THA | Hamst3r.com

Thoughts On Gears of War for PC (Part 2 – Final)

I beat ACT 5 in Gears of War tonight. The first half of ACT 5 was difficult while the final stages of ACT 5 were nearly a walk in the park.

The PC exclusive stage where you fight the hulking Brumak pictured below was pretty cool. Dumb kept running over to the Brumak where he would be stepped on. It was amusing to see him run straight into a stomping foot every time I had to retry the level.

Due to the redundant nature of Gears of War, there’s almost nothing new to comment on…it just kept doing the same thing over and over for the last two ACTs of the game. Oh no, locust. Oh no, emergence hole. Oh no, Snipers. Oh no, more locust. Oh no, another emergence hole. Every single room was a battle and nearly the same battle as the last room. “Jack, rip this door open” and an emergence hole would spawn – it was extremely predictable.

One thing to comment on though is that there were several places that lacked consistency. I’ll skip all the piddly shit like walls you couldn’t lean up against like every other wall or pillars you couldn’t look around in one area when you could in another. Let’s just jump straight to the beefy one…

The Escape key:

In Gears of War, when you press the Escape key, it pauses the game. this works during gameplay, during moments where they take control of your character or direct your vision for a moment and even during cutscenes. Seems like it works anywhere…you press the Escape key, the game pauses. Not so. Guess where it doesn’t work? THE ENDING CINEMATIC IN THE GAME. Yes, that’s right. If you press Escape, like I did, during the final cinematic, it skips past it and goes to the credits. There is no way to pause the ending cinematic! I wanted to pause it so that my roomate could check out the ending as she had been watching me play the game up until then, but sadly, once you’ve skipped the cinematic, there’s no way to go back and view it again without having to replay the final boss fight against General Raam. Gears of War doesn’t have gallery mode like Resident Evil 4 or a convenient QUICKSAVE system where you can save when you kill the final boss.

So, I tried to beat General Raam again…I mean, it only took me two tries the first time, I could surely do it again. It turns out I couldn’t do it a second time, so I gave up after a couple tries, uninstalled Gears of War and watched the ending on Youtube.

Overall Gears of War was pretty good, but I don’t feel it was as superb as many of the other shooters I’ve played and I’ve played a lot of them. Gears of War was definitely worth playing, don’t get me wrong…it just wasn’t as good as say, Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R. or Bioshock. I’ll even explain why in one very short sentence:

There’s no reason to fight in Gears of War.

Aside from getting to the end of the game, why the heck am I fighting? The game didn’t establish any reason to care about what’s going on. See, they thought they did, with that scene where General Raam comes in and stabs your squad leader, which ends up making you the leader of the team. The problem is, who cares? It’s not like they developed that character before he died – I don’t even remember his name. He was that important, you see.

They also didn’t demonize General Raam. He appeared only two or three times in the entire game, so there’s no good reason to despise him or want to kill him other than the fact that you’re playing a video game and that’s the point of a video game…to beat the boss and win.

Alternatively, In Half-Life 2 there is a very clear enemy, Dr.Breen. The combine aren’t the main enemy, even though they’re the ones with the guns. Breen is the primary focus…and you get to listen to his weaselly comments as he puts you down the entire game until all you want to do is find and kill him. Once you finally kill him, it’s extremely satisfying. Gears of War lacks that satisfaction. General Raam died, oh, ok – didn’t know him anyways, just another locust.

F.E.A.R. had Paxton Fettel taunting you the entire game and messing with your head. Bioshock had a similar thing going on with Andrew Ryan. By the time I got to them, all I wanted to do was shoot them in the head and then continue shooting their lifeless corpses.

You need a real antagonist. System Shock had Shodan. Call of Juarez had Juarez. Portal had GLaDOS. PREY had, “Mother”.

It doesn’t have to be just a single boss either, like the examples above. You can make the entire enemy force into a despicable mob that you want nothing more than to make extinct. They have to do horrible things though, which the Locust never did. I never saw the Locust killing civilians, or torturing anyone. It never showed them destroying the world I was in. The story skipped all that. The Locust only killed that one guy. If they killed anyone else important, I sure missed it.

The enemies need to do things…horrible horrible things…like kick puppies and inject the heads of infants with Easy Cheese. If all they do is swarm in and mindlessly attack you the whole game with no real reason or premise, then there’s no reason to care – there’s no reason to fight – you’re just playing an arcade game.

Gears of War could have greatly benefited from some setup at the beginning of the game, showing your family being slaughtered by Locust hordes, or locusts executing humans in grotesque manners. But it didn’t. The game just starts off with you in a jail cell. You walk out of it and go straight into a battle. EPIC, That’s not an engrossing way to start a game…you need to try harder than that!

Verdict: good, but not great.