Gear up for war, it's a good fight

This was a mixed bag. Playing through the game was great but there were some things that were less than stellar.

Install time was horrendous. I took a 10 minute shower nuked a slice of leftover pizza and come back a total of about 20 minutes later and it was still installing. Something which I wasn't accustomed to given that unreal tournament 3 installed in about 10 minutes. It took nearly as much time as installing an operating system.

Thankfully, the load time for the actual game wasn't nearly as bad. There was a quick 10 second splash screen and I was in the game. The thing I loved about unreal tournament 3 was that i could skip all the developer logos and such but with Gears, I have to sit through the epic games logo and the microsoft logo each and every time the game loads. Not that it detracts from the game but it does get somewhat annoying after a while.

So down to the game itself. You play the role as Marcus Fenix, you have a bunch of uglies hell bent on tearing you and your team of grunts to shreds in a ruined world. In this world the game looks absolutely fantastic and I expected no less after playing UT3. While UT3 focuses it's engine on lush and bright environments, gears of war takes a 180 and is dreary and fits the mood perfectly. Everything looks as it should in a war torn world. Broken down pillars are textured beautifully. Enemies are ugly as hell and the weaponry is appropriate. there really isn't much to say other than the game looks absolutely amazing. What you see on the box is what you get. Marcus Fenix looks exactly as he should in the game, his hair looks like actual hair and a bit of it even sticks out from his bandanna when you toggle the aim function with the crosshair.

Sounds in this game are as fitting as the environment. booms and bams are powerful and gunfire sounds make my heart pound. the music is dreary like the environment and gives a sense of despair and draws you in then changes instantly when the action starts.

while sound and image quality are astounding, the game play itself a bit awkward to get used to. playing through the game, it has tutorials that teach you how to maneuver Marcus around. Sometimes the action gets heavy enough to make movement extremely frustrating. for instance, the crouch and duck key (default spacebar) make marcus either duck behind a wall or small obstacle but sometimes you want him to just roll out of the way. Sometimes i'm already ducked behind a blockade and i get up to revive my team mates and i want to duck again, but takes his sweet time doing so and frantically i hammer at the space bar to get him to duck but he jumps over the block and gets fired on and dies. I do realize that you can roll by double tapping a direction twice but it doesn't work for rolling forward. Sometimes you just want marcus to do something but he does something else. Melee combat is strange to say the least. for me, it's sort of a 50/50 chance that i hit the target sometimes it looks like i hit the enemy but i don't, and sometimes i can hit off onto one side and i'd knock him out. melee attacks are strange that they seem to hurt the enemy much more than just shooting at the enemy. sometimes i can unload as much as 20 rounds using the secondary weapon that shoots in bursts but when i get the change to melee attack, it only takes 3 or maybe 4 hits to take him out permanently. I would understand if it was the chainsaw bayonet but this is just a blunt object. I never knew pistol whipping someone could be so effective. everything else with control is easy enough though. commanding your troops to attack, cease fire or regroup is simple and you hold the communicate key and press the corresponding button to tell your squad what to do.

the absolute worst thing i hate the most is the hammer of dawn. not that it's not cool but it does get extremely annoying when there are no satellites to use but you're stuck with that laser targetter. sometimes you can backtrack to pick up a regular primary weapon so you'd be stuck using a secondary weapon, pistol or grenades. what's bad about it is that, let's say you throw all your grenades and you run out. the game automatically defaults to your primary weapon which is the hammer of dawn laser targetter. when you're surrounded by enemies and you hear a nice beep from the gun telling you that there are no satellites you're pretty much already dead. it's so stupid, i hate the hammer of dawn. i absolutely hate it. it looks cool and it's an essential part of the game to take out the large locust like the berzerker or seeders but it really is useless after those occasional sequences where you have to kill a large enemy. at least the game should not default it to be the gun after you run out of grenades.

In the end the gameplay is quite satisfying given it's shortcomings even though it is a bit repetitive. you must rely on duck and cover to stay alive in this game. This game really is a test of patience and sometimes it does get a little tedious ducking and firing at enemies. actually, when you duck and cover it's like you're almost invincible. any rocket fire or grenades that are going off in front of the blockade where you are ducked behind are rendered useless. unless that grenade comes behind the blockade then it's game over. i honestly think that if any rockets hits like a 6 inch concrete block, i'd still be able to feel it. it's not a bad thing though, the game would have been much more difficult and in the end i would have been much more frustrated. while you are ducked though you can pop your head out and fire at enemies but this makes you vulnerable to any type of fire. once you're hit, you'll get a small red spot on the screen. once the red spot becomes the gears of war logo, you're dead. so life bars and armor are completely absent in this game. you'll have no health to pick up and you simply regenerate your health gradually.

the final thing I will say about this game is that it runs incredibly smooth on my machine. with all the old 8800gt video cards with rebates and all this game will look amazing on 1680x1050. Antialiasing and all the details were turned to high in this game and I only had the occasional hiccup when something was loading. I ran this game on the following configuration:

Intel quadcore Q6600 @ 2.4ghz
gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L mainboard
OCZ pc6400 2gb ram
evga 8800gt 512mb
seagate baracuda 500gb sata
LG IDE dvd drive