by
luke
@ 2007-08-27 - 01:53:14
Gears of War (Gow as we'll call it) is an xbox360 game that's been getting a lot of attention since its release. If I told you the story you might ask why; you're a space marine saving the world from the alien threat, and it's not like that hasn't been done before. But as they say, it's not the tale, it's the teller, and in any case, this game is definitely all about action. Find a wall to hide your sorry backside behind or get it shot off.
At one level, the game really is as good as they say it is, and to cut a long story short, if you're at all into gaming, I recommend it. I played it right through to the end, which says a lot. I suspect that like most people I start way more computer games than I ever finish because the good ones tend to mean such a time commitment, and if something isn't holding my attention it's easy to move on to something new or go back to one I liked more that I've been meaning to complete.
A large part of what kept me playing GoW it was the way it looked; the quality of the graphics was really outstanding on an HDTV. This was one of the nearest things to cinematic that I've seen; the lighting was fantastic, the characters looked solid and well-detailed, the world was intricately realised and fun to look around. Never underestimate the joy of just wandering round in a computer game and checking out the environment for the hell of it; this is partly why something like Second Life has become so popular, I reckon, on top of its social aspect. It has the 'Hey come and look at this' factor, and so does Gow.
Plus I have to admit there was some pretty intense gameplay in there as well; third person shooting has probably never been done this well before. If you don't play games you're probably oblivious to the geek cult of the shooter, so a little exposition may be necessary. Since the dawn of time (in the minds of the cultists, anyway) the way to play shooting games has been from a first person perspective on a PC mouse and keyboard.
Really nerding hard now, there are various reasons for this. One is that the PC keyboard offers more input options than a gamepad or joystick. Another is the superior quality of PC hardware; the PC will shortly be pulling ahead of the graphical power and quality of the latest consoles yet again, if indeed it hasn't already. But the most important is the sensitivity of the mouse; what you're basically doing, at the mechanical level when you play, is to use the mouse pointer to click on a target, and a mouse is much more sensitive than a joypad.
Also, the first-person perspective can help with the illusion of a depth of field so calculating the distance to the target is easier, not to mention the movement of the camera. Because of a combination of these issues, aiming in third-person games is usually either notoriously tricky, or so computer-assisted that you no longer feel you have to try very hard. So GoW was going against the odds technically at several levels, and won out gloriously; it proved beyond all doubt that you can make a decent shooter i) for a console and ii) in the third person.
But I did have some quibbles. For one thing, it goes for a kind of pseudo-realism in the combat; the amount of damage you can take is very unrealistic but in most of the scenarios you're allegedly part of a team, and sometimes at crucial moments the software lets you down. You're meant to be trying to get some grenades into burrows that the aliens are bursting out of, but your team-mates do a lamentable job of laying down suppressing fire. So you die. Repeatedly.
And throw your game controller to the floor, screaming 'Goddammit, give me some fucking covering fire, you bastards'. Now in a sense this is a win for the developers, because that's some serious in-game intensity. But too much frustration like that can mean you stop playing a game, precisely because it's too intense. Too intensely annoying. This isn't a fight you can avoid, like in an open-ended scenario; there's no scope for just slipping by these opponents. You have to beat them before you continue.
And that was the other big issue I had with it, the structure of the gameplay. Here GoW is very traditional indeed. The story wasn't remotely open-ended; you were being funnelled through something. Now there's nothing to say that free roaming environments like in the GTA series are mandatory when you're making an action game; if you've got a story to tell and you want to guide the player through it in a fairly controlled way, then alright.
But GoW didn't really have much of a story; you didn't find out much about your character, who in any case was a complete cliche; grizzled gruff warrior with no discernible personality, and you're just on a mission to plant a bomb to that can foil the alien threat. So it's all a pretty formulaic affair that's always on the verge of narrative incoherence, held together by regular great action sequences (which are fairly scripted, the monsters will always be there at the same points) and wonderful visual style.
It has to be said the all the very best shooters I've played in recent years have been so great precisely because they give you more freedom than this. Far Cry, Oblivion, Bioshock, and Stalker, are all examples of first-person games with a structure that's loose enough to make you feel genuinely like an explorer in a different world; GoW gives you a package tour that you're whisked through. In fact it's more like Disneyland, with replicas of famous attractions rather than the real thing, because so much of the environment is inert. It looks great, but you can't interact with it, so once again the illusion is broken.
Of course fully interactive environments where you can open everything, use everything, and so on, are a tremendous amount of effort to create. They also take a tremendous amount of processing power to run on a computer, and in fact, you could say it still hasn't been done. But games like the ones above are already better at keeping the illusion of it than GoW. Mind you, lots of fans will think this is too picky; if you want an edge-of-your-seat ride through some great firefights and you're not too bothered by plot holes, look no further. If you accept its limitations, nothing delivers like GoW.