Gears of War

I'm slow. Gears of War 2 comes out in a couple of days and I just finished Gears of War. I started to play it 18 months ago or so but it didn't capture me, then. It was . . . y'know, a shooter.

For me, game play is paramount and the shooter interface for Gears of War is real good. The characters move believably from cover to cover. But, in the end, it was just a shooter game. The game play was swiped almost entirely from kill.switch - a deeply mediocre game - and with all "tactical shooters" Gears of War suffers from a lack of variety. You kill something, you go to the next area and you kill s'more guys. There are a few cut scenes, but the characters are never developed and, even at the end, I wasn't sure what the hell I was doing or why I was doing it - other than, y'know, there was an ugly alien enemy whose genocide was the point of the game. I got that.

Am I the only person who finds the prevalence of genocide in these kinds of games disturbing? Just about every sci-fi shooter there is seems to incorporate genocide as the only legitimate end of the conflict! It's pretty disturbing, but that's the goal of Gears of War. Wipe out the ugly enemies.

There's one scene where you have to drive a vehicle. One. Makes me wonder why the bothered to put it in! And just when you think you might get to drive another vehicle . . . just another lame cut scene.

So, while the graphics were good, and the shooting interface was good, the game suffers - like many shooters - from monotony. Go down another corridor. Kill another horde of faceless enemies. Move on.

That kind of ethos is becoming increasingly rare, too. Most shooter games - such as the Halo and Half-Life 2 games - throw some vehicles into the mix. Halo and the Half-Life games also have something else that Gears of War almost entirely lacks: a story. Oh, sure, Halo's story is kind of de rigeur and contrived - evil aliens to destroy in an environment that's gonna blow at any second - but it's there. Half-Life 2's story is actually reasonably cool, and it has Alix and Dog and Alix and Dog are amongst the coolest video game characters ever. But who is Marcus Fenix and why should we care about him and his tiny headed friends? What is the world they're on and why are these guys coming out of the ground to kill them? Who fuckin' knows. I don't and I played the game.

Well, not all of the game. I decided that the final boss was just too annoying to beat. Maybe if I had any investment whatsoever in the characters, setting or outcome - which I read online and is deeply predictable - I would have slogged through to the end. The final boss in almost any video game is going to be annoyingly difficult, because most game designers mistake "difficult" for "interesting". Undoubtedly, many gamers, particularly those who identify as "hardcore", like hard games, much like marathoners like running 26 miles at a stretch. I'm a pretty casual gamer and I've long learned that any cut scene I want to see I can find on YouTube, so skipping the last, stupidly difficult fight that overturns any sense of verisimilitude for being "tactical" that might have been created in the previous play of the game - like, why would a cloud of bats stop machinegun fire? - is pretty easy for me.

So, all said and done, Gears of War is about a B-. It has some pretty good parts but overall it's not really a great game, and is only barely a good one.