In the world of shooters, if you look at the popular and good games, most of them are usually run and gunners. Halo's one, Doom's one, Quake's one, Max Payne, Half-Life, Perfect Dark, and the list goes on. Most developers seem to worry about making a cover-based shooter to compete with those run and gunners. Having a game where cover is a necessity is pretty risky if you see other games aren't cover-based. Gears of War isn't the first of its kind to do this, but it really polishes up what other cover-based shooter has started and Gears of War is possibly one of the first of its genre to set the standards. Not only that, it's a damn great game.
The storyline for Gears is surprsingly average and it's written by Eric Nylund. It's your typical war story: they invade the human beings, we must fight back, and save the day. Your enemy is the Locust-some kind of mutated human freaks. You play as Marcus Fenix and you're free from prison and I don't know why he was there at the first place by a friend named Dom Santiago. Marcus is pretty much your typical bad-ass, and tough marine guy, but he's quite likable for some weird reason. Maybe, it's because he's not too cocky. Dom seems to be most nicest guy out of the characters you meet. Then you'll meet Cole which is this overhyped African-American soldier. He's not really original, but he's very fun and players might find him one of the more likable characters. Then you got baird, who's basically a smart-ass. Those are the characters you'll be around with and they're not really original, but their quite likable because you're going to have a lot of conversation with them throughout the game. The voice acting is all great. All voice actors sound like they enjoyed their characters. Also the guy that voiced Bender from Futurama voiced Marcus.
I'd like to introduce you to Marcus.
06 graphics at its best!
Gears of War was possibly the best looking game in 06. It's graphics were beautiful and really clean and dirty (in a good way). You'll probably be lost in the game by looking at the graphics at times. For the sound, everything's fine. The Locust sound hostile, guns sound powerful, and the music really fits the game.
You will be seeing a lot of this when you're playing Gears of War.
In Gears of War, you'll be moving quite slow, but you can sprint (roadie run).
When you pick up a Sniper Rifle in Gears of War, get a headshot. Something pretty happens when you get it.
The gameplay is a cover-based shooter. Cover is your best friend especially when you're playing it on the hardest difficulty. You have regenerative life like the Halo games so if you're dying just don't look up. Don't think the game will be easy, the game got some advanced AI. Sometimes, they'll flank you, throw a grenade at your area, or basically run up to your face and get a quick beatdown. The game do got some rough parts at times, but it does good for balancing the easy parts and hard parts. Sadly, the enemies are a bit lacking. You're pretty much just fighting locust soldiers with automatic weapons and sometimes you'll fight tougher versions of them like Boomers. Boomers are these big Locust troops-they're tough to kill and they carry this rocket launcher/grenade launcher gun and these guys can totally ruin your day if you're gonna camp behind your cover. The locust sometimes come out of these holes underground and you can throw grenades to stop them from spawning or you can wait for them to come out and make the firefight even more intense. Gears of War is very action-oriented. It will remind you a lot of the Doom days where Doom basically cared about killing your enemies. This game has a lot of violence and action. There are quite a bit of weapons here. There's the hammerburst (a battle rifle pretty much), a standard pistol, a revolver, a bow which basically shoots explosive arrows-one of my favorites, and then there's the Lancer. It's basically an assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet and it's possibly one of most brilliant weapons ever made. When you chainsaw somebody, it changes the camera and the blood just splashes everywhere including on your screen. It's also going to be your best friend throughout the whole game. There's a bit more when you play through the game, but Gears of War will definitely offer some favorites for shooter fans. Also the weapons feature a perfect reload system, If you reload you have like a line that tells you the time and there's a certain color. If you reload perfectly on the white line, you get bonus damage and reload fast and if you reload somewhere near the white line, you reload fast. If you don't reload on any of those time, you'll reload much slower than you normally reload. Campaign is really lengthy. It took me about 12 hours to beat it on Hardcore and I also replayed it on Insane (the hardest difficulty). Most of the time you will be fighting by side with Dom and sometimes with Baird and Cole. You can command them too, but the game doesn't really force you. The game do got boss fights and they are well done and it's very intense too. To end it all, Gears of War is awesome.
Multiplayer is sadly the same like the campaign gameplay. It's like Gears of War with a lot of run elements. The weapons seems quite imbalanced since the power weapons are just way too strong and the mid-range weapon isn't strong enough to keep players rushing up to you with a shotgun. Basically, if you enjoyed the campaign, you might not enjoy the multiplayer since two modes feel different from each other.
If you're looking for a fun shooter to play, look for Gears of War, it's totally one of the best 360 games and maybe the best shooter of its kind. 9/10
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