Review - Gears of War 3

Review - Gears of War 3

Pros: Great Gameplay, soundtrack and multiplayer option

Cons: Slight gap in the narrative from the last game making the start of the story feel disjointed

Final Judgement: Well worth the purchase, satisfying conclusion to the series

www.gearsofwar.xbox.com

Available for: XBOX 360


You know, I like game trilogies; they're just the right amount of story for me. It’s like a well written essay. The first game hooks the player, getting you interested in the series while hinting at a shadowy greater evil. The Second game raises the stakes.  The mastermind is revealed along with the scope of its master plan and you find yourself giving a damn about the heroes plight asthe game begins to round out the key characters. Then comes the third instalment.  It’s like the god damn super bowl of the story. Chalked full of bright lights and noise, the game goes big before going home. Everything from the last two games comes to a climactic head in an epic showdown full of explosions, drama and action. Ending with the salvation of the world, getting of the girl, or dying like a champ.

I like knowing that questions will be answered and stories will be concluded. I also like not being concerned that the ante will continue to be upped to the point that the villain starts cloning dinosaurs for poorly defined reasons or the main character is consistently found on his death bed only to come back to life so often that you lose count.

Which brings us to this week’s offering Gears of War 3, developed by Epic Games and Microsoft Studios. The third and final instalment in the Gears of War Trilogy. Markus Fenix and his steroid addicted buddies are back to grunt, swear and chainsaw bayonet their way through another pile of horrors from the deep. So let’s get ready for more this:

And this:

And plenty of this:

The Gears of War saga follows the misadventures of Sargent Marcus Fenix, a solider known as a Gear in the Coalition of Organized Governments or COG. In the series, a technologically advanced Humanity has been fighting a losing war against a horde of monstrosities known as the Locust.  The Locust, who roughly fifteen years or so (before the first game), launched a surprise attack against the entirety of humanity when they emerged from their burrows beneath the surface of the world.

"We're back! And this time it ain't a sausage party!"

Wait… in writing that I just realized the absurdity of the whole situation. I mean, I did just mention that humanity was a technologically advanced society right? They have after all developed a system of satellites in orbit of the world called “the hammer of dawn” that can be used to call down precision laser strikes which they used on their own cities to… I don’t know, maybe to prove that they’re hard-core.  So with all this technology you`rè telling me that nobody ever bothered to look under a rock? Seriously!?! No one noticed that the planet was mostly hollow? No one ever noticed the multiple vicious species that have a raging hate bonner for anyone with skin pigmentation? Maybe the COG were too busy blasting their pecs to give it any mind but I digress. Lets get back to the plot:

In the first game Marcus, using his dead Father Adam's research, dropped a giant bomb into the center of the planet in an attempt to murder every Locust that wasn't actively engaged in trying to further pork humanity. This didn't work.  In fact it only managed to further piss off the already ornery Locust, was possibly caused the emergence of a plague called `Rust Lung`, which was killing an alarming number of people in the second game. I say maybe because, like cell phone use, no one in the game really seems to care enough to really look in to it. Also I`m starting to think Adam Fenix was the only scientist employed by the COG.

In the second game Marcus, yet again using his dead Father's previously unknown research, blows up the ground underneath Humanity’s last remaining inhabitable city, Jacinto, creating what he hoped would be a giant sink hole that the ocean would flood into and murder every Locust chilling under the planet’s surface. While Marcus is successful in sinking the city and flooding the tunnels Humanities last bastion is also gone. Gone and the COG breaks down and scatters about the world desperately trying to survive. I should also mention that I recalled that right near the end of the game they briefly introduced a new type of Locust that appears to be infested by "Emulsion" which in the Gears of War world is the planets primary fuel source, I seem to recall the Locust being perturbed by their appearance but it was kind of glazed over in the excitement of the big show down under Jacinto.

In the third and final game, the Emulsion Locusts have apparently been renamed Lambent and are becoming a real problem to the COG remnats. The Lambent now burst out of the ground from giant tentacles which spew forth all manner of emulsion tainted super assholes in a fairly disgusting Freudian manner. (At this point there’s a bit of a narrative leap that occurs with the Lambent from the second to the third game, but I'll get to that later.)  The new flavour of neon Locusts are even more hell bent on the extinction of humanity then the original albino Locust.

