Earlier today, while attending a Microsoft press event in London's Covent Garden, we had an opportunity to spend some time with a demo version of Gears of War on the PC. As has been well documented previously, the upcoming PC version will feature content not found in the Xbox 360 version (at least not yet), including five new campaign chapters, three new multiplayer maps, and a new game type. Of course, the PC game will also support higher screen resolutions than its Xbox 360 counterpart and looked great running at 1920x1080 (1920x1200 will purportedly be the maximum) on large HDTV screens.
After opting for an Xbox 360 controller rather than a mouse and keyboard setup, we spent a short time playing through Gears of War's first chapter. This afforded us an opportunity to check out the PC game's visuals in a level that we're already familiar with, and although the improvements weren't mind-blowing, we certainly weren't disappointed. Your COG soldiers and their Locust enemies appear to benefit from the game's PC makeover a little more than the locales in which they do battle do. Their highly detailed faces and armor also hold up to even the closest scrutiny.
With the first chapter behind us, we jumped straight into Gears of War's fifth and final act. This kicks off with five new chapters that bridge a gap between the end of the Xbox 360 game's fourth act and what was originally the beginning of the fifth. Without wishing to give too much away, the premise of the five new chapters appears to be that your squad is en route to a train station and is being chased by a gigantic "brumak" locust creature. In the Xbox 360 game, the brumak appears only in cinematics, but in the PC game, you'll get to fight one. The titles of the five new chapters, in the order that you'll play them, are as follows: Impasse, Comedy of Errors, Window Shopping, Powers that Be, and Jurassic Proportions. No prizes for guessing which of those will pit you against the 40-foot-tall killing machine. Impasse was the only new chapter that we got to play on this occasion, though.
Racing toward the train station in its APC, the COG squad comes to a screeching halt when confronted by a raised drawbridge. The controls for the bridge are nearby, but after activating them, it quickly becomes clear that the bridge's power is out and that this is certainly a trap. Locust grunts scale the side of the bridge and waste no time calling for reinforcements once the battle starts going your way. It took us several attempts to get past the sequence on the medium "hardcore" difficulty, after which, we were led down into a slumlike area beneath the bridge and tasked with bringing the power back online. Wretches crawling along the underside of the bridge from both directions posed a significant challenge, and before we were able to overcome it, we were asked to quit out of the game to take part in a multiplayer session.
The fact that we proceeded to play for well over an hour using the same gameplay mode on the same map over and over again, says a lot about Gears of War's great multiplayer content. The mode was King of the Hill, the map was Courtyard, and both are new. If you're familiar with the Xbox 360 version of Gears of War, King of the Hill is a lot like the Annex mode. The only real difference is that in the new mode you need to remain inside capture points to score off them, which actually makes the game very different. If none of that made any sense to you whatsoever, King of the Hill is a mode in which a small area of the map is designated as the "hill" and two teams attempt to occupy it. You score a point for every second or so that you outnumber the enemy inside the capture point, and the first team to score 120 points is the winner. Like the Annex mode, King of the Kill lets you respawn as many times as necessary before the end of the game, though you'll be taken out of action for up to 15 seconds each time you die.
When playing King of the Hill on the symmetrical Courtyard map, the capture point will be in one of four places. Each is a spawn point for one of the game's deadliest weapons, and each has little or no cover to hide behind. This makes things interesting right from the start because while getting into the scoring zone early certainly isn't a bad tactic, there's a lot to be said for visiting the other three weapon spawns and stocking up on hardware. Incidentally, the weapons in question are the "Longshot" sniper rifle, the powerful "Hammerburst" Locust assault rifle, the "Boomshot" grenade launcher, and the supersatisfying "Hammer of Dawn" laser designator with which you can call down death from above, courtesy of an orbital satellite. The courtyard itself is surrounded by tall buildings and, based on our experiences playing it, it's every bit as well designed as the multiplayer maps that have gone before it. There are tempting (though never truly safe) camping spots aplenty for wannabe snipers, there are crumbling walls or columns to take cover behind all over the place, and if you're badly injured, you'll rarely be too far away from an area that you can run into to recover your health if you're quick enough.
The only downside to the PC version of Gears of War, at least based our time with it, is that when playing multiplayer, you can't assume that everyone on your team has a microphone. None of us were armed with microphones, which resulted in battles that were quite disorganized. Of course, this won't be a problem for any of you fighting in organized clans and the like, but if you're playing pick-up games alongside random teammates, you might find that it's impossible to communicate with each other. Playing alongside or against a number of mouse and keyboard users, we were pleased to find that we had no problem being competitive. For the most part, we notched up some of the more impressive scores during our session. Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not playing with Xbox 360 controllers will still be a viable option after the game ships and all of you mouse and keyboard users become more proficient with the controls.
Gears of War is currently scheduled for release for the PC in November. We look forward to bringing you more information as soon as it becomes available.
