GST: A Brutally Honest Single Player Review of Gears of War

Gears of War is literally one of the most successful franchises on the XBOX 360 and has a rabid fan base of gamers that have dumped days upon weeks upon months into the multiplayer aspects of the experience.  I however, will not be reviewing the multiplayer in Gears of War.  I am diving into the single player to see if it can stand on its own.  I’m also going to try and refrain from making chest high walls references.

I found, despite desperately not wanting to, a lot wrong with the beloved title both objectively and subjectively.  It does some things well, but the 94 it holds on Metacritic was kind of shocking after playing through the entire campaign. I will spare you the rundown of the story since I wouldn’t dream of giving away the ending to a story that’s barely intelligible in the first place.  It follows all of the boiler plate rules for a sci-fi shooter.  Everything from the character design to vehicles to plot and settings reek of B-quality sci-fi game stench.  Nothing in the lore is really explained nor is interesting.  The story is told in the style of “if it shoots at you, shoot back” and the macho gang of characters might as well be WWE wrestlers in costume.

Speaking of character design, Gears has a real problem with all the characters looking the same from a far.  About a dozen times during the game I was taken out by what I thought was my partner only to find out it was an enemy.  Everything, short of a few small throwaway enemies, has the same build (the build of the Thing from The Fantastic Four).  I get the feeling that all of the characters sat on the design table a bit too long and could have used a bit of scaling back.

The dialog sounds much like something you hear on a middle school playground with the swears sounding too forced and the script not being clever enough to be considered mature.  These characters might as well be talking with their penises.  When the story plays out in the end, I really wasn’t sure what I had just accomplished.  What I’m really trying to say is that the narrative is laughable and that it is only compounded by the ridiculousness of the characters.  The enemies have even less personality and the final boss you fight has a name that isn’t given to you until right before the fight, nor are you informed of the importance of the character you are killing, nor that it’s the final freaking boss.

This brings me to length.  Gears of War is five chapters long.  That’s it, only five chapters.  Each one can be completes in about 45 minutes if you haul ass.  That puts the length of your single player experience at 3-4 hours, give or take, considering your skill level.  Sure, you can go back and play through on co-op and on a higher difficulty level, but what it comes down to is five chapters.  Maybe Epic though that if they make the game super hard, they don’t have to make it super long.

Speaking of Hard, yeah Gears is hard.  Usually I can hang in pretty well on the normal setting of games, but apparently Gears’ normal setting is actually its casual (or easiest setting).  I was getting my ass handed to me very quickly on Hardcore, partially due to your character only being able take like 3-5 shots before you go down and partially due to the clumsy control scheme.  Being a third person shooter whose camera and control scheme is modeled after Resident Evil 4, doesn’t really have any benefits here.  About half way through, it became very apparent that the only reason the game is 3^rd person, is so you can hide behind shit.  It’s done as a way to exploit the much hyped “cover” mechanic.

I like the cover mechanic, but everything else is slow and unresponsive.  When I want to duck, I dive, when I want to shoot lefty I shoot righty and god forbid I need to pull out my chainsaw quickly.  With the enemies killing you within seconds, getting a chainsaw melee kill is nearly impossible at times.  And why is there not a dedicated grenade button, and why do I have to choose it like it’s a gun?  This slows the pace of the game down and has you fumbling with the accuracy of the 360’s D-pad.  Here’s a suggestion Epic, get rid of the visible arch and flight path of grenades and replace it with a one button grenade throw, you can thank me later.

I found Gears to be really glitchy, I had to restart from the last check point a few times because I got caught behind a door that wasn’t supposed to be open yet.  This may not be representative of the entire experience, but I died a lot of times without ever knowing what killed me…needless to say, infuriating.

Finally my last Gears of War complaint is directed towards the weapons, most specifically the Lancer.  As stated before, this gun has a chainsaw on it.  That’s a great idea, but if it doesn’t respond half the time you press the chain saw button it doesn’t do you any good.  On top of that, the weapons in general just feel weak.  Epic definitely needs a new sound department.  I have stepped on bubble wrap with better pop than these guns.  Even in the cut scenes when you see Marcus and co shooting them with one hand from behind cover, it looks like they are shooting water guns.  Then again I think water guns might have more kick.  Kick is artificially added when using the gun, but both the feel and effect of many of the guns are puny.  You would think the Gears army would have come up with better weaponry, since the current weapons don’t take the enemies down in one shot.  Except the shotgun, the shot gun is awesome, but if you ever let an enemy get close enough to you to use it then you are already dead.

Gears isn’t all bad, graphically, it’s stunning especially when you get later in the game. However, most of the landscapes are super flat.  The entire campaign has a good sense of action and I’m sure that translates well into the competitive multiplayer.  The faults that Gears brings to the table are so great that don’t see how it’s a triple A title.  In a world with an almost infinite number of shooters you could play, I don’t recommend Gears (at least for the single player).  A lot of the control and balancing problems with single player would still be present in the multiplayer, but I really don’t see how the multiplayer can make up this kind of deficit in quality.

Verdict: Play Something Else