Gears of War has always felt as though it was built with metaphor in mind. The slam of a clip locking into place; the thudding, oversized boots of a COG soldier. The pinwheeling spokes of combat, lines of engagement moving in two opposing semicircles; the rev of a chainsawâs motor.
These are games filled with weighty, important-feeling things, any one of which could stand as a symbol of the game in its entirety: Gears of War 3 is as satisfying as a clip slammed into a lancer assault rifle, as sturdy and as unweildy as a man in 200-pound mechanical armor, as unsubtle as a chainsaw to the sternum. But beyond those metaphors, it is simply a burly video-game concoction, one that doubles down on its core mechanical design, pushing its own personal avalanche down, down, until it crashes into the earth.
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Gears of War 3 is the purported conclusion to Epic Gamesâ Gears of War saga, a series of Xbox 360-exclusive action games that take place on the earth-like planet of Sera. For years, humanity has been locked in a genocidal war with a heavily armed lacertilian race of cave-dwellers known as the Locust. Players shoot through the game as a man named Marcus Fenix, a soldier in the Coalition of Ordered Governments, or âCOG.â COG soldiers are, appropriately enough, known as âGears,â hence the gameâs strange-sounding title. Fenix leads Delta Squad, an elite, colorful team of COG soldiers; over the course of the first two games Delta has been at the forefront of humanityâs effort to repel and destroy the Locust threat.
Gears of War 3 is also the end result of five years of post-release iteration since the first gameâs release in 2006, and it shows. This is fundamentally the best-playing, tightest, and most âGearsâ Gears of War game yet made.
That fact comes as no surprise, given that Epic Gamesâ design director Cliff Bleszinski is a renowned tinkerer with an ability to capture that ephemeral quality that makes a game feel âright.â When I spoke with him last week, he told me, âMaking games is great, but you spend all your time playing a broken game thatâs not as fun as it should be. When itâs not broken and itâs a lot of fun, then you give it to everyone to enjoy.â The refinement born of that design philosophy permeates the entirety of Gears of War 3
The Gears games revolve around the act of taking cover: run fully exposed towards the enemyâs line and youâll be cut down quicker than you can say âRevive me!â After years of tweaking, the act of taking cover has never been snappier or more forgiving. And just as importantly, pulling away from cover is fluid and rarely disorienting. Even the chaotic imprecision of the Lancer assault rifle has been tweaked and perfectedâtiny aids and aim-assists lend order to the chaos and keep the heavy-metal gameplay from becoming too cumbersome or unwieldy. Well, most of the time, anyway.
At times, Gears of War 3 feels a touch like an elephant trying to tap-dance; years of evolution have made it highly (if not overly) specialized.
That Gears-y heaviness permeates the entire experience, for good and for illâwhile nearly all aspects of combat feel better than they ever have, movement and environmental interaction still often feel ungainly. The influences of other gamesâfrom Bioshock to Uncharted to Mass Effectâcan be felt, but they serve mainly to highlight just how ill-suited those oh-so-refined Gears controls are for any game other than Gears
At times, Gears of War 3 feels a touch like an elephant trying to tap-dance; years of evolution have made it highly (if not overly) specialized. Take the late-campaign segment in which I was forced to roadie-run my way up stairs, around corners, and out the front door of a building⊠while a timer ticked down towards instant death, should I fail to escape. Gears of Warâs âroadie runâ is one of its defining, enduring tricks, but the move was designed to quickly ambulate over short distances from cover to coverâthe roadie run is all momentum and no maneuverability, and its end-goal is to stick the player to a wall. âClearly,â the game seems to be saying, âwe need an âescape the buildingâ sequence. But we lack the ability to let our players simply ârun.â Guess we better work with what weâve got.â The entire segment is reduced to a frustrating try-die-reload section, and it should have been cut entirely.
Segments like that one serve to highlight Gears of Warâs ungainly specificity. Fortunately, those moments of clumsy overreaching are few and far between; the bulk of the game is spent happily diving into fraught, cover-based firefights in a variety of superbly designed, lovely-looking battlegrounds.
