Review: Gears of War 3

As a critic, I’ve found the most challenging reviews to write involve games to which I have a particular emotional attachment, and this is certainly the case for the Gears of War franchise. As long as I’ve had an Xbox 360, Gears of War has been a constant and dependable companion. Sure, every once in a while I’d run off and have a fling when a sexy new Call of Duty game came along... but once the thrill wore off, I’d realize all those new frags were meaningless, and soon I’d be stomping Locusts again like I never left.

Now Gears of War 3 is out, the final entry in Epic Games’ blockbuster trilogy. As excited as I’ve been about this moment, I’ve resolved to do my best to be objective. Given all that we’ve been through together, I’m sure my girl will be furious about being treated like any other release. All I have to say is that I’m sorry, babe... but this is business.

Design: 5/5

In any well-established franchise—especially those with a strong multiplayer component—each sequel is a delicate balance between innovation and tradition. Gears of War 3 finds this balance well, leaving the majority of the essential play-control elements unchanged, while making a few subtle yet important tweaks. Pick up a controller, and initially you may feel like you’re still playing Gears of War 2; however, you’ll quickly notice that things feel more refined and responsive. For example, the button mechanics for actions such as picking up weapons and reviving allies have been slightly adjusted, so now the next time one of your comrades takes an unhealthy number of bullets to the head, you’re much more likely to help him up as opposed to accidentally rummaging through the ammo crate upon which he happened to lie bleeding.

Hey, you can cook him, but I sure as hell ain’t gonna eat him.

Of course, there’s the requisite bevy of new ordnance, including the Digger Launcher (which fires small, highly-explosive Locusts that burrow under cover), the One-Shot (a heavy instant-kill sniper rifle), and the Vulcan Cannon (a two-person chain gun setup, where one person shoots while the other feeds ammo using some sort of bizarre hand-crank device that looks like it also doubles as an ice cream maker).  These new additions are fun, and so far appear to be limited enough in power and availability as to not alter the core gameplay too substantially.

One of the biggest changes involves “Horde mode”, a staple of the Gears of War 2 experience. While you and four friends still get to fend off waves of attacking Locusts, you now have the opportunity to establish a dedicated base, complete with fortifications such as razor wire and turrets. Instead of points (and gore and self-satisfaction), killing Locusts yields rewards of cold hard cash (also, gore and self-satisfaction). After each wave, you can use your newly earned wad to repair and upgrade your sweet fort. Oh, one more thing—every 10th wave is now a “boss wave”, which in my experience usually meant that before his gruesome demise, my character spent his last few terrible seconds of life as a pair of Brumak slippers.

Artistic: 5/5

It’s hard to know where to stand with the visuals in Gears of War 3. From a technical standpoint, everything looks jaw-droppingly amazing, but I consider this to be more of an engineering accomplishment than an artistic one. However, in terms of pure aesthetics, I didn’t find most of the locations in the campaign to be all that compelling. One issue is that at this point, the world of Sera has been wrecked more times than I was during my freshman year of undergrad, and thus most areas have devolved into the same uniform collection of gray rubble. Although there are some occasional breaks from this monotony (such as the setting for the last act), for the most part I wasn’t particularly impressed by too many of the new locales. 

It took some hard work, but designers of Gears of War 3 were able to make Marcus look about 20-30% more haggard.

The enemies, however, are a different story. There are a ridiculous number of new foes, and most of them look pretty bad-ass. Particularly impressive are the many new Locusts of the Lambent variety, which are so packed full of Imulsion that upon dying they explode in a spectacular display of glowing ooze, like some sort of toxic piñata.

Narrative: 3/5

In trying to trying to describe the plot and dialogue of Gears of War 3, I felt it necessary to strive for the same delicate blend of dramatic sensibility and elegant wordsmithing that surely went into the game itself. Here’s what I came up with: “It’s okay.” If you happen to care at all about the fate of Sera, then the campaign does offer a few answers and a bit of closure, but don’t expect to see any Marcus Fenix soliloquys showing up in the drama curriculum anytime soon.

In a lot of ways, Gears of War 3 feels like it’s just running down the checklist of action game clichés. Noble battlefield sacrifices? Check. Comic relief through gallows humor? Check. Newly-introduced NPCs dying quick and horrible deaths? Check. On the other hand, perhaps I should cut the writing a little slack. If you consider the characters, perhaps it’s actually spot-on. I mean, these guys are soldiers—and not the macabre “war is a terrible tragedy, but I’ll fight because I must” kind of soldier, but the kind who gleefully crush skulls under their boots while cracking jokes. I have to assume that they’re not too particularly thoughtful or self-reflective, because otherwise I’d start to worry that they were total sociopaths.

Gameplay: 5/5

As I’ve already mentioned, Gears of War 3 sees adjustments to both the multiplayer and Horde modes, and the result is a noticeably improved gameplay experience. Add to this full four-player co-op in the campaign and a new albeit brief “Beast mode” (basically the reverse of Horde, wherein you play as the Locust), and you’ve got a total package that should keep anyone entertained for quite some time. In fact, while playing the game I got a very real sense that the developers tried to make a game that one could continue to enjoy for years, and so far it seems to me like they achieved that goal.

Once you’ve crushed a Locust’s head with a Silverback mech, you won’t want to crush one with anything else.

Summary

When it comes down to it, when evaluating any video game there’s really only one question that matters: “Is it fun?” After all, you can’t spell “video game” without “game”. (Or, I suppose, without “demo”, “evade”, or “amigo”, although none of those words are at all relevant to my current point.)

If you enjoyed playing any of the previous Gears of War games, then you can rest assured that this one improves upon them in nearly every way, including being more “fun”. Alternatively, if you haven’t played Gears before, but the prospect of exploding one of your friends into a pile of bloody chunks with a short-range shotgun blast (and then having a good laugh about it) appeals to you, then now is as good a time as any to jump on the bandwagon.

