locust have taken control of nearly every square inch of the place.
That's it, that's all the info the game gives you right there, and like usual, it just leads to more questions. No one ever goes into detail about why there even IS a Fenix Estate, or why Marcus's father matters, or what he's doing with a secret lab in his mansion and a map of the Locust network. This should've been the perfect time for the game to jump in with some of the answers to those questions it had been building, like why Marcus was in jail. Maybe his father's work had something to do with it? Was he trying to help the Locust, and Marcus had to stop him by killing a bunch of innocent people? What d*****?! I've played your game, I'm ready to recommend it, all I need is one simple cutscene right here to answer a few basic questions. But the game denied me even that, and instead handed me another place to go off and kill some more stuff.
By the end of the game, I realized GoW wasn't gonna pony up the answers, and had simply conned me into playing by teasing me with their existence. Gears of War had wasted my time, because at least half of my motivation for playing was to find answers to all these questions the game had been building on. Eventually I had to hit Wikipedia and Gamefaqs to figure out E-Day was Emergence Day, that I was another world called "Sera", (even though in-game Anya refers to it as "Earth", but whatever, I'm tired of trying to make it all make sense) and that apparently Marcus was a hero in the Pendulum Wars, whatever those were. Realizing that the answers I had sloughed through 12 hours of punishing gameplay, and ultimately had to turn to the web for could've been told to me with some scrolling text at the beginning did nothing to abate my urge to stab Marcus in his giant forehead.
GAMEPLAY
And speaking of the gameplay (he said with an evil smile) let's talk about it. Gears of War is an over-the-shoulder cover shooter, which means you're always seeing the action from just behind the guy you're playing, and that the emphasis is supposed to be on the tactical use of cover to advance, or protect yourself.
Which would be fine, if the controls weren't trying to sabotage my every effort to do so. This must be a Windows-specific problem, but if not let me know. I'm on the lookout for more reasons to hate this game than I already have. One button, (the space bar by default) engages cover when you're close it, disengages cover, and is also your run/roll away button. Since you often have to do some or all of that, and since GoW is designed as a cover shooter with potential cover everywhere, this leads to a lot of accidental taking-cover-when-I-meant-to-keep-running-or-dodging,-and-now-I'm-in-pieces moments. In addition, the game makes little provision for close quarters combat, which your enemies are all too eager to engage in. More than once I spent twenty minutes fighting a single battle from behind cover, carefully managing my dwindling ammunition supply, with my entire team out of action, and slowly whittling their force down to one.
At first this was cool, it really drew me into the game, and made me feel like a soldier on the edge of death, where it was all up to me, and that only by a narrow margin and proper application of skill would I save my teammates. Then invariably the one enemy who was left would pop out of his cover and charge, reach me before I could kill him, and catch me fumbling for the melee button, (or god forbid if I had the Lancer equipped, the any-other-weapon-but-this-piece-of-s*** button) and quickly shoot/beat me to death, forcing me to fight the entire battle all over again. One battle in particular I fought at least 20 times because of exactly this kind of cheap, thrill-robbing crap. The only solution I eventually found to this was to grab the shotgun at the first opportunity, and hold on to it for the entire game. Judging from what I've read, this seems to be the way most players handle close combat, and it should be a sign of poor game balancing when the circumstances of the game force you to keep one weapon out of all your choices, just to deal with POTENTIAL encounters. Not to mention the inexplicable and random failure of control options. You could be in the middle of a firefight, and all of a sudden the fire button will stop responding, or Marcus will decide he's tired, and doesn't feel like running anywhere, never mind the creatures crawling up his a**.
"Why didn't you save more often?" I hear you ask. Because the save system in this game is one of the worst I've ever encountered. Checkpoint saves are all well and good, when the checkpoints are set based on how much time goes by, not when you cross the invisible checkpoint line, and definitely not when that line is usually fifteen to twenty minutes apart. This was yet another reason why the gameplay was so unforgiving: there are plenty of moments where you can die by simply not realizing what the game wants you to do, and coming up with your own solution instead, leading to a lot of wasted time and effort, and possibly even premature baldness.
