Visuals / Audio
They look gorgeous and the lighting creates a lovely sense of scale and destruction as you march around the various destroyed cities. If you feel that the visuals don’t look ‘right’ colour wise, then from the options menu you can select various colour ‘temperatures’, as seen in FarCry. You can choose from Default, Vibrant, Lucid, and Soft. These do affect the in game palette, and everyone will no doubt find a suitable setting for their LCD/HDTV screens.
The good thing is that this is just the start, as developers get used to this engine they’ll figure out more ingenious ways of harnessing its power, given that Gears of War is Unreal 3.0 engine’s first outing it’s already stirred up a hornets nest on almost every single games review site on the web getting huge rave reviews.
The one thing that a lot of gamers fail to spot is that there are zero loading times. The Unreal 3.0 engine has been built to allow streaming of level data during play, so you never ever notice it. You don’t get any in game stuttering as this happens either. Epic have stated many times that they don’t wish the player to see a single loading screen, which is the truth from what I’ve seen so far. Thanks to multi-threading, the player just won’t even spot it at all. I had completely forgotten about loading screens until Pr pointed this out to me.
Frame rates are a constant 30fps, and never seem to drop even during the most hectic of fire fights. This engine has been so heavily optimised on the 360 that it runs with sheer perfection.
The audio is just as superb as everything else. During fire fights, a superb musical score lurks in the background that gets your andrenaline rushing. It’s easy to ignore this, but when you pause for a moment just to reload you suddenly hear it playing away. Equally as good are the weapon sounds, deep meaty sounds full of bass.
The voice acting from our COG team isn’t anything special. It’s quite comical in places and rather cliché too. As you slowly move through certain sections some of the team will let rip with jokes and one liners. As sad as it may be, I ended up laughing silly to a few of them.
Dom: “Did you hear that?”
Marcus: “It was just the wind”
Dom: “Oh yea? Since when did the wind say Hostiles!”
The thing that scared the hell out of me, was during the first act when I heard a demonic voice say “Huuuuumans!”, I thought I was hearing things again, but it turns out that the locust’s have grasped the concept of rough English.
Multiplayer
GoW features a superbly implemented Co-op mode. With this, you can call in a friend to join you instantly within a single player campaign. It’s seamless and simple and in some cases essential as the AI behind Dom is a bit dumb, he frequently gets killed. You can also play co-op in split screen mode. Locally, you can only play split screen versus, or one-on-one.
You can also go online to compete in GoW’s four-on-four versus matches called Warzone. These are small but hugely enjoyable matches that can be quite tactical at times. There’s two types of mode here. Execution involves getting in close in order to finish off opponents. Instead of a direct death, your opponents are left incapacitated and you have to rush in and ‘finish them off’ with either a melee, curb stomp or a single bullet to the head. In Assassination, the round ends when the captain of the team has been eliminated.
The annoying thing is, like a lot of recent titles you’ll get “Connection Lost” thrown up in your face occasionally. Connection issues are present but acknowledged as an update is on the way from Epic who are noted for their exceptional game support.
Sadly there are no CTF (capture the flag) modes included, which would have really made the multiplayer side of the game shine. Needless to say, four players on a big screen would have been a welcome option. Via system link and Xbox Live, two profiles can sign on and share a screen, at least.
Conclusion
If you’re a Xbox 360 owner, then this game is a massive essential purchase. There’s no doubting that statement. You HAVE to purchase this. Gears of War, was massively hyped up before the game was even ready to play at E3 2006. That hype machine remained strong all the way uptil it’s release, and it didn’t disappoint.
Epic has created something that has raised the bar so high, that I find it difficult to see how future third person shooters can possibly surpass this. The level design is superb and this is what really sets it apart from the rest.
I cannot pinpoint a single fault with any aspect of this game. Gameplay, Visuals, Audio, Controls – everything is top notch. It shows just how much work CliffyB and the staff at Epic put into this title. They kept working away for months upon end to perfect every line of code, to perfect every aspect of the game. Apparently downloadable content is on the way, but I’m not sure how they could improve on an otherwise prestine title. Maybe this content is for multiplayer only? Who knows.
All I do know is that Gears of War has left me hankering for more, and I haven’t even finished it yet. Hopefully the sequel, if there is one in the works will explain the story a bit better – and that is the reason why this game doesn’t receive a full 10/10 from me. I am left wanting more, so much more….
Rating: 9.5/10
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