autocratic for the people.

Gears of War.

Gears of War is a towering monument to contemporary gaming, and not only for the obvious reasons. As Microsoft has made clear¹, this game is both their answer to the PS3/Wii threat, and their sole must-have for 360 gamers this holiday season. Available in both premium and regular versions (just like the 360 itself), the game arrived on shelves perfectly timed to remind everyone that Microsoft loves you, baby, and there are plenty of 360s on store shelves for everyone. And in terms of such marketability, Gears is wholly contemporary: arguably more flash than substance. But that's not really the whole story; Gears is also fashionable in its attempts at genre fusion, blending elements of FPS, stealth, old-is-new-again linear level design (thanks, Valve), and third-person adventure. But does it work? .. Well, it depends on how modern you are.

Created by longtime PC game developer Epic, Gears was birthed for "only" $10 million, which really ain't bad considering. This cost savings was apparently achieved largely via reuse of Epic's own Unreal Engine, and of course by outsourcing the game art².

China's artists are worth every penny, though, because Gears of War looks fucking nice. This is particularly true on an HDTV, of course (and Gears supports up to 1080i), but I am thrilled to report spectacular results even on a regular ol' standard-def set. None of the buzzkills of years past – LOD / mipmap weirdness, pop-up, clipping-plane fog – make an appearance, and the graphical whizbangery actually improves gameplay in the sense that distant enemies remain clearly visible at all times. And hey, the text is legible! Can't always take that for granted. But even more interestingly, Gears manages to avoid the uncanny valley effect which is beginning to appear in more and more games. I believe this is achieved through subtle, comic-book-style exaggeration of facial proportions, features, and textures. Whatever the method, it works.

But what screen shots of the game can't tell you is that the frame rate, although generally acceptable, has some problems. In single-player the dips are fairly rare outside of cutscenes, and 30fps is the general rule. But in split-screen co-op, which as I will describe in a moment is the only way you want to play Gears of War anyway, there are more widespread frame rate issues. This will hardly surprise fans of split-screen gaming, but that it occurs at all is a curiously last-gen sort of frustration to emerge in a game otherwise free of legacy baggage. To be fair, though, it's never really much of a problem³.

Gears has also been cited as a standout in the audio department, but here I must strenuously disagree. For various reasons I tend to listen very carefully to games, and playing Gears of War in 5.1 surround was not the revelatory experience I was led to expect. Gamespot called the sound effects "killer;" IGN, "virtually flawless." This is trivially untrue. Firstly, the music is thoroughly generic: you get action-movie music or creepy music, depending on the level, with battle music stitched in where appropriate. It works, sure, but it's no Metal Gear Solid. They won't be moving many soundtrack CDs for this one. The real problem, though, and it's a big one, lies with the sound effects, or rather the effects engine. The effects themselves I have no real opinion on either way – I agree with IGN⁴, but don't consider the agreement to be tacit approval as they do.

The problem with the sound effects engine is that it has screwed-up notions of precedence, if indeed it has any. By precedence I mean this: audio rendering engines usually set a limit on the number of sound effects they can play simultaneously. When there are more sounds to play than there are slots available, the audio engine needs to choose which ones play and which don't. This is often done via some precedence system, e.g. "play the sound of the enemy creeping up on you, instead of the background music." In Gears of War, it fairly regularly happened that my firing machine gun would suddenly stop making sounds until I released the trigger and pressed it again. I could see from the gun on the screen that it was firing, but the sound stopped playing. Even when the scene became quiet again, the gun noise didn't come back until I released the trigger and pressed it again. Call me picky, but I found it an extremely irritating glitch and would consider it grounds for DQing a game from audio awards. This tradeoff hasn't been so poorly handled by a game in many years.

Okay, you say, but esoteric bitching aside, is the game any fun? Why sure. The basic game mechanics are easily expressed as:

1. Run into new area.
   
2. Take cover.
   
3. Pop out and shoot bad guys.
   
4. Run to next area.

But it really works, and it's where the primary innovation in Gears takes place.

The control scheme centers around the A button, which is context-sensitive. It's a bit fiddly at first, but when you get used to it it works very well, and the game mechanics are impressively innovative in their fluidity when you learn to disambiguate your A button inputs. Said button is primarily used to take and break cover behind various objects, be they interior walls, heaps of garbage, cars, pillars, etc. From behind cover, you can either fire safely but blindly around the object, or pop partially out in order to aim with a crosshair. Popping back behind cover allows you to reload and regenerate your health (Gears uses a regenerative health system; you only die if you take a lot of damage in a short period of time. It works), and the third-person view allows you to still see what the enemy is doing. To break cover you also use the A button, but pressing it in conjunction with a movement direction produces different effects: holding Up vaults your character over the cover if it's a low wall, and holding Left or Right performs a lateral roll that can provide a quick getaway or new cover in some situations. The take/break cover mechanic is the most important component of the Gears of War gameplay, and it works well to provide both tension and time to strategize. Since the enemies are hiding behind objects as well, flanking tactics and grenades are more effective tools here than in many other similar games.

