Gears of War
A review by Mathew Bredfeldt
My older brother, the former Surly Gamer on this site, decided to purchase an X-Box 360 last month so he could play games he can download from the X-Box Marketplace. I got tired of just having Carcassone to play, so I decided to do some research on regular games that I would like to try based on the hype I have heard and ratings on the various gaming web sites. After I did that, I looked up the prices of the games on Gamestop.com because I know I can get games used there. The cheapest one with the highest rating I could find that I wanted to try was Gears of War. It was $6.99 and I knew that it did not require a lot of downloads to make it work.
Didn't that come out in 2006?
Yes it did, but since we just now got a 360 I decided to try something fun to play that was rated M.
Gears of War is a game that is set in the future where a group of aliens called "Locusts" have invaded Earth and are taking over and leveling cities. You play a former soldier turned prisoner turned soldier again named Marcus Fenix. When you start the game from the beginning, a guy from Delta Squad is breaking him out of his jail cell and giving you armor and a couple of weapons to join his unit. By this point in the game you learn Marcus' favorite word, "Shit."
The game is different from traditional shooters because it is from a third person point of view rather than a first person point of view. The closest you get to first person in the game is when you take over a turret in an early level but that does not happen too often. The game also has a pretty loose learning curve so far in the three or so levels I have played in act one. The thing is that you have to learn to read the terrain and predict when a Locust attack is coming based on what is laid out around in the way of cover. You really learn to use that terrain to your advantage because it will keep you alive and give you a good point to shoot at the Locust swarms that pop up from under the ground.
The game makes good use of the chaos of war by having your three other squad mates running around and sometimes getting in the way of your shot. Your squad mates are no slouches in the combat department either. Instead of you being the only one that can kill all the bad guys before you have to move on, your other team mates can actually shoot at the bad guys too and kill them. The A.I. on this game is outstanding because once when I was playing a level, I took some potshots at some Locusts that were defending a stretch of ground with one behind a gun turret and another running interference; before running over and grabbing an ammo box I was met by a large Locust soldier that promptly killed me. This gave me two ideas; first, grab the ammo box before anything else and second, see if I can find where that Locust came from and see if it was easier to take on the turret guy from the side. That is what I like about the game, it makes me think rather than rely on brute force and stupidity to get through every challenge.
The last thing I would like to hit on in this game, is the gathering game you have to play along with the regular game to get more Gamer Points on X-Box Live. Throughout the game, there is a red gears symbol on the walls on rubble or on a pillar that indicates that somewhere in that area, there are gear tags. If you find all of the tags then you get a lot of gamer points. There's only thirty of them, but sometimes you get caught up in a firefight and see the tag, but can't get to it without leaving one enemy alive so you can get to it before going to a cut scene.
I have yet to do the multiplayer in the game, but I don't think there is much of a chance to play with someone else because the game is four years old and a lot of people have moved on to the Call of Duty franchise as their shooter of choice.
So far from what I have learned from the game for playing for about an hour over four days, it is a sold shooter that ranks right up there with Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64 as one of my favorite shooters.
Rating (on a scale of 1-5): 5
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