Good God.
Deserving of all the hype, and becoming one of the few games that can define a console's existence from the moment it hits the shelves, Gears of War is hands-down the worst possible thing that could happen to Sony. Months of negative publicity and middling early writeups about the PS3 still hadn't taken the shine off SCEA's black behemoth...but oh, baby, Gears of War just might. In fact, I suspect that while the lines begin to form for the PS3 on Nov. 16, there'll be a lot of folks who saunter right by all those bedraggled masses, straight to the 360s. They'll scoop up a Premium System and a copy of Gears of War (and, okay, maybe a wireless adapter and extra controller) and walk out with all kinds of badassness for less money and time.
This isn't a Halo-killer, but an enterprise that needn't be compared with other games of its kind. Gears of War is to the 360 what GoldenEye was to the Nintendo 64, or Final Fantasy VII was to the original PlayStation. It makes you realize that the capabilities of the console were barely cracked by previous games, and makes you wish you had more friends able to play it with you. From a bells-and-whistles standpoint, the game excels. We had reason to anticipate that from the advance screenshots we saw more than a year-and-a-half ago. But could we have reasonably expected this game to provide such ingenuity from a gameplay perspective? Shooters tend to be a repetitive lot, but Gears of War has so many fresh elements--it's got a tactical heart beating beneath its bloodbath veneer, to say nothing of its array of weapons--that it pretty much can't be lumped in with a genre where inspiration has been so sorely lacking.
It's the best gaming title of 2006, and it merits every bit of praise that the critics are lavishing upon it.