The enemy A.I. was at least vicious, smart, and had the common sense to get behind something when being shot. The same can't be said for your teammates. Often, while I'd be ducked behind cover, taking potshots and keeping my head down, my compatriots would assist me by charging into my line of fire, or headlong into the 6 or 8 enemies we were fighting, quickly getting themselves dispatched and helpingg every Locust with a gun in the area to focus on me. I saw my teammates getting stuck on walls, spinning in place, and doing a two-step back and forth while someone riddled their body with bullets. Is this really all we can manage? Surely we can manage better than Goldeneye level of stupid with A.I. in a game this prestigious?
VISUALS AND SOUND
Gears of War runs on the Unreal 3 engine, but it seems like it would've done just as well on something less expensive. The only colors featured in the game are gray or dingy brown, with sides of green and black here and there. Approximately half the game is fought indoors, with some areas so dark it's hard to realize you've been running into a wall for the last five minutes, and even the areas that are fought outside feel cramped and constricted, with most of the focus being on what's immediately around you. It seems like more effort went into detailing Marcus and the other soldiers than the rest of the game, and in spite of that, almost no effort was made to differentiate the soldiers from the enemies you're fighting, making it very easy to confuse the two in a firefight, leading you to not fire when you should, or fire when you shouldn't and take your teammate out of the fight.
The visuals aren't bad, but for something running on a graphics engine like Unreal 3, I expected it to take advantage of that power.
The sound is no better. Every enemy makes exactly one noise unique to it. The Locust foot soldiers all grunt. Boomers say "Boom!" Wretches screech, and so do Beserkers, oddly in the same way. Voice acting is at least decent, especially Baird's sarcastic wit, but the guns all sound the same, like paintball rifles. I suppose if you had a surround sound set up this game would sound awesome, but then what wouldn't? For the average gamer on the average T.V. though, the sound is less than impressive.
CONCLUSION
I got this game hoping to see what the hype and praise were all about, and now that I've played it... I'm still lost. I have to assume I played a drastically different game than everyone else, or that I'm missing something. Maybe there was a cutscene that should've been there and wasn't? Maybe it's better on the XBox, I don't know. I DO know that this game wasted 12 hours of my time, and tried to convince me to ignore the glaring holes in its plot, or its abominable control scheme and game design, with eye candy and empty promises of answers to come.
I started writing this thinking that by the end I'd recommend Gears of War as an okay shooter, something worth renting. But now as I really look at all the flaws in this game, I can't even do that.
Stay away from this one unless you just HAVE to know what it's like. There are other, better shooters out there, far more deserving of your time and money.
Well... I turned out to be half right. It WAS memorable.
System Specs:
Video Card: nVIDIA 8600, 256 MB
Processor: AMD Athlon 6000, Dual Core
RAM: 3.25 GB
Operating System: Windows XP, Service Pack 2.
STORY
Gears of War started me off with a short intro scene that mentioned the date was 14 years after something called E-Day, and then jumped to some guy pacing around in a jail cell, presumably the one I'd be taking control of. Another guy then kicked down the jail cell door, tossed me a bag, and told me to get dressed. From the way these two interacted, I presumed they knew each other, and that my rescuer would be how the game laid out the setting for me. Maybe with a casual conversation of how things had changed since I'd been locked up, some mention of how things used to be better before E-Day, whatever. Some explanation of why I was in a derelict prison, (where, judging from one exchange from Marcus and his friend Dom, something sinister and secret had been going on), and why the world around me looked a video reel of London during WWII.
In fact I got none of this. Even if you opt to go through the training in the beginning as I did, the game treats the player as if they already know why and how we came to be at war with these things, what these things are, and why the hell you were in prison in the first place.
My first time through the game, GoW did a fine job foreshadowing the answers to these questions, giving me little tidbits of information here and there. Apparently Marcus was thrown in prison for something that got him branded a traitor, as one character refers to him, and another later regards him with distrust, saying "I know about your trial", while yet another mentions that "His trial was a sham, sir."
