by:	August 20, 2007

Epic has created a true masterpiece and the first true must own game for the Xbox 360. If you don’t already have this title and own a 360, then go get it right now, you’re losing precious playing time by reading this. I’m wasting it by writing this but I want you to know why you need this game.

You are Marcus Fenix, a supposed war criminal on the world of Sera. Sera is sort of similar to Earth. There are humans who are fairly similar to us. They have cars, guns, gas stations and most of the things that we have. Despite some buildings that look straight out of the 1400s, their world is fairly similar to the one we know today. They also have the Locust. On Emergence Day, the locust came from the ground. The people of Sera, in desperate need of a new form of energy, found it beneath the planet’s surface. But this allowed the Locust to break through. The Locust are a horrible race that shows no mercy. They quickly set to work annihilating the human race, destroying city after city. Humans, in a last ditch effort to defeat the Locusts, destroyed their entire planet except for one city where they took refuge. They hoped this would wipe out the locusts but it did no such thing. Things are getting bad on this planet when Dominic Santiago breaks his old friend Marcus out of a military prison which has been abandoned and is being invaded by the Locust. Given some gear and ready to go, the two break out of the prison and escape to get back into the fight. As someone who was in the audience when Microsoft demoed this breakout at their E3 press conference this year, I was not disappointed when I actually got to play it for myself.



Gears of War focuses largely on a system of cover. If you try to play this like Halo, you’re going to die very quickly. That’s just the nature of this game. Will strategies like strafing help? Yes, but if you’re not going to use cover, you aren’t going to last long. You probably won’t even be able to beat the training level. Since so much of the game depends on this cover system, it’s a good thing that Epic got it right. The cover system is far more intuitive than I imagined and plays beautifully. Your character will quickly adjust to whatever cover you are behind. If it’s short, he’ll get low, if it’s taller, he’ll be at the proper height. You can move behind the cover through an equally intuitive system which basically has you tapping the A button and the direction of where you want to go. Want to jump behind that cover to your left? Just hold the movement stick left and tap A. Want to jump over your current cover(assuming it’s short enough to do so)? Then just hold the stick up and tap A. It’s simple and works brilliantly so you should use it, especially since your enemies will do so as well. Yes, you sometimes see them running in the open but more often than not they’ll use the cover system as well as you do. Flanking becomes a necessity throughout the game in order to survive. Enemy AI actually ramps up as the title goes on, maybe not to the point of acting like an actual human player but not too far off.



The single player could be a bit longer, that’s pretty much my only complaint with it. Comprising only five levels (not short ones mind you, but only five), you can beat Gears of War in under
ten hours. Still, going back and beating the title on insane difficulty, which you unlock upon completing the game, will provide another great challenge, and should take longer than your first go. Still, the single player won’t last forever. You can always go through it in co-op again and again which you probably will, but how often can you play the same thing? The multi-player is what gives this title its legs. Online, this game is the most fun I’ve had on Xbox Live. Although you can only play four on four, it’s more than enough. Some may look at that statistic and say, oh, it isn’t even worth playing when there are 16 vs. 16 games out, but they couldn’t be farther off. The game only offering four on four is actually what makes it great. Unlike in most shooters, the limited numbers make you actually have to strategize. I know there have been a lot of shooters that supposedly make you do this over the years. I was an avid SOCOM 2 player for awhile. But when you have 8-16 guys on a team, it can be hard to actually get a good strategy going, because invariably a couple guys are just going to go out and try to kick butt on their own. Often helps their stats but hurts the team. With only four on a team, players trying that will quickly be mowed down here. The name of the game is working together, creating strategies, figuring out what your opponents are doing and using it. It works brilliantly. There may be only three modes available right now (Epic says they’re already working on additional multi-player combat) but a great selection of well designed levels and the pure fun of those modes makes it enough. Plus, it’s way more satisfying to chainsaw or curb stomp a human player than a computer.