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Some generic Space Marines, yesterday

Yes, yes, I know, old hat, but they’re new to me. The funny thing is, a lot of them, including Gears of War in particular, don’t feel new to me because they’ve been so heavily referenced by pretty much every gaming magazine and site I read. Gears had been built up in my mind to be this incredible, frenetic shooter, heavily based around a single-button cover system that made combat fast, fluid and lots of fun. All tied up in an aces Space Marines-esque battle with sinister aliens. Brilliant.

What I got instead was, well, dull. I’m one of those kids who dabbled in tabletop wargaming as a young ‘un, and hence have an entire mid-adolescent head full of pulp SF military hardware and mythos stored away at the back of my brain. Gears of War is a bad pastiche of the genre, with naff dialogue, stock characters and a largely spurious plot.

It’s pretty, at a certain level, but when most of that prettyness is immovable skybox background that you never get to actually touch or move around in, and the colour scheme is a load of tiny variations on grey, gunmetal blue and brown, prettiness doesn’t account for much. At its core, the environment is a series of corridors scattered with crates, like, oh, pretty much every shooter since Doom, except here the crates are disguised as chunks of mouldering concrete and low walls.

The much-heralded cover system is nifty, and has become something of a trend in over-the-shoulder shooters, but quite honestly it gets very dull, very quickly. I’ve heard it called ’stop and pop’ and indeed that’s what it boils down to, stop, pop, run, stop, pop. Blah. With weirdly-spaced checkpoints in the first third of the game, it quickly becomes a pretty uninteresting grind. I’ve heard that it’s a lot more fun playing co-op with a friend, but I played a few games of multiplayer and found it as dull as the single-player.

All in all, so much more could have been done with this. If the single-player game had bigger environments, more varied cover, decent AI on your teammates (who go down like bowling pins the moment the enemy so much as coughs) and better paced save points, it would be a lot less frustrating and more enjoyable. As it stands though, it’s a below-par shooter that I feel squandered a lot of very cool visuals, a potentially deep backstory and an interesting gameplay mechanic. It could have been so much better.

Compare and contrast to Call of Duty 4, which I’ve been playing non-stop for a month now. Hell, I’ve been writing this article in the gaps between multiplayer deathmatch games. Sweet. Stay tuned.