thenew.oddend.com

To reassure you, Gears of War is awesome. It has its bugs, especially in the coop campaign mode, but that can not spoil the huge amount of fun.

As I mentioned yesterday we bought the game for the Xbox at the office and jumped straight into the HD next-gen sweetness. The game world is nothing short of gorgeous. Although the grungy and very crisp textures may get to you at times, I was not too bothered by it.

It took a while to master the controls, especially the contextual a button. Once you get the hang of it, it does make you feel skilled in your movements. As a mainly first person shooter gamer, the over the shoulder view is something to get used to as well. It makes melee combat quite chaotic, but then again that’s what melee combat is like. Talking about melee combat, bashing an enemy with your gun or ripping them apart with the chainsaw bayonet is very rewarding.

The storyline is nothing to get excited about, Gears is no Half-life 2. The enemy’s AI makes up for it and every fight is challenging. The cut scenes do not disrupt the flow of the game too much. The partial cut scenes involving forced slow walking and some talking over the com do get annoying when they take place at the start of a checkpoint. If you die a couple of times, you get tired of repeating those little sequences every time.

The coop campaign mode is a lot of fun. We played it split screen and that worked well on a big HD TV. Apart from two cases in which a scripted event would not trigger, gameplay was smooth. Especially the first berserker level took some team effort and was tons of fun. We frantically avoided the big girl, got knocked down a couple of times, revived each other and both bolted for the doorways. Best part so far in my opinion.

Many argue that Gears of War is not very innovative. This game deviates from the first person shooter genre with the ‘over the shoulder’ view and ‘take cover and shoot’ tactics. Other than that, it is a shooter game, but in my opinion a very solid, fun and exciting one.