By this time I had a list of questions I wanted answered, like "What's the deal with this guy? Apparently he was a soldier of some renown once, but something he did got him branded a traitor and hucked in prison. I wonder what? And what was so special about this trial? Why was it a sham? And why are these creatures on this planet? How did they get underground? Are they invading aliens? Did we create them?"
I could go on with the questions and comments, but let's just stop here. Since it was early in the game I was willing to take it on faith that they'd reveal a lot of these mysteries eventually. Maybe over time as I played, or maybe in one giant revelation towards the end. Little did I know how I was deluding myself, even then.
The game I played NEVER answered a single question I had. Nobody ever elaborated on Marcus's history, which, since he was apparently a famed traitor in some eyes, should've at least inspired some gossip among the men. Why he was in jail, or why they didn't trust him, or why the f*** earth was suddenly overrun with long, tall, and ugly.
Instead, it simply drags on like these questions don't exist, and then towards the end of the game, pops in with even more mystery, mentioning Marcus's father, (who apparently had an estate and was some scientist guy who was trying to do something to prevent the war) and for some reason had a whole map of the enemy's tunnel system in his mansion.
When you arrive at East Barricade Academy, which is where, ahem, Fenix Estate is located, it's obvious the place has been long abandoned. The statues, stone steps, and fountains are overgrown with weeds, the buildings are dilapidated and close to collapse, and Locust have taken control of nearly every square inch of the place.
That's it, that's all the info the game gives you right there, and like usual, it just leads to more questions. No one ever goes into detail about why there even IS a Fenix Estate, or why Marcus's father matters, or what he's doing with a secret lab in his mansion and a map of the Locust network. This should've been the perfect time for the game to jump in with some of the answers to those questions it had been building, like why Marcus was in jail. Maybe his father's work had something to do with it? Was he trying to help the Locust, and Marcus had to stop him by killing a bunch of innocent people? What d*****?! I've played your game, I'm ready to recommend it, all I need is one simple cutscene right here to answer a few basic questions. But the game denied me even that, and instead handed me another place to go off and kill some more stuff.
By the end of the game, I realized GoW wasn't gonna pony up the answers, and had simply conned me into playing by teasing me with their existence. Gears of War had wasted my time, because at least half of my motivation for playing was to find answers to all these questions the game had been building on. Eventually I had to hit Wikipedia and Gamefaqs to figure out E-Day was Emergence Day, that I was another world called "Sera", (even though in-game Anya refers to it as "Earth", but whatever, I'm tired of trying to make it all make sense) and that apparently Marcus was a hero in the Pendulum Wars, whatever those were. Realizing that the answers I had sloughed through 12 hours of punishing gameplay, and ultimately had to turn to the web for could've been told to me with some scrolling text at the beginning did nothing to abate my urge to stab Marcus in his giant forehead.
GAMEPLAY
And speaking of the gameplay (he said with an evil smile) let's talk about it. Gears of War is an over-the-shoulder cover shooter, which means you're always seeing the action from just behind the guy you're playing, and that the emphasis is supposed to be on the tactical use of cover to advance, or protect yourself.
Which would be fine, if the controls weren't trying to sabotage my every effort to do so. This must be a Windows-specific problem, but if not let me know. I'm on the lookout for more reasons to hate this game than I already have. One button, (the space bar by default) engages cover when you're close it, disengages cover, and is also your run/roll away button. Since you often have to do some or all of that, and since GoW is designed as a cover shooter with potential cover everywhere, this leads to a lot of accidental taking-cover-when-I-meant-to-keep-running-or-dodging,-and-now-I'm-in-pieces moments. In addition, the game makes little provision for close quarters combat, which your enemies are all too eager to engage in. More than once I spent twenty minutes fighting a single battle from behind cover, carefully managing my dwindling ammunition supply, with my entire team out of action, and slowly whittling their force down to one.
