Gears of War: completely uneducated analysis

I'm sure that everyone by now has seen the couple reviews of Gears of War that are casting it in a light less brilliant than what CliffyB would want, one of those reviews being home here, written by TANK. Not that I have much invested in the game personally, but I am very pumped for its release, and I wanted to offer up an opinion regarding these less excited reviews. Not to try and discredit or name-call the reviewers, just to take their evaluation and give a perspective on why it is that way, bring the comments from "this is bad" to "this is different and I don't care for it", more or less. That and I'm bored at work and this is the best thing I could think of to occupy my time.

I'll start by getting the unexplainable out of the way. Joystiq gave feedback on the demo they were able to play after viewing Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (side note: I'm curious to see this; I love horror movies and enjoyed the original remake that came out a few years ago) and theirs was generally more positive, taking a similar stance to the control as me (I'll get to this point soon) but saying one bug they found was with the Locust Horde characters. Apparently, when they get shot up they start bleeding out massive amounts of blood and didn't really stop until being killed and respawning. The excessive bleeding didn't seem to effect their health at all, just a graphical glitch where the flow (read: spurting) didn't stop as it was supposed to. Yeah, that's a glitch, I can't sugar-coat that. But hey, even if that makes it in to the final game.... wouldn't it be funny watching a 4-man team of the Locust Horde running around bleeding all over the place? I'm ok with that. Who knows, maybe they'll be hiding behind something and the spurts of blood will clear the object of cover and will give away their position. In such a tactical game, that's nothing to scoff at if you're a member of the COGs. ;-)

The continuing theme of the negative reviews is the buggy controls. In Gears of War there are action buttons that change in their action depending on the situation / location. The intention behind such a control scheme makes great sense, it aims to minimize the number of buttons that need to be memorized to play the game as well as being able to offer more actions with the same amount of buttons. Whether or not that works as well as it will in theory is something that I've yet to experience, but it sounds like some of the initial reports are saying it's not the best, and this is primarily what I wanted to address. Complaints were made that when a person is doing a "roadie run," or doing a crouching sprint, saying that if you got close to a wall, car, various area of cover, your character would push himself against that section of cover instead of continuing to sprint. I can understand how that could potentially be annoying, I've played through Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, after all and there is a shining example of some touchy cover. However, considering the fast, furious and brutal nature of Gears, it makes sense how you would want your character to do that. For instance, if I'm running across a fairly open field and someone is shooting at me I'm not going to want to release the action button ('A' in this case, I believe) to stop running (and consequently stand up) and press it again to take cover. To me, that would be defeating the purpose of these action moves that are designed to keep you from getting shot up as much. It was also pointed out by CliffyB during one of his presentations that such was the idea behind it. When you run and take cover against a wall you slam your body against cover, it's a very intentional, forceful action inspired by desperation to get out of the line of fire.

There were also some gripes about the same action key used for the "roadie run" and cover is used to do a dive, saying that sometimes your character "doesn't know what to do" if you're close to a wall, but instead of wanting to take cover you want to run but your guy does a diving roll. To me, this seems like the user simply hasn't adjusted to the big difference in control setup. From what I've read, you run by holding A, but do a roll by pressing A when in the open and take cover against an object by pressing A when you're a certain distance from such cover. It's not buggy controls, it's a speedbump in getting the feel for timing and distance. After playing the game more and more you'll become very accustomed to how far away you need to be to do a roll instead of taking cover. It seems to me as though Gears has a larger area of sensitivity to taking cover than GRAW, for example. With how intentionally your character throws himself against something tells me that you press A and your character ducks a bit and pushes against cover as hard as he can. Cliffy made some mention about using enough force to almost break one's shoulder. I feel this is done to create a sense of urgency in a player that isn't achieved in GRAW. Sure, in both you're fighting for your life, but in Gears you may actually feel like you are. Again, it's just going to be a learning process. How far you need to be away from a structure, how long you have to hold before starting to run, etc. Being the first time these people had played the game (and without the benefit of a tutorial session, no less, they were just thrown into the frantic multiplayer arena), it's understandable that they didn't know these controls or sensitivities and it didn't exactly do great things for their opinions.

When it comes to the complaints of shooting, having to zoom in to get any real accuracy, I think that was a fantastic decision on the part of Epic. Everything they're doing with Gears that's receiving criticism I find to make for a much more tactical and enjoyable experience. Also, anyone who has played GRAW knows that the shooting is similar, if you are moving at all and open fire without aiming first you'll ne'er land a shot. This seems like something that is meant to, and is successful at, keeping players from sprinting through the match, opening fire on anything that moves and forces skill into the mix, especially with the reported massive recoil of the weapons. Instead of littering an area with gunfire, people will need to fire in bursts if they have any hope of keeping accuracy up. I'm also fond of the fact that melee attacks with the chainsaw have to be "charged". First, you hold B to start up your chainsaw at the base of the Lancer rifle, and once it's running you release B and press it again to perform the melee attack. Absolutely brilliant decision to keep close-quarters matches from becoming twitchfests, see who can land the first slash or see who can smack the other up faster in a chaotic catfight that sometimes results in games like Halo / Halo 2. Other weapons (and maybe the Lancer as well if the chainsaw isn't charged first) deliver a blow, as is standard fare in other shooters, so I'm sure there will be a good amount of gun butted catfights, but I haven't seen anything on how many melee attacks it takes to beat someone down.

Joystiq reported that there is no radar in the game, which I'm a fan of. I think radars partially contribute to me not doing well in games like Halo (you know, on top of just plain not being very good) since people other than myself are much better about monitoring them and are able to see and track me while I just go running around like an idiot and get ambushed. This also helps with the aforementioned feeling of a life or death match, feeling of your backside being your enemy because it can't shoot at your opposition. Everything about this game that I hear of leads me to believe it's going to be the most edge-of-your-seat action game that I will have in my collection for a long time. Perhaps up till the sequel. Hopefully when it drops in just over a month it will prove to validate my thoughts and not just have buggy controls that don't work all that well. Till then, kids.