Gears of War Review - PC

You know the real problem with Epic’s Gears of War? Take its surly ex-military protagonist, Marcus Fenix. Arms like elephant legs, virtually no neck, shoulders up to his eyeballs, wears triple-size ski-boots and hauls around a rifle with a chainsaw bayonet, yet somehow he can dodge and weave and somersault around the game’s subterranean enemy Locust Horde like Jet Li in a fat suit. Must have been the ballet lessons?

That just about sums up what’s wrong with Gears of War for the PC, which is of course to say “nothing, really.” In fact it’s a perfectly reliable port of the Xbox 360 version, predictably better looking, with five new campaign levels, three extra multiplayer maps (for a grand total of 19), a few additional achievements, and a level editor to boot. Comparatively speaking, it’s like a game of the year edition that keeps all the good stuff and tacks on twenty percent more.

Gears of Yore

Or does it? The original Gears of War had a gorgeously shiny, strapping, glazed-industrial MO, but it’s campaign was really just a protracted scoot-and-shoot down a single track with interlocking areas littered with conveniently placed concrete pylons and slag heaps and skeletal car frames for cover. You’d squat behind these between bursts of enemy fire, pop up, scan for head or leg shots, slide along your plane of protection, then maybe dare a flank move or two. Epic’s idea of “tactical” was for you to optionally take a side route that beckoned like a blinking runway, come up perpendicular to an entrenched (but stupidly ignorant) opponent, and tattoo an unfriendly hello into the back of its skull. The PC version adds more of the same, but is the “twenty percent” extra really justified just so players can fight a gun-armed behemoth only glimpsed in the Xbox 360 version and titularity referred to as ‘the’ Brumak?

Not quite. Looking like the fatter, sorrier sibling of the spider-eyed and fireball-flinging imps in Doom 3, the much hyped Brumak delivers a tense if entirely scripted performance as it distantly tracks your progress through the five additional levels newly slipstreamed between the start and close of the campaign’s final chapter. Until you have to fight it, anyway, at which point it turns out to be big, dumb, and preposterously easy to pummel by observing a few trite conventions (shoot its arm-cannons, shoot its legs, shoot its head, and Kaboom!). After five or six edgy hours struggling off a bridge and through a park and through the guts of a power plant, the Brumak disappointingly feels all tease and no play.

Wardriving

On the other hand, piloting Marcus with the PC’s keyboard-mouse allows for unquestionably greater tactical accuracy and better reaction times than comparatively fussy and inexact thumb-sticking on an Xbox 360 controller. The latter is of course optionally supported if you’d rather make the hike as originally intended. If anything, it makes multiplayer gunfights feel more exact if you’re deferential to traditional palms-down skirmishing.

The trouble with multiplayer is that it hedges its bets between “silver” and “gold” membership, requiring non-members to pay for the latter if they want the full Monty. Yes, you can play in non-ranked multiplayer and cooperative games with a freebie Silver account, but you sacrifice custom matchmaking, the option to send friend invites, tracked leaderboard scores, joining matches in progress, and, most onerously, the ability to keep matches private. With that kind of “can’t” list, what’s the point? If you don’t have a Gold account but had hardcore multiplayer intentions, add fifty bucks to Gears of War’s price tag.

Other problems are superficial but notable. Running Windows Vista, the optional DX10 setting offers no discernible visual improvements over DX9, but play with Windows XP, and you’re absurdly prevented from enabling anti-aliasing (including at the driver level). Ridiculous bordering on offensive is the only way to describe slapping arbitrary shackles on one operating system to boost sales of another.

Imperfectly Diverting

The PC version of Gears of War feels both more and less complete. While the new seamlessly slipped-in missions add more narrative and in a few cases, some exceptionally difficult and satisfying battles; they don’t add anything substantive to a story already at best worth half a buck and a bag of popcorn. If you’ve never played the original and don’t intend to pay the Gold account multiplayer tax, Gears of War is ten bucks cheaper on PC and still one of the best third-person tactical shooters available, but vets of the Xbox 360 experience will probably want to pass.

Review by: Matt Peckham
Video Produced by: Joel Rubin