Epic's beast finally tears up the PC.
Nearly a year later, Epic's massive 2006 hit, Gears of War, is almost out on PC, bringing along some additional content. It's got some added single player content, three new multiplayer maps, a new game mode, and a map editor. In 2006, Gears of War was such a big success for many reasons, including but not limited to the marriage of enjoyable gameplay, beautiful graphics, and a massive marketing campaign. Now on PC, a lot of the freshness has worn off. The game's still gorgeous and offers an impressive feature set, the best of which is online co-operative play, but many of the little quirks of gameplay are still in there.
As is easy to see from the screens and video, production values are one of Gears' big draws. On PC, like on Xbox 360, this game looks and sounds incredible. It's tailored to appeal to that 18 - 35 year old male demographic by featuring ludicrously muscled heroes killing everything except each other. Watch the blood fly up in great splashes as enemies' heads explode or bodies are carved in two with a chainsaw. It's a game that really taps into that strange primal urge to do horrible things to monstrous invaders, making it addictively satisfying to repeatedly pulp an enemy face with a point-blank shotgun blast.
Some may wave aside Gears' gore as unnecessary, but the way it's implemented really makes a difference. The blood sprays from enemies as they get hit with bullets serves not only to let you know you're doing damage, but also to reinforce the game's animalistic appeal. The blood is, as gross as it sounds, a reward, and a device that meshes the visuals and sound to enhance the player's sense of power.
The story follows Marcus Fenix and his band of Coalition of Ordered Governments militia. They're fighting the Locust Horde, a subterranean race of humanoid monsters on a planet called Sera. While we don't know exactly why the Horde needs to demolish Marcus and friends, we know they're in the process of doing so, and therefore need to be stopped. The rest of the story is more or less uninteresting, serving primarily as a hollow excuse to move you through the different environments. Don't go into this game expecting rounded characters and nuance - they're not there. In fact, don't even expect some basic questions you'll likely have at the game's conclusion to be answered. Then again, this is a high-intensity action game, so all the better some might say.
This isn't a pure shooter like Epic's Unreal Tournament. It's not even a first person shooter. Instead, it fuses a cover system into the fast-paced mix, and shooting takes place from a third-person over-the-shoulder camera. If you press the cover button while near any obstacle, be it a door frame or wall section or whatever, you suck into the obstacle, sort of like if both you and your target were suddenly magnetically attracted. Marcus will automatically take cover once attached, opening up a few options for attack. If it's a good cover spot, you can blindly fire your gun around the corner, though doing so probably won't hit anything. For a more likely chance at scoring a kill, holding the aim button will pop you out into the open, let you squeeze off a clip, and releasing aim sucks you right back into cover.
What's been termed by Epic as the active reload system starts up whenever you hit R to reload manually or a clip has been spent. A meter appears in the top right of your screen with a bar moving from left to right. Should you stop the moving bar, accomplished by again hitting reload, in a bright white section of the meter, you get bonus damage bullets for a limited time afterward and you gun reloads very quickly. Stopping in a less bright white section awards a faster reload, and missing the white sections penalizes you with a much longer reload duration. If you don't try for the active reload at all, your gun reloads normally. Such a system is great fun, since it's a perpetual and useful reward system, and there's some skill involved.
Let's say your chosen cover position suddenly becomes less than ideal. Gears lets you quickly hop from cover to cover, do a quick sprint forward out of cover, or roll backwards to retreat. If you're near another pillar or wall fragment while already in cover, moving to the edge of your current cover will pop up an icon indicating you can do a rapid spin-strafe, keeping you out of harm's way as you automatically suck into the adjacent position. When not attached to a wall, Marcus can somersault forward, roll backward and to the sides, giving him plenty of movement options.
