Xbox 360 Gears Of War

There can only be very few allowable excuses as to why you probably haven’t picked up Xbox 360 Gears Of War: a). First, is that you’re marooned in a deserted island, or b.) You find yourself in the middle of the Gobi desert, hands tied behind your back. Both cases would mean that you’re probably not able to read this, so you’re excused. As for the rest of you, there can be no excuses: No Xbox? Xbox 360 Gears Of War is available for the PC, too, slacker so get a move on. Get your gears out of your chair and go grab a copy right now. Like, really right now. And don’t ever come back without finishing the easiest, “casual” level, understand?

Back already? Took you long enough. Well, it’s all good and by this time you’re probably thanking the high heavens for giving you the opportunity to play Gears of War on the Xbox 360 (let’s just assume that you did play it in its original platform, alrighty matey?)

No doubt, you (and the rest of the gaming community) have enjoyed the rich gameplay and the innovative tactics that Xbox 360 Gears Of War has over other contemporaries. No doubt, you might even think that the experience is like playing Halo or Half Life 2 for the first time. Yes, it’s not really fair to compare GoW to those games, but it’s not a comparison of gameplay features: it’s an apt comparison of excellence between groundbreaking games of their time.

As you’re no doubt surmised from the clipped story, Xbox 360 Gears Of War placed you in the middle of a hostile alien takeover, with the aliens in question going by the collective name of the Locust. The timeline of the story proper in the game takes you in fourteen years after the invasion of the Locust of your home planet of Sera. Enter Marcus Fenix, a soldier imprisoned for attempting to rescue his father during the height of Emergence Day (or the day of the Locust invasion) and now reinstated (another fancy word for being broken out of jail) and stands as humanity’s last hope against the Locust swarm.

The plot progresses from how Fenix’s elite squad acquires the Resonator, a device capable of mapping out the entire “Hollow” or underground network of the Locust. This is so that the last remaining resistance on the planet, the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG) will be able to deploy the Light mass Bomb, which will finally put a decisive end to the Locust occupation. As in any military operation, things always do not go out as planned, but that’s why the big brass has Markus Fenix in tow: to make sure the job gets done and done right.

Although the story seems very basic (too basic, actually) one does not play Xbox 360 Gears Of War for the philosophical implications. GoW is an excellent third-person shooter game that utilizes cover very intensely—perhaps the first console game ever to do that (we’re excluding arcade fare like Time Crisis here, of course). This isn’t just you shooting your way through trouble. You have to work for it. You have to think, move from cover to cover and hit your enemies without exposing your vulnerabilities, which will really happen a lot.

Though the game is first centered on the Career mode, you can also enjoy many of its multiplayer options via the Xbox Live. You can play co-op with a friend on the same unit splits the screen with your friend assuming the role of squad member Dominic Santiago (in one-player mode, an AI assumes the role of Santiago, as it does with two other squad members). You can also play online via Xbox Live for up to eight players total, with one team assuming the Locust and the other, the Fenix’s Delta Squad.

The game is furious as it is fast, and the multiplayer as well as the escalation of difficulty levels (Casual, Hardcore and Insane) will prolong the game’s playability for a very, very long time. Not groundbreaking in the sense that it may not bring something new, but what Xbox 360 Gears Of War does bring, it brings in spades.