Gears of War Hands On Review

We were able to attend the pre-screening of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and get a hands on of Gears of War after the showing. Check out what we think. Of coarse we had to sit through Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning first, but it was a perfect opening for Gears. PLENTY of chainsaw action in that movie. But who cares about the movie, on with the review!

The front of the theater had 8 Xbox360’s and 8 Samsung monitors which hosted 2 sets of 4v4 multiplayer games. One lucky person also got picked to play on the B-I-G screen while the audience watched, heckled, cheered, and booed. It was quite an experience.

The game was team Death Match or ‘WarZone’ which is pretty much the only style that Epic has talked about in detail so far. Basically they are fast 4v4 games with Locusts vs COG set to best of 3 matches. If your side won, you got a prize. Some of the free swag given away was Gears of War T-Shirts and stickers, Xbox 360 T-Shirts, Xbox360 hats, pens, notepads and key chains. I wonder how many of these will be on eBay on Thursday? Sadly no Gears of War faceplates or free advanced copies were given out.


The controls are exactly what I explained in my Gears of War : What can we expect news article posted on Tuesday here on 2old2play. However I did learn about some new buttons and tricks. First the X button is kind of a miscellaneous action button. If your teammate dies, you can run over to them and press X to revive them which gives you points. If you’re the guy lying injured on the floor, you button mash the A button. The faster you press it, the slower you bleed out which will extend your revival window. However at any point while you’re on the ground bleeding out, the enemy can come up and hit X to curb stomp you dead. They can also finish you off with a quick chainsaw or continue shooting until you stop twitching. X also will swap out your current gun with a weapon on the ground.

I also have full clarity on the reload "mini game." When your gun runs out of ammo, there is a meter in the upper right corner that starts moving left. There are 3 thicknesses of this bar; the medium thickness is a quick reload, the fattest thickness in the middle is the fast reload with damage enhancement for the new clip, and the narrower part is the gun jam reload. The bar will move left to right at different pace depending on the gun and how many successful times you’ve done the quick reload with damage.

Graphically the game is stunning. One thing you will notice right away is no health meter. You have no idea how much damage you’ve taken or how much more you can take. I guess it doesn’t matter since you kind of count on your team mates to revive you if you go down. I did notice a few frame rate glitches while the 1st level was demoed for us on the big screen in single player. That was a bit disappointing since this is probably pretty close to a final build of the game if not the completed code. Multiplayer over LAN was lag free with no detectable frame rate glitches which was a good sign. Of coarse this isn't over Xbox Live, so we will have to wait and see how good their networking code is.

Since the playable bit was multi-player, that’s really all I can comment on for now. I’ll say this right off the top, the controls will take some getting used to. One of the biggest problems is there’s more to think about to move your guy around than say in Ghost Recon Advanced War Fighter. When to press A to get into cover is a timing issue. Sometimes you’ll press it and expect to hit cover, but instead you’ll roll because you weren’t close enough to the wall. "Roadie run" takes a few steps to kick in as well. While in cover and standing, it didn’t seem like you could shoot at all. Pulling aim with my back to the wall didn’t produce a lean out aim, my avatar just stood there. So I had to break cover and move out into the open to fire which is never a good idea. I know you can pop up and fire from low wall cover, but standing wall cover, your guy seems to stick to it like glue. Rolling out of cover also may not produce the results you want. If there’s cover close buy, your guy will just roll into another cover rather into the open to shoot.

Another issue I didn’t like is shooting is even more complex. You need to zoom in in order to shoot. You can’t just put the cross hair on the enemy and fire. Technically you can, but it does very little damage since most the shots miss. When you zoom in and fire though, you get tunnel vision and are easy pickings. Maybe this is to encourage chainsawing? You can move slightly while zoomed in, but that’s not a practical way to navigate the game. The whole control system was just a lot to process, which I’m sure will become more intuitive after playing through the story mode. All I know is, after a 3 round match I wasn’t any more familiar with the controls on round 3 than I was in round 1.

Some new weapons were also revealed. First off for default settings you start with smoke grenades and not frags. There is a bow type weapon with an exploding arrow that does some huge damage as well. If you shoot the enemy with it, it’ll stick in them and explode but it also does splash damage if you miss. This weapon and the chainsaw need to ‘power up’ before they can do damage and if you get shot while they’re powering up or are powered, they go back to powering up from the start again. So you can’t run around holding B chainsawing your way through the level. Also every weapon has a B button melee attack for close quarters fighting so its not only the chainsaw. Lastly there are mounted guns as well. I managed to flank the enemy and grab their mounted gun and use it against them during a match. The problem is you’re open to attack because you’re zoomed in with tunnel vision, so you need to have someone covering your ass when you’re on one of those.

Some cool things I witnessed during some of the rounds were a shotgun to the side of the head producing a headless corpse, plenty of chainsawing, and curb stomping to finish off a enemy. I also saw one instance where one guy’s skull detached and rolled down the steps. Pretty sick stuff.

Pace wise, the 4v4 games moved pretty quickly. As you would expect from human players, they’re pretty much run and gun. Team work is really key to victory though, with only 4 guys on your team, you need to work together. Keeping together also helps keep you alive, because you will need someone close enough to revive you if you go down. If you lone wolf it and end up deep in enemy territory with no backup, you’re just going to bleed out or get curb stomped when you go down.

All in all the game visually is very impressive and definitely one of the best looking titles for the Xbox 360. Pace wise it looks like it’ll be a ton of fun on Live especially if you get a good tight team of 4 together. Control wise, the game is a bit disappointing. There’s a definite learning curve, and it doesn’t control like a normal shooter so you will need to adjust to it. Until next month.

-Tank