Very polished and exciting gameplay and great graphics, but the story and visual design left me a bit bored.
Graphics/Visuals:
Well there's no doubt that Gears of War has phenomenal graphics. They are even great by today's standards. Sure, other games have surpassed it, but it is still a very graphically superb game. However, I do not find the game to be all that visually appealing. Everything just looks so drab. There is almost no color in the game at all. When you view your mission objective and order-giving-screen, the game goes black and white. I honestly saw very little change from b&w to color. Now I understand the game is trying to be all gritty and hopeless feeling, and I suppose it does pull that off. There just weren't many occasions when I was in awe with what I saw on screen, despite how technically great the graphics are. The levels in the caverns were the most awe-inspiring. The lack of color also left me shooting at my own squad-mates a couple of times because it was hard to tell them apart from the white-skinned locusts. Oh well. The locusts do look very fearsome and awesome though. So, graphics are awesome, but visuals on a whole are just lackluster.
Story/Plot:
So after playing and beating the game, I thought I would Wikipedia the game (I do this for everything, games, movies, books, etc.). The first thing I read under "Story" on the wiki page was, "Gears of War takes place on the planet Sera." WHAAAAT??? If they mentioned that at all in the story during the game, I sure missed it. I thought the whole time it was on Earth or something. A different planet makes a whole lot more sense seeing as there's that glowy yellow goop underground and stuff, but still, the point is that the game didn't make it clear to me that this took place on a foreign planet.
And that is my first point about the story. It's simply not very clear what the hell is going on in the background. Your missions are fine and dandy, do this, defend that, find this, blow up that, this guy got shot in the head, whatever. But the setting, the plot behind the game, is supposed to drive those missions, and honestly, it was pretty weak in this game. Not terrible, and actually quite interesting if you have the time to read up on it, but the game itself doesn't do a good job of establishing that setting or the overarching plot. It is just mediocre. Also, the locusts have very little to no character whatsoever, except for the chilling voice of the queen that you hear every now and then in a cutscene. They are just a brutish enemy. I tend to prefer intelligent enemies to fearsome ugly ones. Oh well.
I am now going to make a brief comparison to the story of another popular shooter: the Halo series. In the Halo games, you similarly spend a lot of time shooting ugly alien enemies. However, the big difference is that in Halo I actually cared about WHY! In Halo 1, you investigate this awe inspiring ring-world and discover the horrific flood that threatens both you and your enemies. Halo 2 sees Earth get massively invaded by the Covenant. Halo 3 was just OK by my thoughts, but in Halo Reach, the character development alone made me actually care when each Spartan on my team eventually gave their life defending humanity. In Gears of War, I never felt that kind of care for any of the plot devices. Our mission may have been crucial to stopping the Locusts and saving humanity on this planet, and it may have been in my hands to do this, but I never felt that sense of urgency and responsibility from the plot like I did in the Halo games.
Sound:
The music in the game is actually really great, it often times reminded me of the score to the Matrix. Voice acting is also very solid and believable (most of the time at least).
Gameplay:
This is what ultimately counts. And with this, I had fun. The game does not do anything new or groundbreaking, but it set a new standard for what third person shooters should play like. It is extremely tight, and extremely polished. The shooting is fun, the levels are designed well, and there are some very epic moments. The game does a good job of varying the action as well. You spend most of your time shooting bad guys (although even this is varied enough by the situations in which you have to shoot bad guys), but you also get to drive a big tank thing, man chain gun turrets, direct huge satellite beams of energy onto bad guys, and that kind of cool stuff. Ultimately the gameplay was very satisfying. I can see why this game got good reviews based on this alone.
Final thoughts:
The gameplay itself earns this game a good review. But the lackluster visual design and the bare-bones storytelling leave more to be desired. It took me a half an hour or more to really start enjoying the game, because it simply wasn't set up well story-wise or visually. So instead of being in shock and awe while I'm learning the controls, I was kind of bored while learning them. I give this game a 7.5. I think the polish that went into making great gameplay along with the technically great graphics earned this game a solid score. However, I don't see how it got so many 9s or 10s with such a mediocre story and boring visuals.