I know it’s a little late, (10 whole days after the release) but it’s good to start with Gears.
I was kind of disappointed by Gears. Wait, don’t ridicule me yet. I was disappointed mainly by the fact that it comes out at the same time as so many other awesome games like Mirror’s Edge and Left 4 Dead. But also by the fact that I won’t have time to play anything else. So yes, Gears is super awesome.
Everything that CliffyB said he would deliver, he did. The campaign is pretty awesome and the story is strong, but it’s not what you’ll be playing most of the time. The strong point, and I mean the really really strong point, is the multiplayer. Especially horde.
Horde is mind bogglingly fun, and that fun factor increases with the amount of people playing it with you. My friend and I just this weekend made it to wave 40, and then tried for about an hour without success to beat it. That’s what is so fun about it. On the Day One map you go and sit behind the cover above the arcade and wait for some massive boomers to come and shoot rockets at you while you pelt their faces with shotgun ammo. And on wave 40 it takes about a clip and a half (at least) to kill a boomer like that.
On horde if you don’t use teamwork, well, you get screwed. On the later waves there will be some grenadier with a shotty, who will run up to you and blast you and your separated team into little tiny bits while you try to meet up in the middle of the map.
To say the least, horde is hard. But that is what’s fun. It’s just so hard to describe the excitement on your friends’ faces whenever you beat a wave that you’ve been working on for a long time.
What’s really interesting about horde is how Epic did the waves. Each wave, the locust increase in numbers and harder enemies spawn during every wave. But at every tenth wave starting with 11, the locust get either their damage, accuracy, or health increased, but the enemy spawns start back over at level one. It works out very well in the end, even though it doesn’t sound like a big enough challenge. And let me tell you, a grinder with 3 times as much health, twice as much accuracy, and twice the amount of damage is not cool. It’s like fighting RAAM all over again, 70 times.
The online is fun too. Especially Submission (which should have been called Meat-flag, as Epic originally announced). You take down a shotgun wielding AI, take them as a hostage, and drag them to a capture zone, where you win the round. But all of the online is very fun. The connections are almost always seamless, and the games are intense. Really intense. The matches are fun on almost any map, as long as your team is not the one getting curb-stomped and chain-sawed all of the time.
There is not really anything bad I can say about Gears multiplayer, except for one problem my friends and I were having: It takes forever to find a team to play with, and then a team to play against. I expect that the problem should be fixed soon, but I’m not sure if it was because of the limited amount of people who got the game in the first week, or because of a network problem. Whatever it is, it should get better any time soon.
So yes, go and buy Gears right now, if you don’t have it already. It’s easily one of the best games I’ve played on the 360 since Oblivion and Halo and it is worth the 60 dollars. Hell, it’s worth a lot more than 60 dollars. So go and buy it, before the price goes up.
Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
Oh yeah i forgot a few things. The difficulties. The difficulties are now Casual, Normal, Hardcore, and Insane, which you can’t even play until you’ve beaten the game at least once. The gap in difficulty from normal to insane really is insane. Most of the time you don’t even go down, you just die. Add that to the fact that the locust have up to four times the amount of health as you, it is pretty damn hard.
I also forgot to talk about how the story is strong. The addition of the search for Maria, Dom’s wife, adds a lot to the game. You really can relate to Dom, you know, especially if you’ve lost your wife in a war against a terrible alien species. Besides that off shoot, the main story is very good. At some times you won’t get why you are where you are, but the blood and violence lets you forget that and just have fun doing whatever it is that you’re doing.
Well, now that the entry is actually done, go and buy Gears. You’ll thank me.
Pwn First, Ask Questions Later 