How many times has this 1001 list proven that games build upon what came before, tweaking and adapting them, taking genres in new directions? It happens an awful lot. Nothing is original, after all, and taking inspiration from Resident Evil 4 and Kill Switch, Gears of War helps demonstrate the point - before every other third-person shooter started acting like Gears of War.
The description is simple enough. Battle-hardened soldiers tackle an invasion coming from beneath their very feet, using chest-high walls for cover to allow them to flank their targets, and chainsaws strapped to their rifles to save on ammunition.
It's a mad world, this, innit?
Frustrations
Gears of War is as synonymous with the Xbox as Halo is, but it's actually the PC port that I found myself owning. No idea where from, but if my notes are anything to go by, I probably should have gone for the Xbox 360 original.
"May need DVD-ROM to run." - Ok, don't ditch the disk yet, no big deal.
"Patched to get passed the date problem (Patch 3), though it may need to be reapplied," Right. Hope I can find where I saved that patch if I need it again.
"or else the PC needs date changed to 2008ish before playing." Riiiiight. That's different. Let's hope that patch still works.
"Launch from Raptr or whatever for best/easiest launch." Raptr's no more, isn't it? Raptr's something else now. Hmm.
Past me went through all of this just to get the game running nearly a decade after its PC release. Anti-Cheat code ceased to work in 2009, rendering the game unplayable until it was patched. But it has been, and we can play it. Whey.
Fun Times
Marcus Fenix has been busted out of prison by the military. The prison itself has been busted wide open by war, so it's probably a good thing that we're out. Colonel Hoffman doesn't agree, but we're quite the chunk of muscle and the situation is dire, so what is he going to do about it?
Our enemy is the Locust, a bunch of subterranean lizard-looking folks also built like angry brick shithouses. The humans haven't yet got anything to deal with their invasion - until now. But it doesn't work yet. Alpha Squad has gone in somewhere with a device to map the Locust tunnels, and once they're mapped, they can be efficiently bombed. But Alpha Squad is missing, along with the device. In we go to sort out the mess.
As you're probably aware, Gears of War is big on cover, shooting, and shooting from cover. It's loud, it's action-heavy, everything is chunky and varying shades of grey, brown, and black, punctuated with red, though the red is usually incredibly dark too.
Locust Hordes emerge from the ground, running for cover much like you and your squad are doing. The A button does a lot, from diving into a roll to dodge incoming fire, snapping into cover, switching between two bits of cover, jumping over the cover so that you're free to sprint to the next bit of cover... There's a lot of cover and a lot of the A button.
The Left trigger brings your gun up and gets Marcus aiming down the sights a little more usefully, and squeezing the right trigger fires your weapon. Ammo ticks down fairly quickly, and your gun can jump around all over the place wit the kick of the probably oversized rounds leaving its barrel.
As we move through the ruined streets, we're given chunks of combat before a short run, which is followed by another chunk of combat. You're never quite surprised when an enemy pops out because you can see all the chest-high walls plonked in the environment, waiting for a giant soldier to snap into cover.
When you get that joke out of your head a little, you can see how some of these skirmishes are designed with a bit of freedom. Flanking, for example, is a tactic that works wonders for you, but the Locust will try it themselves, too.
An unexpected fork in the path gives us another opportunity for a fight that isn't just about hiding behind cover until a threat has gone. Splitting up into groups, we work through the left path, all the while hearing gunfire and action from the right path. We can influence the fight on the other path by shooting through broken walls, and flanking behind mounted machine guns before continuing with our path.
You might mock Gears of War for being a dumb cover shooter, but there are some more mechanics than just taking cover. Your allies can prove useful in combat, especially when taking the brunt of the incoming fire while you flank around and deal with the threat, but they can also be a bit stupid and walk into compromising positions where they fall over, injured and dying.
They'll need to be picked up - thankfully an action that takes a second at most - but it does expose the pair of you to any enemies that remain.
Timing your rescue isn't the only thing to time in the game, either. Every time you reload, you can press the reload button during a tiny window for a quick reload. Miss the window and your gun jams. Ignore the mini-game altogether and you'll reload, albeit slowly.
I often forgot it was a mechanic, but once I remembered, I did try to nail it each time. Even safely tucked behind cover, you want to be as prepared to fight as you can be.
In a pinch, you can use a melee attack or, with the right weapon, a chainsaw. You need to rev it up with a press of the B button before charging in, but the screen goes awfully bloody upon a successful charge.
Further Frustrations
Somewhat strangely, the screen doesn't go awfully bloody when you're being shot. There's no splash of (incredibly dirty) strawberry jam around the screen edges here. In fact, when I died, it often felt instant and unavoidable.
In the instance above it was a grenade, granted, but I died a few times in the gunfire that followed and was never quite sure why.
By this point, I'd gotten the gist of Gears of War. The gameplay is pretty simple, the graphics are grim, you can't really get lost. It's doing a solid job. Movement is bulky and weighty, appropriately, but you can zip around the environments with the cover switching.
I'm not desperate to play more, but it's easy enough to do so, and I want to find Alpha Squad who are supposedly close by.
Further Fun Times
We push through more corridors and chest-high cover, eventfully to a balcony where we can use a mounted machine gun - with unlimited ammo and no overheating, so far as I can tell - to mop up the remaining Locusts that are pinning down Alpha Squad.
One of them got stuck on some scenery and had to be coaxed out by a grenade. I missed the first one and only had two on me, so it was rather fortunate that the second worked. Street clear of Locusts, it was time for a cutscene, the first for a long time. Gears of War must want you in the thick of it, rather than watching the thick of it.
Now that's a good place to end a playthrough.
Final Word
When Gears of War was released, I had no interest in the Xbox 360. None of the sequels swayed me towards what I saw as a simple shooter. A loud, shouty shooter with nothing of substance. Probably entertaining while you played, but then what? Multiplayer if you're really interested. Nothing about it was selling it to me.
But to gaming as a whole? What game wasn't inspired by Gears of War afterwards? It wasn't the first game to include chest-high walls and cover systems, but damn does it make sure to do them right and give you a game all about them to make sure you see the details of switching, moving along walls, vaulting over them...
Gears of War doesn't look like it has a revolutionary storyline, so it needs to have solid gameplay to keep players engaged. It may be a joke to notice all the cover in a new area and then - what a surprise - an ambush to deal with, but at least it gets you prepared for the action.
Multiple weapons, multiple allies, multiple approaches to thinning down the Locust Horde. It may eventually just default to 'get into cover and keep shooting', but at least it does it well. It feels like it should. Maybe not the combat roll. But on the whole, Gears of War feels great.
I'm not desperate to finish it - it still hasn't wowed me - but it's easy enough to pick up and play and has more going on than past me might have imagined. It's good to learn from your mistakes. Give Gears of War a go.
Fun Facts
The demo, along with strong persuasion by Epic Games' Tim Sweeney, prompted Microsoft to double the amount of memory in the Xbox 360. It would cost Microsoft tens of millions of dollars and lead to fewer consoles available at launch, but Gears of War could finally run at 720p...
Gears of War, developed by Epic Games, first released in 2006.
Version played: PC, 2007.