Gears of War 3

Date Acquired: 9.15.2011

Date Completed: 10.9.2011

Thoughts: Gears of War has become one of my favorite franchises, and it's almost entirely due to the multiplayer. Particularily the co-op makes the series for me. Playing one on one with 12 year olds who have all day to sit in front of the game and perpetually spew racist remarks hold no appeal to me. Sure, occasionally I enjoy some of the multiplayer modes against strangers (with the volume turned down of course) The campaign mode is once again the silly, almost nonsensical story of overly testosteroned frat boys. I don't pay attention to the 'plot advancements' which is why John, I still don't know why the queen of the Locust is a human. And I don't care. I'm not playing this game for the story or I would have given up on it long ago.

So Gears is back with everything that made it great. Is it a major improvement over Gears 2? To me, not really. It's primarily more of the same. Which isn't a bad thing at all, I played the hell out of Gears 2.

The campaign hasn't changed much from Gears 2 with one exception. It still offers 4 player multiplayer, so you can play through the whole game by yourself, or with 3 other friends or complete internet strangers. There are now 2 different campaign modes: Standard and Arcade. Standard is self-explanatory, but Arcade is an interesting twist. For starters, your points are shown on the screen. After every level you are ranked with how you did against your friends, and then the scores reset and you compete for the most points again. It doesn't exactly promote team play, there is a clear adavantage to the player who runs off ahead (assuming he doesn't die) and certainly for the player who gets in the big machines that deal major damage. The nice thing, is that when the 'teammate' who goes ramboing off by himself to get a big point lead invariably gets himself killed, it doesn't cause the game to start over as it does in standard mode. Now this player is dead for 30 seconds or so, while the other players go on without him. If all players die at the same time, only then does the game restart from the last checkpoint. New as well to gears is the concept of mutators. We've seen this in other FPS's in the past, such as the skulls in Halo, but basically they let you alter an aspect of the game. It could be something that makes the game easier such as infinite ammo, or a super powerfull active reload, or something that makes it harder, like making ammo drops scarcer (I'll be honest, I've never activated one that makes it harder) and some are just cosmetic. Most of these have to be deliberately unlocked, it's difficult to get them unless you are actively trying to get them, but they can be worth it when you do. They can be applied to both campaign and horde mode, which makes finishing off the 50th level of horde mode much more doable.

Speaking ofHorde mode, it has been completely reimagined. You still band together with up to 4 other players against wave after wave of progressively more difficult enemies, but now you earn money with each kill, and that money can be spent on new weapons, fortifications, and other items that make it easier to handle the oncoming horde. And you need these items. The previous horde mode threw only regular enemies at you, and on the 10th wave you had to fight riders, which were difficult, but none of the large enemies from the series' history. That all changes here. Now you fight berserkers, Reavers, Corpsers and more. I was initially very skeptical about these changes, but I have to admit, they really work. In the past you had to worry about other players taking the limited ammo, leaving you with nothing. Now that's not the case. It's a reward system. You get money for the things you do in the game. You want to buy a mortar or build and upgrade a turret? Great, better get some kills. The new system encourages team play even more. Once a base is established, it's the only place you can build defenses, unless you pay progressively more money to establish bases in other areas. The result is all the players wind up hunkering down in the same area working together, whether they know each other or not.

The only truly new mode is Beast mode, which is sort of the inverse of Horde mode where you play the locust horde and you attempt to hunt down and wipe out the human resistance in 12 progressively more difficult waves. As you go, you unlock more and more different enemies to play as, and the last wave or too offers almost no challenge assuming you can afford the nearly industructable Berserker. It's a fun diversion, but not really meaty enough to keep players coming back for more.

The game's been out long enough that I've had the time to play the three downloadable content packs that have been released for it so far. The first offered new horde mode maps, as well as new fortifications. Now you can unlock command centers, basically a spot in the battlefield where you can call down an air strike to take out a group of enemies near you. Unfortunately you can't aim it, it just attacks whomever the game feels like attacking, and it's pretty expensive to unlock, so it doesn't really wind up being worth it, since it's a one-time use sort of thing. One very cool decision Epic made was to release the new maps made available via this DLC as a free download to everyone. If you didn't pay for the DLC you can't host your own matches with these maps, or of course get the achievements, but you can play them if they are randomly chosen. The result is the Gears userbase doesn't get fragmented. Everyone has access to the same maps. I think it was a good strategy. I don't care if some gamer in Boring Oregon (real town) paid for the maps or not, now I have more options as far as whom I can play with, and it makes the money I spent worth more to me, but at the same time doesn't force anyone to buy maps just to keep playing the game they already purchased.

The second set of DLC was a campaign download. It adds a prologue to the game. A friend of mine told me that he beat this campaign by himself in about an hour on hard mode. After playing through it myself, I quickly realized that he was wildly exagerating. It probably took me around 5 hours. Sure, it likely could have been done in less, I tend to take my time, I died a lot because the guy I was playing with is terrible (just kidding, John ;) ), but I would estimate it's a bare minimum of 3 hours of content.

The final (so far) set of DLC was a bunch of multiplayer maps and skins. I haven't played around with this too much, as multiplayer is my least used aspect of this game. I've tried a few of the maps, but honestly, by the time these maps came out, I had pretty much moved on. Maybe the next set of DLC will rope me back in.

So that's how I feel about Gears 3. I don't feel it does that much to differentiate itself from the previous game, but I don't need it to. I played a ton of Gears 2, and now have played a ton of Gears 3. I don't need companies to reinvent the wheel, go with what works, play it safe, make a few minor additions that work well and mix things up just enough, and I think that's what Cliffy B and Epic did here.