And that's really how Gears progresses: set piece to set piece, both in large courtyard-like areas and in close quarters. The pacing is more Half-Life than Halo, but it never drags. The level design and enemy placement are well-done, and definitely highlights of the game.

Which is good, because they largely mask the borderline AI. As mentioned above, the enemies do a pretty good job of using cover and working together, but there are still plenty of moments of stupidity⁵. Enemies regularly charge you, weapon holstered, and seem to love nothing more than clambering over boulders as you pump round after round into 'em. The kamikaze approach is disappointing, certainly, but you tend to dismiss it at first, because, hey, maybe that's how they fight.

A few minutes later you realize your squadmates are doing it too. Yes, you spend the game fighting alongside either one or three AI teammates. Argh. And yes, you have to revive them when they die. Argh.

This is why the game is primarily worth playing in co-op. In co-op your mandatory squadmate is controlled by player 2, and not that player 2 isn't a totally cool guy and stuff, but it's a relief just to have another person around to not jump into bullets. That, and it's much more rewarding to apply some strategy to the situation when you know your squadmates will actually go along with the plan. It makes the game much more interesting, much more involving, and much more fun.

To reiterate: split-screen co-op makes everything better. Not that this is anything new, but there you go. Gears gets major kudos for this more than anything else. CliffyB, I salute you.

The plot, incidentally, is pointless both in its presence and its development. Your character is a generic badass, and the cutscenes are completely forgettable. The voicework is pretty nice, I'll grant, but on the whole you've already heard this story before, when it was called Quake II. But anyone familiar with the genre already guessed that, so it makes precisely zero difference in the end.

Speaking of the end, Gears of War is divided into five acts, for a total of 7 hours of play on the default difficulty ("casual"). If you find this to be a shockingly short play time, well, you're not alone, but the higher difficulty levels are indeed significantly tougher if you're into that sort of thing. Otherwise, though, there's always the hugely popular multiplayer on XBox Live, which I was completely unable to figure out how to use (kept popping some strange error message). But I gather it's a good time.

How best to sum up Gears of War? Well, I agree with Eurogamer's closing thoughts:

"If you want to gorge on a next-generation audio-visual feast then Gears of War is a king's banquet. But what of the gameplay pudding that Peter Moore so often reminds us that he likes? The proof, he says, is in the eating, and in this case Gears of War sticks to a well-worn recipe."

I completely agree. But whereas Eurogamer follows that sentence with a rating of 8/10, I follow it with mild disappointment. There's really nothing in Gears gameplay-wise that exercises the 360, and aside from the graphics there's nothing here other systems couldn't do – the original XBox, for example, or even the original PlayStation. Contrast that with Dead Rising, which introduces gameplay truly impossible to create before the 360. I can see how Microsoft sees Gears of War as the current killer app for the 360, and certainly from a shock-and-awe perspective that's so. (Just look at it.) But I suspect the postrelease hype and adoration is mostly a testament to the limited 360 software library right now. If you have the system, then Gears of War is absolutely worth getting. But really, how many other options do you have?






¹"Microsoft and Epic came together out of common interests a few years back. CliffyB was feeling trapped by the success of the Unreal franchise. And Microsoft, realizing that the delays of Halo 2 meant that there would be no Halo 3 for the Xbox 360 launch, needed a good game." The article goes on to explain that Epic wanted to make the "Halo of XBox 2." How aspirational, sort of.

²Considering how much of game development costs go directly to art assets (especially in HD), this trend will only grow. Art students take note, and, uh, switch majors.

³Okay, it gets to be a bit irritating at the end of Act 2.

⁴"I've never heard a head explode or a chainsaw dismember someone, but I would imagine it sounds exactly like it does in Gears of War." And etc. Let me say this: I have heard a head explode and a chainsaw dismember someone before. In practically every FPS since Wolf3D in 1992. And it has always sounded just like it does here.

⁵The huge blind enemies are particularly effective in demonstrating that games still have a ways to go in terms of pathfinding.

posted by avixe @ 10:10 PM