As visceral as a chainsaw to the head but infinitely more enjoyable.
The weapon selection in GoW is a mix of the old and new. You have your standard shotgun, pistol and grenade launchers, among others. But you also get some more exotic weaponry, like an assault rifle fitted with a chainsaw that dishes out some serious punishment. By tapping the B button, Marcus revs up the chainsaw and slices in half any Locust unfortunate enough to get in his way. The presentation is absolutely stunning, as evidenced by the gory and over-the-top animation associated with a chainsaw kill. You've also got the Torque Bow, which essentially acts like a regular bow that shoots explosive arrows. Yummy! Not to be forgotten is the Hammer of Dawn. It's a harmless looking little sissy pistol at first, but once you fire that lil' baby up and let 'er rip, it's a whole new ball game. The Hammer activates a laser beam from an orbital satellite, not unlike the ion cannon from C&C-series, that literally fries anything and everything in it's path. The game also has a nifty feature called Active Reload. If you look just below the gun indicator on the screen, you'll see a line sweeping across a bar with a couple of different colors on it. A button press stops the meter. If you stop it in the gray area, the weapon reloads faster. If you stop it in the tiny white zone, you'll reload and all the bullets you just fed into your weapon will do more damage. But if you miss and hit it in the black, the gun jams and takes even longer to reload. It's a cool addition that manages to bring some variety into the simple act of reloading a weapon. The system is by no means difficult to learn, but every once in a while you'll still be able to screw it up.
The multiplayer is guaranteed to keep you playing once you've blown through the relatively short campaign mode. The game features a team-based multiplayer mode for up to eight players. The four-on-four action is also round-based with no respawns, though like in the co-op game, you can revive other players when they go down. Conversely, downed players need to be shot to keep them down, or in the case of Execution, nothing short of a curb stomp will finish them off (unless of course you happen to chainsaw or blast the enemy to pieces with your boomstick). GoW comes with three modes out of the box (with a fourth, titled Annex released as a free download). Warzone mostly follows the standard Team Deathmatch archetype, with each team trying to eliminate the other. When players are downed they can only get back up when an ally revives them. The length of time during which a downed player can be reviewed before they die of blood-loss, also called the "bleed-out" time, can be set from 5 seconds to 60 seconds. Execution is very similar to Warzone, except that when an opponent is down, the opposing team must terminate the downed player up close. Should the opposing team fail to destroy the downed player during the allotted time, the player will be revived and will once again become a threat. The bleed-out time is applied here by altering the amount of time before a downed person rises again without any input from the player. Assassination requires that teams focus on killing the other team's designated leader while protecting their own. If a team's leader dies, that team loses the round. As of the most present patch, players die by rules of "Warzone", while leaders die by "Execution" rules. The newest addition, Annex is essentially a version of King of the Hill, teams win by keeping control over key map locations, or objectives, long enough to collect a winning number of points. Every map has two to five identified objectives available for capture, with one objective active at a time. Objectives are based on map weapon-spawn locations and have a potential value of 60 points toward either team's score. Teams collect those points by maintaining ownership of an objective until all its 60 points have been distributed; players do not have to stay at the point to retain ownership but only prevent the enemy from approaching the point. Every second that a team controls an objective, the team gets one point. When an objective falls to zero points, the next objective is selected at random.[8]. Players can be downed following "Warzone" bleed out rules, but unlike the other game play modes, any dead players will respawn simultaneously at the next respawning interval, which occurs every 15 seconds beginning at the start of the round. All in all, Gears has a pretty robust and fun multiplayer mode, although it is hampered significantly by various bugs and glitches. Also annoying is the notorious "host advantage", which means the person hosting the match has a split-second advantage over the others, due to bandwidth limitations. As every gamer knows, even a split-second advantage is enough to pull out a win in tight spots.
Graphically, Gears of War blows every other game out of the water. Not only is the presentation top-notch, the visuals themselves are practically without equal. The framerate is smooth through the entire game, the lighting is fantastic and the textures are all clear and sharp, not to mention the awesome bump mapping. Character models are all "thick" and look stunning. The environments are varied but always beautiful, no matter if you're slogging through a set of underground caverns lit up by imulsion or fighting a Berserker on top of a speeding train whilst the sun sets ominously on an inky black sky.
Not to be outdone by the graphics (well, perhaps slightly), the audio packs a punch and delivers. Weapon sounds are all sufficiently powerful, whilst the dialogue is suitably gruff and macho. Perhaps the best part though, is the soundtrack. Gears features an unbelievable set of tracks, each more epic than the last. Last, but not least are the awesome sound effects. Flesh rips and squishes in a morbidly awesome way and each time the chainsaw mangles an unsuspecting enemy, you can't help but cringe and smile at the same time.
So then, is Gears of War the killer app gamers have been waiting for? Does it live up to the almost impossible hype? Yes, yes it does. While the game is in no way revolutionary, it is simply fun. It combines awesome elements to create an even more awesome package, all the way from the satisfying-till-the-end gameplay to the unbelievable visuals and top-notch audio. Add to this a great mutiplayer portion and an even better co-op mode and you have an instant classic on your hands.