Gears of War is a MANLY game for MANLY men. The MANLY main
characters shout MANLY things at each other while shooting MANLY guns at MANLY
monsters. It's all a bit overwhelmingly MANLY if you ask me.
Yes, Gears of War is an older game. It was released in ...
(checks) ... oh. 2006. Why am I.. a retrospective! A postmortem, if you will!
Sorry. Gears of War is an over-the-shoulder, third-person,
cover-based MANLY shooter, released in 2006 for the X-Box 360, then rather
haphazardly ported a year later to the platform of my choice, PC, with an
extended campaign and some extra multiplayer maps. In addition to the usual
performance issues and Games for Windows Live fun, there was also a digital
certificate that expired in January of 2009, rendering the game unplayable for
a lot of people until they patched it.
The MAC version, and subsequent sequels on PC, were never
released due to poor sales of the first game. Cliffy B, well-known and
out-spoken games developer insists that this was, obviously, due to piracy and
not at all to the game being out on a popular and newly-released console for an
entire year before reaching PC, and the port not being particularly well done.
My impression of this game suffers from having played the PC
version of Bulletstorm, Epic's joint venture with People Can Fly (of Painkiller
fame), and spiritual, er, side-story to the Gears of War franchise, also
featuring MANLY men shooting MANLY guns at MANLY monsters while shouting MANLY
things at each other. But it also has Jennifer Hale, a color palette of more
than three shades of grey, and is first-person and therefore not as reliant on
MANLY hiding behind chest-high walls while MANLY monsters shoot at you. Which,
coincidentally, failed on PC as well, because of piracy (obviously) and not because
the demo was released 2 months after the game, and the game suffered horrible
frame-rates on resolutions that were not multiples of 8.
As I write this, I'm most of the way through Act 4 of 5
acts, and I'm not entirely sure of what the story is. Maybe the game skipped a
cutscene early on, but there are monsters.. not sure if they are aliens or not,
but they're ugly, and they come out of holes in the ground, and there's some
kind of resonance machine, and Marcus has a landing strip on his chin. Which is
totally MANLY. The game has overwhelmed me with an eye-soothing color palette
of at least 5 colors, including grey, dark grey, light grey, dull yellow, and
dull green. And possibly some brown, but I admit that might have been a mixture
of grey and brown.
Has the game aged well?
Not really, no. I've played several games since, from the
forgettable Inversion to the detestable Kane & Lynch 2, to the combat
sections of Mass Effect 3, that do this style of gameplay just as well, if not
better. The hyper-masculine protagonists feel awkward and forced, and the plot
can be resolved in pretty much two sentences. It's not a pretty game, and even
if the character models are well done you can tell the developers had to skimp
in other places like color palettes, enemy diversity, and AI to get those shiny
character models.
I'm honestly going to have to say to give this one a pass.
Maybe the sequels are good. Until someone hands me an X-box, I'll just have to
look elsewhere for my chest high walls.
[Gears of War for PC is available for more than it's worth
at this point at next to nowhere.]
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