Gears of War (Xbox 360)

Gears of War is a solid attempt to change the direction of the First-Person Shooter genre, but with a handful of fatal flaws that limit its shelf-life. Don't get me wrong - it's a good game. It's a must-play, in fact, a game every 360 owner should buy and play through - it's a great experience. But I believe in my heart of hearts that this is not the Halo franchise - certainly not the seminal "play forever" game that Halo 2 has become, where the campaign is merely the beginning of what you can get out of it. Gears of War is a campaign game, to be enjoyed in co-op mode, but its flaws limit its shelf life.

Let's face it. There's a lot of hype on the hype wagon over this game, and the fact that it broke sales records speaks not only of how good the marketing is, but of how much trust we as gamers place in Epic Games ability to deliver a quality experience. Unreal Tournament has been, for many years now, the seminal FPS experience; it toppled Quake early and beat it down with every successive release - even the weaker UT2003 release was better than anything id software had to give us. So along comes Epic to change FPSes on consoles, and provide something new and different, and like the dutiful fans we are, we follow.

And they're largely successful. Innovations galore - active reloading is the future of FPS gaming, and the system is smart, clever, and feels brilliant. The heavy dependence on cover fundamentally changes the feel of the game, preventing everyone from being reduced to hopping idiots and making the FPS experience as fun to watch as it is to play - probably for the first time. And the implementation of co-op gameplay throughout the campaign experience will hopefully change the landscape of all first-person games; never has a single-player campaign been so successfully integrated with the co-op experience, with almost every type of co-op catered to; cooperative play works on a single console, across local consoles, across the internet... it just works, at every level - from the hop-in/hop-out instantaneousness of it all right down to the support throughout the campaign to allow for it. It's pervasive, it's perfectly balanced, it's incredibly well done.

The campaign is, bar none, a triumph.

Problems exist, however, and they're exacerbated when played out against other players in multiplayer combat. In many ways, this is surprising - Epic, the experts on multiplayer on the PC, have delivered a lackluster multiplayer experience that, I think, might ultimately doom this game to the pile of "already played it" games.

First and foremost - the control scheme. What starts out feeling really good - being able to get into cover just by pressing a single button - ends up feeling overly-stacked; dodging out of the way and ending up stuck in cover, or getting "sucked in" to things during a roadie run, the "magic button" does too many things. This means there's often a disconnect between what you actually did and what you meant to do, even for the most hardcore of players

Next, the storyline. Part of the problem with the Gears campaign is the use of the engine itself to deliver the experience; characters talk at you, filling you in with bits of story - but they do so over the distances in-game; often, the voices end up being lost in the gun battles, because they're being delivered as if you were standing around that way - the "realism" of the engine takes center stage instead of the storyline. This leaves most of the story to be delivered via cut scenes, which makes it all look pretty thinly strapped together, moments of dialog sparsely punctuating a combat-heavy game, rather than being peppered throughout the experience. Even a contrived mechanic that put earpieces on everyone and cranked the volume of conversations could have been done, or ensuring that the random little epithets of characters during the combat experiences were more readily audible would have reduced the sparseness and tied more of the game into a storylike feel. It's unfortunate that the story took the backseat.

Third, is the "WTF" factor. You'll spend a lot of time wondering where the hell you're supposed to be shooting; that's one of the positive points, in many ways, as it feels decidedly less "shoot what's in front of you" than many games, without resorting to Doom III's scripted-baddie-just-appeared-behind-you feel. However, it's too easy to get lost in the art; the lack of colour can often feel you wondering whether you're shooting at friend or foe, and it can be hard to tell when you're simply facing the wrong direction; add this to level design that, by trying to emphasize the multidirectionality of everything, can sometimes put you in a circus ring of cover-that-doesn't-cover-properly, and you end up in situations where the cover system, which works so well everywhere else, suddenly falls apart. Once you can't tell where you need to be, getting into the right kind of cover from a direction that isn't always easy to discern can lead to a kind of chaotic "aw, screw it" feeling caused by the player fighting the controls instead of fighting the baddies.

Last, and hardest to accept from someone as experienced as the Gears team, is that the HUD isn't what it could have been. Targeting, unless you're in scope mode, feels... like guesswork. Sure, you eventually get a feel for it - but in the meantime, you feel unhelped by the engine, a barrier to play that seems needless. The HUD is also bad at telling you where you're being shot from, which is a hard thing to accept in a game so focused on ensuring you feel like you're being flanked. The visual cues you are offered are often lost in the blood and gore that ends up on screen, covering your ability to see where it is you're being shot from on your own model, while the gears health symbol, appearing mid-screen, makes it hard not only to see where you're shooting, but to see where you're being shot from. Ultimately, the best reason to use the scope isn't to squeeze off that important headshot, it's to give yourself a targeting HUD so that you actually know where you're shooting; and while some may argue that's the whole point, there's definitely a middle road around here somewhere; shooting blind from behind cover (literally by sticking your gun over the top of the wall/sofa/whatever and shooting without looking) feels just as accurate as standing up and shooting at someone - or, more importantly, appears to have the same accuracy, as there's no visual cueing to really help you figure out what hits home and what doesn't. There ought to be more of a difference, and there isn't; that weakens the experience and reinforces the heavy use of scope - something that Fenix in cutscenes almost never does. You don't get rambo moments that feel rewarding.