Generally this controls work well, but problems arise in many of the stages because Epic requires the sprint, roll, and suck-to-cover abilities to all be mapped to the same key. Sprinting, called "roadie running" by Epic for some reason, moves the camera down to Marcus' knees as he hurries along with his head ducked low. The effect is to make you feel as though you're running along behind, immersed in the action, and it works well. What doesn't work is that trying to sprint or roll near any kind of cover spot, which are everywhere in this game, will very frequently result in sticking unintentionally to cover. The PC version, unlike the Xbox 360, gives you another method of rolling and sucking to cover through double-tapping W, A, S, or D. Epic fans will likely find this familiar to the scheme for evasive maneuvers in the Unreal Tournament series, but they just don't work as well in Gears of War. Again, it's the problem of getting hung up on environmental obstacles. You'll dive when you mean to take cover, you'll sprint when you meant to hide behind a pillar, and you'll be frustrated far more often than you should be. Thankfully, the double-tapping can be disabled through the control options menu. Now if only Epic would separate cover, run, and roll for Gears 2…
When not fumbling with control imprecision, Gears responds very well to your commands with the mouse and keyboard. The back and forth between shooting and partaking in the active reload mini-game has a definite flow, giving the firefights a unique feel as compared to other third-person shooters. You get standard machine guns, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, and shotguns, along with more exotic weaponry like the torque bow and hammer of dawn. Though part of the arsenal may sound mundane, the top-notch weapon models and effects give them personality, and their individualized reload timers make a surprising difference in how they handle.
Packaged alongside the entertaining gameplay is an impressive feature set, particularly the option for online co-operative play. To make full use of all the online features, however, you'll need a Live gold account, which costs money (Editor's Note: Apparently the preceding two sentences were misinterpreted and caused a bit of a firestorm. To be perfectly clear, you can play co-op with a Silver account.) Though Gears is entertaining, we can't say it's worth signing up for yet another service when so many other titles out there offer full access to their online features with no additional cost. If you sign up for a Live Silver account, which is free, you can still play in non-ranked multiplayer games, though your experience is feature-limited. Assuming you already have an account, don't care about the additional cost, or are content with having limited access to the online functions, then there's plenty here to enjoy. You get five multiplayer modes and 19 maps, which should provide for lots of entertainment. For Achievement junkies, Gears PC gives you points on top of what you may have already earned with the Xbox 360 version. So even if you've beaten the game on Microsoft's console, you get credit for all the same Achievements again on PC.
Fans of the game are sure to be curious about the new single-player content, which consists of five new chapters stuffed into the beginning of Gears' fifth act. It adds an hour or two of extra gameplay, depending on how many times you're killed and forced to restart from checkpoints, and offers much of the same gameplay as you've already had before. Throughout the entirety of the five new chapters you're tailed by a Brumak, the heavily-armed monster Xbox 360 gamers never got to actually battle at Act 4's conclusion. You do get to fire bullets at the guy in this version, and it's a challenging fight playing solo on the either hardcore or insane difficulty settings. When playing co-operatively you'll notice a significant drop in challenge level, mostly because Gears' friendly AI just isn't that good.
Then there's the question of performance. Gears is still a gorgeous game, but in both DX9 and DX10 we noticed it would stutter on a regular basis. Things would run smoothly otherwise, but the regular occurrences of dropped frames were distracting. As for our system, we're running 32-bit Vista on a rig with an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU 2.40GHz, a 768 MB GeForce 8800 GTX, and 2 GB of high-end RAM. Granted, that's not exactly the best kind of rig to determine a game's performance since it's a much more powerful system than most probably have, but that's all we've tried it on so far.
We're still waiting to post a full review, since as of right now there's absolutely nobody online for us to play against. This makes sense, as the game doesn't ship until November 6th, so expect the review to appear sometime around then so we can add in what we think of the new maps, new mode, and multiplayer as a whole. If you're chomping at the bit to know how good the game is, we'll say it's definitely an enjoyable experience. The active reload and shooting mechanics make for a different, satisfying and entertaining style of gameplay, though it's marred by odd control binding limitations. Story and characters are flimsy and poorly realized as well as smothered by a deluge of steroid-infused machismo, though some might actually appreciate and enjoy this style. Think of Marcus Fenix as channeling the spirit of Arnold Schwarzenegger's John Matrix in Commando, where his appeal stems from his total inability to express himself at anything beyond a third-grader's level of intelligence. For all its strengths, we've definitely seen better single-player games release for PC already this year.
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