The Best Hangover Cure

As should be obvious from the date of my last post, my blog has been on a bit of a break while I finish up my Ph.D. degree. However, I hit a major milestone this past weekend when I turned in a nearly final draft of my thesis to my committee. After doing a bit too much celebrating on Sunday night, I nursed a brutal hangover on Monday using an old family remedy: fluids, aspirin, and the Gears of War 3 beta.

My initial reactions are pretty positive. As one might expect, not much of the game is fundamentally different from its predecessors. I was able to jump in and play as though I’d never left, like these months of pretending to love Black Ops were just a bad dream. It seems like they refined the button overloading a little bit; for example, you now have to hold buttons down to do certain things, which reduces the chances of your character absently rifling through an ammo crate when you want him to be assisting a dying teammate instead.

Also, there appear to be two new default weapons. The first was a “Retro Lancer” which has a bayonet instead of a chainsaw. I think the balance here is a faster instant-kill melee, at the cost of a lower shooting accuracy. Instead of your standard Gnasher, there is now the alternative of a sawed-off shotgun, which can instantly turn anything into a pile of bloody chum, but can only do so one shell at a time.

You must get a tax break if you include a mall as one of your multiplayer maps, because it seems to be all the rage these days.

A few other new weapons I found scattered about were an incendiary grenade and a “Digger Launcher”. The latter adds a nice twist to the cover-based combat, as it can burrow under walls to explode an enemy hiding on the other side.  If you have a terrible sense of direction like me, then you’ll be pleased to see that the loading screen includes a map of the current multiplayer level, complete with locations of where to find these precious toys. Just don’t expect to be the only one making a beeline for the nearest Mulcher.

Although not much has changed on the surface, that doesn’t mean that a lot of new work hasn’t gone into the game. I get the impression that designing a good multiplayer experience is kind of a thankless job, as people only notice when something is unbalanced, such as when a map is poorly designed or a particular weapon is too powerful. Though things look good right now, it will take some time to see whether Gears of War 3 gets it just right.  Of course, that’s why they have these beta tests… and if it means I don’t have to wait until the fall to get my Gears on, then I’m certainly happy to help.

Review: Bulletstorm

In the supper of video gaming, first-person shooters are the red meat: bloody, delicious, and unlikely to be dethroned as our dominant form of sustenance, no matter how many heart attacks they cause. Our latest helping of hamburger is Bulletstorm, an FPS from People Can Fly (makers of Painkiller) and Epic Games (of Gears of War fame). Following the adventures of Grayson Hunt—a former military assassin turned space pirate and part-time Christian Slater impersonator—Bulletstorm invites you the abandoned resort city of Elysium, where you get to carve a brutal, limb-strewn swath through waves of mutants as you “kill with skill”.

Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the seventh installment in the Call of Duty series.  Set this time in the 1960’s, it shows that the only thing with more longevity than the Call of Duty franchise itself is American nostalgia for the Cold War. I’d say things have gotten pretty bad when game developers start to think, “You know what people might enjoy fighting again? The Vietnam War.”

Like the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 single-player campaign, you play as a variety of characters, though most of the action centers around Studies and Observation Group (SOG) operator Alex Mason. During the campaign, you attempt to uncover a Russian plot to... ah, who are we kidding? Anyone who plays this game either (1) got it for the multiplayer, or (2) accidentally purchased it because they got it confused with a Splinter Cell game.

Shooting Up

I recently jumped on the Call of Duty: Black Ops bandwagon. (Or maybe just I fell off of the “I’m too cool to play the new CoD game” bandwagon—either way, I’m certain there was a wagon involved.) Regardless, the irony of this choice is threefold, because that’s as many fold as I feel like discussing right now.

I prefer to take the coward's way out, but I usually get executed first.

Irony the First: I typically avoid first-person shooters, largely because I’m not very good at them. I feel like there was some special gym class in high school or something where they taught everyone how to be good at shooters, and I happened to be absent that day. (I was probably pretending to be sick so I could play Final Fantasy II.) Sometimes in multiplayer my opponents don’t even shoot at me; they just point and laugh. In past years, however, games like Half-Life and Bioshock have worked to subvert my disdain by exploiting my love of RPG’s and trying to win me over with their amazing characters, environments, and story arcs. Slowly but surely, these games have paved the way for me toward more typical FPS’s.

Irony the Second: whenever my ego is feeling robust enough that I’m willing to subject myself to an FPS, I usually tend towards ones with more of a sci-fi flare. To me, games like Call of Duty seem like little more than the following: choose one from a collection of nearly identical guns, and then use it to murder a bunch of nearly identical guys in a series of nearly identical environments. I prefer the greater variety offered by games like Halo (where you fight against an invading alien force called the Covenant, which is trying to wipe out all of mankind), or Half-Life (where you fight against an invading alien force called the Combine, which is trying to wipe out all of mankind), or Gears of War (where you fight against an invading alien force called the Locusts... okay, so maybe the variety argument isn’t a good one).

Irony the Third: I only just got Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a few weeks ago, despite repeatedly telling my friends I wasn’t really interested. I actually only got the game because a friend of mine saw it in a used games store in Virginia and mailed it to me. Now, instead of not playing MW2 with them because I don’t own it, I’m not playing MW2 with them because I’ve moved on to Black Ops. What an asshole.

Anyways, I have to admit that the Black Ops multiplayer is addictive enough that I foresee myself playing it for quite some time. Maybe with enough practice I can graduate from “guy who gets knifed in the back while running around like a jackass” to “guy who gets knifed in the back while hiding in the corner trying to drive a stupid exploding RC car”.