Mega Derived

Gears of War refuses to sit right in modern gaming. It’s best experienced by not believing the hype that it’s the first true soldier in the high-definition, next-gen war, which probably wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for the fact that our humble Microsoft stuffed the gaming media with so many bank notes they’re liable to explode like gruesome human pinatas. That, and the phenomenal graphics. It’s dubious if this game would have actually been well received at all if it wasn’t for the incredible graphics: exquisite visuals that are so good they cannot be mentioned without at least one superlative. This game looks amazing. There, it’s been said. No game (at time of writing) has graphics that surpass this, a title entirely unrelenting in its visceral charm. When I’m playing I quite often want to gouge my eyes out, as a man so dirty and corrupt should not be allowed to behold such beauty. But running parallel to the luscious visuals you have the game itself which, while fantastic, is not pushing any boundaries. You see, what Gears of War really wants to be is a title from the early 90s.

The engine throws you in to a land of destroyed beauty, a world ruined by war. You view this through the games cast of characters, whom are so muscular that one more protein shake and a simple clench of their butt cheeks would cause their body to spasm so hard their backs would snap. These guys are goddamn buff. And they’re also men. They’re big, tough, armour-clad, angry, gruff, gun-toting badass men. Chromosome XY on full display, rippled and defined muscle groups coated in a light sweaty sheen; battle-hardened faces and wrinkles expressing that they knows the true pain of war. The atmosphere these guys give off is attacking you, the player, in a testosterone fuelled adrenaline rage, working your face with its gigantic behemoth fists until reduced to a miserable pate of blood and sinew. Gears’s protagonist has spent the last god-knows how many years rotting away in a jail cell but is as strong as three Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, in their peak, combined. I imagine that If you challenged Gears of War to a drinking competition it would kick you ass and then sleep with your wife.

Games haven’t been so blatantly homoerotic since the days of Quake II, when the most technologically advanced games were a penis-swinging display of male dominance. Then things changed. Tomb Raider and Half-Life showed up and it wasn’t cool to have incredibly muscular protagonists anymore. Metal Gear Solid snuck in an age of stealthy revolution, evolving any number of Tom Clancy tactical squad based shooters. It never used to be this way, no, your graphical powerhouses used to be a character sneering with delight when you got your hands on the double-barrelled shotgun, then blasting fourteen hundred nightmarish monsters before advancing to the next level. Gears of War might function as a squad based shooter, but it is not one of them. It’s revving up the machismo age of gaming by punching you in the gut and curb stomping you when you’re down. And it doesn’t give a damn what you think about it.

The single-player campaign is a five-act cacophony of destruction. Hurled from one bloodbath to the next, protagonist Marcus Fenix and his posse indulge in a storyline that amounts to a bloody good excuse to blast seven shades of crimson out of an assortment of freaky bug-like villains, fifteen years after their freaky locust army emerged on the planet and started wiping out humanity. A copy of the art book in the limited edition version of the game tells you more about the Gears universe than the game itself, a testament to the sparse moments of storytelling revealed as you play. A traditional FPS style has been replaced by a cover-based third person adventure, and ducking behind anything that will stop a bullet in its path changes the flow of game, giving an extra development to heed: you can blind fire around cover, hoping you’ll hit something, or pop your head out slightly to give yourself a crosshair at the cost of exposing yourself. If you’ve never sampled it before, it takes about twenty seconds to adjust to this cover-oriented gameplay and soon the routine become ingrained into your soul itself (run into room, find cover, press A to hide behind it, begin shooting anything that moves). Perhaps this exposes the games biggest flaw itself, that of repetition. Other than getting cover and then shooting stuff, there’s not much more it has to offer. The story, which has definite potential, is so disparagingly sparse and designed for at least six sequels that it’s hard to be engrossed by it at all and the banter between you and your sidekicks only has to be heard once before it becomes routine. It’s all about hooking you, the gamer: if it gets you from the start, you won’t let go until the end. For the majority, it will be a success. Epic have managed to keep Gears of War sustain its flashy surprises and excellent set-pieces from the start until the end of the game. If Gears of War is a one-trick pony, it’s certainly exceptionally good at performing it.

Other than graphics and cementing in the wonderfully trendy ideal that making the single-player part of games available in an online co-op mode is an exceptionally fine idea, perhaps the first real inkling of next-gen potential comes from the games manual, as CliffyB (semi-famous game developer/lead designer) provides an introduction to the game. Perhaps, in our internet and reality TV driven age, this is a sign of thing to come? Current industry laughing stocks Ken Kutaragi and Kaz Hirai have become notorious internet superstars after E3 2006. Celebrity designers using their name to sell their product is the next logical step and, with development costs at all-time high, publishers will likely be looking to invest in other ways to ensure a games success. Or, perhaps, Gears of War is just an excellent dive back into the blood-filled pool of yesteryear - a time when the idea of chainsaws your enemies into pieces wasn’t a rare sight to behold - and an adrenaline-pumping, albeit basic, shooter that rarely fails to impress.