Gears of War 3 celebrates its tenth anniversary this week, which means I am well and truly prepared to crumble into dust. Resident Evil 4 carved a new path for third-person shooters, but Gears of War came along and stained that road with scorch marks that became unmistakable.
Dominic Santiago has gotten really into gardening, while Marcus Fenix has grown into a more seasoned leader who has begun to learn from his past mistakes. Like so many third entries of this time period think Spider-Man 3 Epic Games saw fit to include a new class of enemy to avoid Gears of War 3 falling victim to monotony.
However, beginners get a bonus by being able to take extra damage while learning the game in multiplayer, an advantage that goes away once players reach level five. It's also worth noting that throughout the entire game players have the ability to spot enemies for their allies. With a couple quick button pushes, you can identify a hidden enemy you've spotted to the rest of your team.
One of the most popular multiplayer modes, Horde, returns, but with a significant difference. Five players are again up against 50 ever-increasingly difficult waves of enemies, but instead of finding a spot and holing up, players now pick a command post to defend. With each wave, players earn cash they can use to purchase defensive and offensive countermeasures. Plus, every 10th wave includes a particularly nasty boss, beginning with a Brumak at level While the previous version of Horde worked best with teamwork, version 2.
Finally, there's Beast mode, a new game to the Gears empire. It plays similarly to Horde, but the player is the Locust. You start as lower level monsters and, by accumulating kills, you can earn tokens, which you can cash in for higher level monsters. They've also decided to include stereoscopic 3-D for some unfathomable reason. It is. In just about every way that matters, the team over at Epic have saved their best for last. The weapons, enemies, story, top-notch voice acting, incredible vistas, and maps in Gears of War 3 are better than either of the two previous games.
Plus, thanks to the new Unreal Engine , it plays and looks better than ever before. When the campaign ended, I was actually a little sad, disappointed that it was all over. But eager to tackle the whole thing again on Insane and waste countless hours playing Horde and Beast and go back looking for all the collectibles While it doesn't begin to approach the comically clusterfucky depths of Halo 's mythology, Gears of War 's storytelling has still taken on a bit of bloat over the years.
The economical, terse staging of the first game still stands as the best Gears story of the three, insofar as it felt genuinely tense and left a good deal to the imagination. But the more the writers at Epic show me of the Gears universe, the less I care about it. It's something of a video game paradox: the very iteration that has allowed Gears of War 3 's mechanics to become so finely tuned has proven anathema to its storytelling. Most video game sequels play better than their predecessors.
How many of our favorite games are sequels? But as writers are forced to juggle and expand to keep things going, their stories almost invariably suffer. How many of our favorite films are sequels? This is very much the case with Gears of War 3 —its game-y elements have hugely benefited from five years of post-release iteration, while its filmic, storytelling aspects have suffered. Even after all those ads filled with all that moody pop music and eerily silent gunplay, I have never been able to invest in Gears of War 's apocalyptic gravitas to the degree that I sense Epic wants me to.
That's not to say that the story is unbearable or anything: given the ham-fisted way that both lead characters have been portrayed, I continually find myself surprised at my affection for Marcus and Dom—I genuinely like both men, and I'm not alone. Among the game's fans, their gruff bromance has become one of the defining aspects of the Gears of War franchise. But my unlikely enjoyment of some of the characters doesn't blind me to the fact that for the most part, Gears of War 3 's story never rises above the level of hackneyed genre fiction.
Lead writer Karen Traviss has crafted a suitable series of reasons for Delta Squad to make its way from location to location, but the whys, hows, and wherefores of their journey are woefully half-baked. Furthermore, Gears of War 's overserious, emo bent remains a mystery to me.
There simply hasn't been enough consistent character development over the course of the series to support the kind of catharsis for which the games clumsily reach. I've never been given a sense of what Sera was like before Emergence Day—why should I care about these people, this world? It's a classic video game storytelling shortcoming: in the down-and-dirty heat of combat, everything in front of me matters a great deal … and so nothing beyond my ironsights needs to matter at all.
Both tricks feel intriguing and fresh, but they're unceremoniously dropped after the first act, and the rest of the game played out as a linear story with few surprises. By and large, Gears of War 3 spends most of its campaign doing what it does best: guiding players through an escalating series of highly enjoyable firefights. Each fight's pacing is sculpted with great care, and encounters move from one arena to the next with remarkable fluidity.
The campaign may seem repetitive from a distance, but while I was in the thick of it, I never tired of charging into a new room, slamming up against cover, and cutting my way towards the enemy's flank. While the gunplay is parceled out with admirable discretion and control, the campaign's broader pacing does falter from time to time.
This occurs most notably during vehicle segments and boss battles. These bits seem designed to break up the fight-rest-fight rhythm of the campaign, but more often than not they move too far from the game's core and expose its limitations. Only one of the boss battles—involving a certain gigantic female rageoholic—is what I would call genuinely "good. During a battle against a giant, tyrannosaurian Brumak, the beast simply stood still at the edge of the battlefield, impotently shooting rockets as I hid behind a train car and gradually whittled down its health until it keeled over.
Vehicle segments are similarly uneven; blasting away at Reavers from the bed of a pickup truck is good fun, but a late-game submarine mission is perhaps fittingly the nadir of the entire campaign. The story screeches to a halt, and players are forced to spend fifteen minutes shooting incoming torpedoes out of the water using an imprecise, frustrating sea-cannon.
From a difficulty standpoint, Gears of War 3 is easily the most accessible, welcoming game in the series. Chainsaw bayonets and blood spatters: tick. Hulking space marines: tick. Chest-high walls and new and interesting ways to blast the Locust troops: tick. But there are signs here that Epic want to entice the casual gamer too. The campaign mode contains a short clip of the game's backstory to ground the uninitiated. It also offers a "casual" difficulty setting which allows players only interested in seeing how the story develops to breeze through its 10 to 12 hour-long campaign.
The story picks up right where the last instalment left off. Marcus Fenix and the rest of the COG soldiers of the planet Sera have been scattered after the destruction of the last human city, and now eke out a Spartan existence aboard giant sea-barges. Their situation has been made even more desperate by the emergence of a new enemy, called The Lambent, a feral strain of the Locust Horde that have been mutated by Imulsion the glowing liquid power source of Sera.
Not only do these enemies mutate on the fly in battle, they also have a nasty habit of exploding when killed. The Lambent have proven to be such a substantial threat, that they've even succeeded in driving the Locust above ground, turning some confrontations into three-way battles. The plot gets rolling after the arrival of the effete COG leader, Chairman Prescott, who provides Marcus with proof his father is alive and being held captive by the Locust.
Epic has maintained all year that, while Gears Of War 3 may not herald the end of the franchise altogether, it will certainly end the storyline that has played out over this and the previous two games.
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