Gears of War 3
“Gears 3 did what I never expected it could do. It sets the standard for every single third person shooter that comes out after. Epic has something to be proud of as even the most hardcore skeptic such as myself, has already spent twice as much time in multiplayer gameplay as I have in Campaign. This game definitely will go in for one of my picks of the year.” – by Justin Nauss
Supported Platforms:
XBox360
Facts/Features:
Third person shooter
Rated for Blood, Gore, Intense Violence, and Strong Language.
Known Performance Issues:
- Some minor graphical glitches in the campaign.
Mechanics
- Flow: 4.75
- Consistency: 5
- Communication: 4
Visuals
- Frame Rate: 5
- Textures: 4.5
- Effects: 4.75
Sound
- Effects: 5
- Interference: 5
Score: 4.75 out of 5
Review
Mechanics
- Flow in Gears is more or less flawless. It’s linear with a bit of side exploration for items. You always have a reason to move forward and the story keeps the plot going. It never loses steam even up until the end. On multiplayer; it doesn’t take too long to figure out and the controls work better than they did in the old games. This is the standard for third person shooters on a console.
- It’s hard to rate a game on it’s consistency when it is constantly good. Every single game mode in this is good. You can play by yourself and you can really play with others. Every mode features some kind of cooperative or competitive play that all work amazingly well.
- Lets face it. Gears has always been decent at multiplayer but never completely amazing like the COD games or the Halo franchise. Gears 3 takes it to the next level with every mode giving the ability to drop in or drop out. You can play with an “open party” arrangement that lets your friends or even strangers (if you so choose) to get in at any point in your game. You won’t get lost in the levels and it’s easy to communicate to your friends what objective to complete next.
Visuals
- For as much is going on with Gears, they put a lot of thought on how to efficiently show good visuals and give a good frame rate. It consistantly runs at 60 fps and even though I don’t have a 3D television, I was able to test the frame rate (with a bit of dizziness) with 3D mode enabled and didn’t notice any drop in the performance.
- Textures are also top notch in this game. Where the gripe lies with the Unreal engine is in it’s texture work and it seems that the team at Epic did just fine with making an utterly beautiful world with the tools of the trade. Speaking of textures, this game is much more colorful than previous installments. Expect more color and variety than you have ever experienced in this trilogy. The only points that were docked were in the area that I’ve seen a handful of games that look better. Not many though.
- Effects are also top notch. The blood spray isn’t quite as amazing as Space Marine but the fire effects, the smoke, and some of the lighting are out of this world good.
Sound
- The sound in this game is pretty much spot on. The weapons feel punchy and destructive, the locust sound downright fantastic, and there are moments where the music takes on an almost soundtrack type quality where it makes the game mood feel more like a major motion picture than a game. It’s exactly what needed to be done in this game.
- None of the noise interferes with actual gameplay. Even when you are having a chainsaw battle, you will know enough of what is going on around you to make good value decisions in the campaign as well as in multiplayer.
Our Thoughts
by Justin Nauss:
I’ll be honest. Gears 3 wasn’t as high on my radar as a lot of other games when I went to Pax this year. I dropped by the booth and simply walked back out to look at games like Portal and Rage. Honestly, I now know I made a huge mistake. Gears 3 blows the rest of the trilogy out of the water and shows that Epic can definitely challenge the larger contenders like COD and Halo. I had to review this on a temporary account due to some difficulty with being hacked on my primary account and I liked this game enough to make it to level 27 before writing this review. Yes, this game is fantastic. Every aspect of this game is utterly top notch. I hate giving 5′s to games on the principle of not sounding like a fan boy but it’s really hard to even nitpick what Epic has done with the series.
It’s an improvement in simply every category. The story finally tied everything together. I felt a kind of connection I never did before to the characters after finishing the game. The campaign is worth it and at least as long as the Halo Reach campaign. The Horde mode is out of this world good. Halo ODST found a way to draw me to this kind of multiplayer by giving me more holy crap moments than I have ever experienced in coop gaming. Gears does this and it does it better. It combines tower defense with horde mode and it does it well. You get to build defenses up with the cash you earn from fantastic kills. It’s utterly satisfactory and you will continue to play this for weeks to come. Beast mode is just the opposite of horde mode in that you are attacking the defenses with the Locusts. You earn more cash to unlock more “beasts”. It takes coordination and ends up being more of a “tower assault” style of gameplay that I really haven’t seen much of over the years. The regular multiplayer does well with five on five. Yeah, it could be more but the maps are tight and concise. Get too many people in there and it feels cramped. It’s solid, satisfying and offers a lot more than the team deathmatch that most FPS tack on to give multiplayer. Having everything hosted on their servers definitively makes the experience good since lagging players can’t effect your fun.
Gears 3 did what I never expected it could do. It sets the standard for every single third person shooter that comes out after. It’s got an incredible amount of replay value as you have three modes of cooperative play. It promises satisfying combat, diverse cooperative modes, and a challenge for even the most hardcore of gamers. Epic has something to be proud of as even the most hardcore skeptic such as myself, has already spent twice as much time in multiplayer gameplay as I have in Campaign. This game definitely will go in for one of my picks of the year. Two thumbs!