Right about now I'm glad this game wasn't created in Japan

While the Lambent are busy oiling their tentacles and slathering themselves with more day glow gloop then a free spirited hippie at a burning man rave. Marcus, who has been on a boat with his friends for the last year and a half appears receives a message from his Father Adam who turns out not to be dead but actually held captive by the Coke Classic flavoured Locust. Adam tells Marcus about new research. Research which will allow humanity to, you guessed it, murder every Locust and Lambent on the planet. Incredible, I know.

"Look son, I know the first few uber weapons I cooked up kinda shot us in the ass... but I've laid off the glue and have a real good feeling about this one. Trust me, this is gonna be awesome."

You know, the more I think about Marcus' track record the more bat shit insane he starts to seem. Does anyone ever stop and think about the facts that every time Marcus gets excited about his Dad’s research he comes up with a Hail Mary plan to cause the mass murder of a species? Or that these plans usually end with humanity being left worse off than it was? Why doesn’t anyone ever stop Marcus mid plan with a, "Hey Markus, I’m real happy for ya, I’m-ma let you finish, but I have to say your Dad’s idea of using the hammer of dawn on our own cities was the greatest crazy plan of all time! OF ALL TIME!”.  Maybe Markus could try something a little less crazy pants, A strongly worded letter perhaps? Maybe try being a Gear of Consensus?

"Dr. No ain't got SHIT on Adam Fenix!"

Now you may think from what I just said about the story that I don't like it, but I do, I really do. I think Gears of War has a great story. It’s just when you look at it objectively, it sounds a bit crazy. In the context of the game though, it makes perfect sense. I've enjoyed every game in the series and I totally drank the Epic Games cool-aid. Every game in this series has a memorable moment to it where I found myself sitting there and muttering impressively "wow" (head nod). For example, halfway through Gears 3 there is a scene played in slow motion with muted sound effects and an instrumental arrangement of Gary Jules' Mad World playing, damn well gave me goose bumps.

So epic Marcus can barely belive it.

The only real criticism I can level at the game is the aforementioned narrative leap.  Whenever there is a successful game series, you are likely going to have comics or novels that accompany the game to further flesh out the characters or the setting. Gears of War is no exception, the game has a graphic novel series as well as four books written by Karen Traviss, who is also the lead writer for Gears of War 3. The final book in the Gears of War novel series is called "Coalition’s End" and covers everything that happened between the end of Gears of War 2 and the start of Gears of War 3. I haven't read it, but from what I've researched in Coalition's End, Traviss explained the lambent threat, developed characters that suddenly appear in Gears 3 and set up key plot devices, such as a data disc that is a focus of the early part of Gears 3. That’s all wonderful except, none of it is explained in any detail, at any point in Gears of War 3. You can piece together what’s going on in the game with fairly little trouble, but I found myself wondering if I had forgotten some key information of the last game and found myself pausing to refer to a Gears of War wikki to clear things up.  To me that’s a bit of an issue.

"What do you mean, 'where did I come from'?"

A game or a game series should be more or less a self-contained story. I'm all for accompanying a game with books or comics with fiction references to make the hard-core fans smile but there should never be required pre-reading before playing a game in order to fully understand a games narrative. While Gears of War 3 tries to address this jump in story line with a short video recapping the story, it does so  in a Battlestar Galactica-esque "So some bad shit happened, yadda yadda yadda, everything is more or less fucked, here we go." Prologue, which while getting me jazzed up for the game, didn`t really explain things so much as make me say, hold on… they were on an island? Wait… He’s on a boat now?

As I mentioned previously, there`s a great scene in the game which is set to the song "mad world". One of the first things that gripped me in the Gears of War series is the music, Steve Jablonsky, who composed the second game was brought back for this instalment. Steve does a great job mixing mellow reflective themes that really brings to life the despair and devastation of the game world punctuated with pounding militaristic orchestration that drives home the frantic fire fights throughout the games action sequences. Jablonsky doesn’t disappoint for the sagas conclusion and I was only a few hours into the campaign when I found myself pre-ordering the Soundtrack off of Amazon.

There isn't really much more I can say about Gears of War 3. The only major changes to game play from the first two games is the inclusion of a four player co-operative campaign mode over Xbox Live and a new multiplayer mode where you attempt to survive successive waves of enemies with your friends. Other than that, the controls, gameplay and multiplayer are the exact same as in the first two games.

If you're a fan of the series, you're going to be pleased with the way the story wraps up. If this is your first foray into the Gears Saga, then stop, turn around, and go pick up the Gears of War collection that has the first two games. It’s fairly cheap, they’re both great and it will make the third games campaign a lot more enjoyable.