Review: Gears of War 3 is like Band of Brothers with lady warriors and real closure

Bigger enemies, bigger weapons

The fact that four players can participate in the campaign game at once means that the enemies have to be tougher to kill. In single-player mode, you play alongside three computer-controlled companions at any given time. In co-op mode, all four players can be real players. So there are many more “bosses,” or huge enemy characters, that you have to take on in the game.

That keeps the single-player game from being just like the other Gears games. When you play it under the most difficult “hardcore” setting, the game becomes pretty tough to beat. I found myself dying and refighting many of the scenes, so the game took nine or ten hours for me to finish. The game did a great job of delivering the feeling that you were under siege and had to hold out against unending hordes of enemies at times.

There are new enemies to deal with in the campaign, such as Lambent Polyps and Stalks. They are variants of the Lambent that are spawned as lots of scorpion-like critters running at you fast to giants that can kill you with a blow or two.

You always play as Marcus Fenix in the single-player story, but you team up with different companion characters as the story unfolds. The game introduces two female characters, the blond-haired Anya Stroud and the brunette Samantha Byrne. They add some fresh banter to the dialogue, and aren’t relegated to sexist subservient roles in the combat.

Sometimes your four-person team splits into two and you have to follow separate paths until reunited. In every scene, you have to worry about the survival of your companions as well as yourself.

You have to earn your weaponry over time, and you have to make tough choices, as you can only carry four major weapons at once. It’s like a little treat when you find a powerful new weapon like a One-Shot sniper rifle, a boomshot grenade launcher, or a Mulcher.

But I found some of the weapons to be clumsy. It was so hard to figure out the way to aim a mortar that I wound up dropping rounds on my character’s head a few times. And the One-Shot aiming system is so unwieldy that it’s quite hard to locate your target in the distance. It isn’t nearly so easy to use when speed is of the essence.

Cool landscapes, little flaws

The game blends styles from so many sources. The fighting and weapons are straight out of the Vietnam War, but the architecture of the city buildings is akin to the elegant buildings of London. Each map is large enough so that you can choose to go straight ahead or make a flanking move. But there’s always one way into the action and one way out. So you usually don’t get lost wandering around looking for the place where you’re supposed to go.

The graphics in this game push the limits of the Xbox 360. It feels that way because the trained eye can spot minor imperfections among the cool 3D imagery. When characters walk, they seem as if they’re made out of wood and are walking like the toy soldiers in the Nutcracker. Epic Games also uses some repetitive imagery that drives you crazy, because it reminds you that you’re playing a game rather than participating in a movie-like experience.

Among the minor annoyances is that there are just way too many garage doors, or shipping bay doors, in the game. That’s because Epic uses the garage doors as a metaphor to tell you that you’ve crossed a checkpoint. The Gears pick up a heavy door and two cross into the opening and then the first two drop the garage door with a loud thud. It’s a nice animation to see — but not over and over again. It’s always fun to see the animation of your character chainsawing an enemy in half, but watching a garage door close is decidedly not the same.

But for the most part, the graphics of the game are beautiful. Since past games have been slammed for looking too gray, this game has an abundant variety of color. But the signature blood is just as red as ever.