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Gears of War 3âs story picks up a few years after the events of Gears of War 2, which ended as a group of desperate humans flooded the Locustâs subterranean lairs with a toxic fluid known as Emulsion, effectively causing an ecological apocalypse while giving rise to a new threat: Emulsion-infected zombie-Locusts known as Lambent. As Gears of War 3 begins, humanity has been reduced to living as nomadic scavengers, and the men and women of Delta Squad have relocated to a floating city aboard an aircraft carrier.
While it doesnât begin to approach the comically clusterfucky depths of Haloâs mythology, Gears of Warâs storytelling has still taken on a bit of bloat over the years. The economical, terse staging of the first game still stands as the best Gears story of the three, insofar as it felt genuinely tense and left a good deal to the imagination.
But the more the writers at Epic show me of the Gears universe, the less I care about it. Itâs something of a video game paradox: the very iteration that has allowed Gears of War 3âs mechanics to become so finely tuned has proven anathema to its storytelling. Most video game sequels play better than their predecessors. (How many of our favorite games are sequels?) But as writers are forced to juggle and expand to keep things going, their stories almost invariably suffer. (How many of our favorite films are sequels?) This is very much the case with Gears of War 3âits game-y elements have hugely benefited from five years of post-release iteration, while its filmic, storytelling aspects have suffered.
Even after all those ads filled with all that moody pop music and eerily silent gunplay, I have never been able to invest in Gears of Warâs apocalyptic gravitas to the degree that I sense Epic wants me to.
Thatâs not to say that the story is unbearable or anything: given the ham-fisted way that both lead characters have been portrayed, I continually find myself surprised at my affection for Marcus and DomâI genuinely like both men, and Iâm not alone. Among the gameâs fans, their gruff bromance has become one of the defining aspects of the Gears of War franchise.
But my unlikely enjoyment of some of the characters doesnât blind me to the fact that for the most part, Gears of War 3âs story never rises above the level of hackneyed genre fiction. Lead writer Karen Traviss has crafted a suitable series of reasons for Delta Squad to make its way from location to location, but the whys, hows, and wherefores of their journey are woefully half-baked.
Furthermore, Gears of Warâs overserious, emo bent remains a mystery to me. Even after all those ads filled with all that moody pop music and eerily silent gunplay, I have never been able to invest in Gears of Warâs apocalyptic gravitas to the degree that I sense Epic wants me to. There simply hasnât been enough consistent character development over the course of the series to support the kind of catharsis for which the games clumsily reach.
Marcusâs relationship with his father never sees any sort of meaningful examination; what was an interesting subext in the first game becomes a by-the-numbers âsave the important princess/scientist/family memberâ conceit. Iâve never been given a sense of what Sera was like before Emergence Dayâwhy should I care about these people, this world? Itâs a classic video game storytelling shortcoming: in the down-and-dirty heat of combat, everything in front of me matters a great deal⊠and so nothing beyond my ironsights needs to matter at all.
Itâs a shame, because early in the story, Travissâs script takes some refreshing risks, introducing harrowing dream sequences as well as some effective timeline/character-hopping. Both tricks feel intriguing and fresh, but theyâre unceremoniously dropped after the first act, and the rest of the game played out as a linear story with few surprises.
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By and large, Gears of War 3 spends most of its campaign doing what it does best: guiding players through an escalating series of highly enjoyable firefights. Each fightâs pacing is sculpted with great care, and encounters move from one arena to the next with remarkable fluidity. The campaign may seem repetitive from a distance, but while I was in the thick of it, I never tired of charging into a new room, slamming up against cover, and cutting my way towards the enemyâs flank.
While the gunplay is parceled out with admirable discretion and control, the campaignâs broader pacing does falter from time to time. This occurs most notably during vehicle segments and boss battles. These bits seem designed to break up the fight-rest-fight rhythm of the campaign, but more often than not they move too far from the gameâs core and expose its limitations.
