Gears of War - Second Play - Story Complete

I’ve thought a lot about my gaming experiences since I’ve joined The Game Chair. A lot of times I sit back and I look at a game and ask myself “What about that gaming moment affected me in this way?” It is these experiences that are driving the gaming industry forward. The month of November in the year 2006 will be a monumental point in gaming history for many gamers because of these experiences. Systems like the Playstation 3 and the Wii have hit stores and created a buzz. Lines started as early as one week in advance of launch in my little Midwestern corner of the country known as Fargo, ND. In the middle of all this hoopla and bravado was the release of Gears.

Well maybe it didn’t just come in quietly in the night and sweep the country by storm. Microsoft got behind Gears and really sold us this game. The hype has been there and I’ve done a lot of reading. Is the hype justified? I think so.

I think Gears has something that I’ve only found in mostly RPG’s and Tom Clancy games, and that’s a decent story. Oh yeah, I can’t forget Halo and Halo 2. They have stories that have really pulled me into the game and actually made me feel attached to the characters. When Joe-Schmoe Gear gets killed I actually feel a little bit sorry for him. Sorry enough to chase down the responsible Locust and introduce him to my chainsaw bayonet.

The story can seem very short on cut scenes and on information. This is what I feel really creates the feeling of being lost and attaching yourself to the story. I found that as I experienced the atrocities first hand with the main character Marcus Fenix, I became invested in seeing out the objectives he was tasked with. The action is mixed in with the story telling so it becomes very hard to put down the controller. As a cut scene breaks, I was left with Locusts trying place a bullet delicately between my eyes. I loved the single player story. I feel that Epic flawlessly meshed action and an ambitious story about the downfall of man into something I found very interesting. Although the story is a very strong aspect of the game, I found that in certain areas it left me disappointed.

My disappointment came at a couple of junctures; the first one being where the game begins. In my mind I thought that Emergence Day would be the actual start of Gears. With all the mis-leading hype about how Emergence Day was coming I’m sure you can understand how I felt robbed. It is a fairly small point for me to make, but a point I wanted to share. Secondly, for me to figure out what happened prior to Marcus’ 14 year stint in a prison on the Jacinto Plateau, the last stronghold of Humanity on the planet Sera, I had to read the manual as well as the artistic book included in my Limited Edition of Gears. I won’t speak for most gamers, but I do not tend to pick up an instruction manual on anything. That could possibly be my maleness coming through but I find that when I am highly anticipating something my first thought is: Let’s do this. Something at the very beginning would have been nice. Cut scenes of a trial placing Marcus in prison, or the destruction of E-Day would have been excellent.

Finally the ending made me remember another game where I had enjoyed the story so much that when the action finally ended I was left asking the question, “What?!?!” That game was Republic Commando. In Gears I was also left with a cliff-hangar ending, foaming at the mouth for more. In total, Gears is 5 acts with approximately 3-4 chapters per act. There was never an indication of acts except when the little achievement beep goes off at the end of a particular chapter and a small boss battle. With the fluidity of how the game progresses, I was never pulled out of the moment. That is were next-generation gaming should be with their stories. Nothing should be introduced that does not keep you in the game. I can not remember a loading screen except when loading my saved game. There were a couple of times in co-op that I found a loading second. Yes, a loading second. A second where the word loading shows up very discretely on the bottom left corner of the screen. There and then it’s gone.

I’ve enjoyed the co-op mode for Gears. That has actually been one of my biggest draws to the Tom Clancy Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series. The ability to team up with a few of my friends and play cooperatively through missions is very satisfying. Especially when the alternative is frustrating AI teammates in the games that I listed above. The AI teammates are no Jake when it comes to thinking skills and the ability to react to dynamic factors. But they do react based on a fight or flight idea. They either stay and fight, or they run away. They will do this independently of the main character, but you can give them orders to take cover or to press the attack if they do not happen to realize they have an advantage or disadvantage. I sat back at one point and watched how the AI reacted and it seemed simple enough. They found cover and returned fire. As the Locust AI began to retreat my AI teammates would push forward. After re-grouping the Locust would flank and then my teammates would begin to back up till they gained a new advantage to push forward again.

They are never perfect, which is okay. I don’t expect perfect AI teammates and they do a sufficient job of holding their own against the Locusts which is all one can really ask of them. I found in the co-op moments that it’s hard to expect even human allies to perform much better. Not to say that my co-op partners were bad because they were in most cases performing better than I was. It does say a lot about the difficulty of the enemies and some of the situations that were created for the game. Co-op has been pretty much everything that I expected. Playing with my friends is why I purchased an Xbox and it is why I continue to pay for Live. It was very unfortunate that there is not the possibility of four player co-op but I can understand why it was not included because of story problems.

I did find a bug which became very annoying though. It had to do with the chainsaw bayonet and getting firmly rooted to the ground. I can’t really tell exactly what I had to do to get myself rooted there. Just that the only way to fix it was to reload from the last checkpoint. This can be very frustrating especially because it only seemed to happen to me playing as Dominic. It would randomly pop-up from time to time, and I could not pin it to a specific spot on the map. I could kill the enemies in different spots, engage them differently with the chainsaw but still end up rooted. It became frustrating because I had grown to love cutting my opponents into chunks of meaty flesh with my sweet bayonet. Sometimes I would chainsaw the same monster twice in a row and get stuck the first time, but not the second. I even got stuck twice on the same monster, cut him the third time, but found myself rooted after embedding my chainsaw in the one behind him. I have never experienced this glitch in my adversarial multiplayer, solo or split-screen gaming sessions.

So far Gears of War has come through on every level that I would expect. It features solid gameplay with excellent story telling and enough graphical detail to leave you staring at buildings for hours. My hope is that through the Xbox Live Marketplace I can be treated to what Valve has called episodic gaming. I am hoping for more single player storyline and I feel that Epic has the opportunity to drive home an excellent story and keep a large fan base by using this new idea. If they can do that and keep it in the $10 -$15 price range (800-1200 micro points) they’ll have hit a sweet spot with gamers and remain on their most played lists for a long time. Unless they decided to seriously change the gameplay there will be no reason to force us to buy a Gears 2.

Where Epic goes from here, I don’t know. Where I go is online to match my wits with other gamers from around the world in some Gears action. Keep your head down and watch your back as I prepare my last article for Gears about its online multiplayer action.