At first this was cool, it really drew me into the game, and made me feel like a soldier on the edge of death, where it was all up to me, and that only by a narrow margin and proper application of skill would I save my teammates. Then invariably the one enemy who was left would pop out of his cover and charge, reach me before I could kill him, and catch me fumbling for the melee button, (or god forbid if I had the Lancer equipped, the any-other-weapon-but-this-piece-of-s*** button) and quickly shoot/beat me to death, forcing me to fight the entire battle all over again. One battle in particular I fought at least 20 times because of exactly this kind of cheap, thrill-robbing crap. The only solution I eventually found to this was to grab the shotgun at the first opportunity, and hold on to it for the entire game. Judging from what I've read, this seems to be the way most players handle close combat, and it should be a sign of poor game balancing when the circumstances of the game force you to keep one weapon out of all your choices, just to deal with POTENTIAL encounters. Not to mention the inexplicable and random failure of control options. You could be in the middle of a firefight, and all of a sudden the fire button will stop responding, or Marcus will decide he's tired, and doesn't feel like running anywhere, never mind the creatures crawling up his a**.
"Why didn't you save more often?" I hear you ask. Because the save system in this game is one of the worst I've ever encountered. Checkpoint saves are all well and good, when the checkpoints are set based on how much time goes by, not when you cross the invisible checkpoint line, and definitely not when that line is usually fifteen to twenty minutes apart. This was yet another reason why the gameplay was so unforgiving: there are plenty of moments where you can die by simply not realizing what the game wants you to do, and coming up with your own solution instead, leading to a lot of wasted time and effort, and possibly even premature baldness.
The enemy A.I. was at least vicious, smart, and had the common sense to get behind something when being shot. The same can't be said for your teammates. Often, while I'd be ducked behind cover, taking potshots and keeping my head down, my compatriots would assist me by charging into my line of fire, or headlong into the 6 or 8 enemies we were fighting, quickly getting themselves dispatched and helpingg every Locust with a gun in the area to focus on me. I saw my teammates getting stuck on walls, spinning in place, and doing a two-step back and forth while someone riddled their body with bullets. Is this really all we can manage? Surely we can manage better than Goldeneye level of stupid with A.I. in a game this prestigious?
VISUALS AND SOUND
Gears of War runs on the Unreal 3 engine, but it seems like it would've done just as well on something less expensive. The only colors featured in the game are gray or dingy brown, with sides of green and black here and there. Approximately half the game is fought indoors, with some areas so dark it's hard to realize you've been running into a wall for the last five minutes, and even the areas that are fought outside feel cramped and constricted, with most of the focus being on what's immediately around you. It seems like more effort went into detailing Marcus and the other soldiers than the rest of the game, and in spite of that, almost no effort was made to differentiate the soldiers from the enemies you're fighting, making it very easy to confuse the two in a firefight, leading you to not fire when you should, or fire when you shouldn't and take your teammate out of the fight.
The visuals aren't bad, but for something running on a graphics engine like Unreal 3, I expected it to take advantage of that power.
The sound is no better. Every enemy makes exactly one noise unique to it. The Locust foot soldiers all grunt. Boomers say "Boom!" Wretches screech, and so do Beserkers, oddly in the same way. Voice acting is at least decent, especially Baird's sarcastic wit, but the guns all sound the same, like paintball rifles. I suppose if you had a surround sound set up this game would sound awesome, but then what wouldn't? For the average gamer on the average T.V. though, the sound is less than impressive.
CONCLUSION
I got this game hoping to see what the hype and praise were all about, and now that I've played it... I'm still lost. I have to assume I played a drastically different game than everyone else, or that I'm missing something. Maybe there was a cutscene that should've been there and wasn't? Maybe it's better on the XBox, I don't know. I DO know that this game wasted 12 hours of my time, and tried to convince me to ignore the glaring holes in its plot, or its abominable control scheme and game design, with eye candy and empty promises of answers to come.
I started writing this thinking that by the end I'd recommend Gears of War as an okay shooter, something worth renting. But now as I really look at all the flaws in this game, I can't even do that.
Stay away from this one unless you just HAVE to know what it's like. There are other, better shooters out there, far more deserving of your time and money.