Only one of the boss battlesâinvolving a certain gigantic female rageoholicâis what I would call genuinely âgood.â Others are far less so. During a battle against a giant, tyrannosaurian Brumak, the beast simply stood still at the edge of the battlefield, impotently shooting rockets as I hid behind a train car and gradually whittled down its health until it keeled over. Vehicle segments are similarly uneven; blasting away at Reavers from the bed of a pickup truck is good fun, but a late-game submarine mission is (perhaps fittingly) the nadir of the entire campaign. The story screeches to a halt, and players are forced to spend fifteen minutes shooting incoming torpedoes out of the water using an imprecise, frustrating sea-cannon.
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From a difficulty standpoint, Gears of War 3 is easily the most accessible, welcoming game in the series. The first two gamesâ brutal difficulty spikes have been smoothed out, and what spikes remain are hugely mitigated by the presence of two additional teammates, each of whom is capable of reviving you if you go down. Iâm not particularly amazing at Gears, but I played through the campaign on âhardcoreâ difficulty and never really felt challenged or overwhelmed; in fact, I could have maybe done with a bit more difficulty.
And letâs talk about those additional teammates for a moment: unlike past Gears games, Gears of War 3âs entire campaign is playable by four players in co-op. That means that even in single-player, players are accompanied at all times by three sidekicks. The constant large-party atmosphere undercuts a lot of the potential for tension, so Gears of War 3 never quite reaches the intense, survival-horror feel of the first game.
Marcusâ three fellow party members are constantly rotating, which keeps things feeling fresh while letting us get to know a handful of new soldiers. Old favorites Baird, Cole, Dizzy and Dom return for much of the campaign, but newcomers Jace, Sam(antha), and Anya provide a welcome bit of variety. It was a pleasant surprise to see just how much the presence of female characters added to my experienceâDragon Age: Origins and Uncharted voice-actor Claudia Black gives a welcomely wry performance as Sam, and Nan McNamara does a fantastic job reprising her role as intelligence-officer turned chainsaw-wielder Anya Stroud. Both characters are well-drawn, strong, and (almost) never lapse into feminine clichĂ©s; when Baird gives Sam crap, she dishes it right back, and Anya was my boldest AI teammate, wading into even the most impossible odds, waving her chainsaw around like it was on fire as the rest of the team struggled to keep up.
Maybe itâs the fact that over the course of my life Iâve spent so much time adventuring alongside my sister, but something about fighting in the trenches shoulder-to-shoulder with a couple of kickass Lady-Gears hugely improved my experience with the game. And forget about my experience, female Gears fans the world over will finally be able to have a woman represent them onscreen. Everybody wins!
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âBrothers to the end.â That marketing catchphrase for Gears of War 3 is a suitably weighty fraternal invocation, four words that imply so much: the camaraderie that comes from having been in the shit together, from having watched one anotherâs backs, lived through triumph and defeat, pulled one another from harmâs way. If it were purely a reference to the overwrought drama of the campaign, it would work well enough. But as far as Iâm concerned, âBrothers to the endâ has less to do with any pre-written narrative and much more to do with the gameâs greatest achievement: its fantastic multiplayer.
In Beast Mode, âslaughterâ and âlaughterâ finally rhyme.
The breadth of Gears of War 3âs multiplayer options is staggeringâthis game has been designed from the top down to be a comprehensive, perpetually connected experience, and every part of it is better with a friend. For starters, the entire story campaign is playable cooperatively by one to four players, and each level can be played in âArcade Mode,â which allows players to compete for high scores as well as add âmutatorsâ to make the game easier, more difficult (the difficult ones offer XP bonuses), or just goofier (one mutator enables a laugh-track that plays along with the game). Itâs a fantastic addition, and gives those who have completed the campaign an excuse to go through it again (and again) with their friends. Probably best to skip that submarine level, though.
The brand-new âBeast Modeâ offers players a chance to play as the Locust Horde, raining bullets and death down upon a platoon of AI-controlled human soldiers. Every Locust character in the game is available, from a tiny fence-chewing ticker to an atomically savage, tank-like Berserker. Itâs brilliant fun; in Beast Mode, âslaughterâ and âlaughterâ finally rhyme.
Gears of War 3 also offers the standard host of competitive multiplayer options, running the gamut from deathmatch to capture-the-leader to king of the hill. But the thing Iâve never liked about versus-mode multiplayer in Gears of War is that the traditional Gears rules do not apply. Combat does not revolve around strategic cover-based shooting, but rather frantic close-quarters encounters chock-full of somersaulting and shotgunning, like the worldâs worst Cirque du Soleil routine. The pleasurable, meticulously designed rhythm of Epicâs combat system is dismantled by the evolutionary necessities of deathmatch, and new, strange mechanics take their place. Gears of War 3 presents what must be the most refined version of this particular cheeseburger, but while it will provide a lot of meat for longtime players, versus-mode continues to be my least favorite type of multiplayer.
All of these multiplayer modes are good fun, but none of them can compare to the joy of Horde Mode. The original Horde Mode was something of a surprise hit in Gears of War 2âup to five players would team up to fend off wave after wave of increasingly difficult Locust attacks, with a maximum (and barely attainable) level of 50. The new Horde, dubbed âHorde 2.0,â is both a refinement of that initial conceit and a brilliant extrapolation.
Iâm not entirely sold on the way the game âgamifiesâ itself by adding layers, unlockables, and even microtransactions, each of which feels designed to hook players and keep them coming back.
Horde 2.0 combines the original Hordeâs ever-increasing difficulty with some light tower-defense elements. Players build a base and establish defenses around it, and a currency system rewards kills with money, which can be spent between rounds to upgrade and repair defenses, build gun-turrets, and purchase new weapons and ammo. Each tenth level is a âboss level,â which pits players against an unholy combination of Grinders, Berserkers, armored shock troopers, and rocket-spewing reavers.
In what has become de rigueur for multiplayer console games these days, all of Gears of War 3âs various modes are united under a persistent umbrella. Whether youâre playing the campaign, co-op, or competitive multiplayer, experience points earned carry over to your master profile, creating a constant sense of coherent progress. Iâm not entirely sold on the way the game âgamifiesâ itself by adding layers, unlockables, and even microtransactions, each of which feels designed to hook players and keep them coming back. It all feels a bit hinky, and as more and more games add persistent leveling, leaderboards, and paid unlockables, the sulfuric whiff of exploitation grows ever-more pungent.
Developer motivations aside, these systems combine to create a profoundly intoxicating cocktail of progression and challenge, and itâs all framed by an energizing amount of real teamwork. A recent two-player bout in Horde brought me and a friend face to face with a supercharged Lambent Berserker. We frantically corralled it, leaping out of its path while spraying its weak spot, Ghostbusters-style, with streams of flame from our Scorcher flame-throwers. Tight-chested with dread, we vigilantly covered one anotherâsâ backs, quick to assist if one of us got knocked down, yelling enthusiastically over our headsets as the fight dragged on and on. When we finally defeated the beast, I felt a moment of ebullient, visceral video game camaraderie the likes of which I havenât experienced in ages. âBrothers to the end,â indeed.
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And so here we have Gears of War 3: Maniacally refined mechanics and design, a clunky campaign that works more often than it doesnât, and one of the more varied and enjoyable multiplayer suites Iâve ever encountered. Even as the culmination of the series, Gears of War 3âs high level stuffâits story, themes, characters, and dramaânever quite manage to get where they were going. But then, this game doesnât do âhigh level.ââit makes its home in the dirt, hugging the ground as incoming bullets kick up chunks of cement, as rattling bursts of gunfire are drowned out by the roars of enemies and friends alike.
Theyâre coming, the onslaught. Drive your way forward, knee-deep in dust and guts; your gritted teeth, your wild eyes, the sun vanishing into a pink haze of battle-rage. Slam in a fresh clip, pick a target, and shoot, and shoot, and shoot.
You can contact Kirk Hamilton, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
