Some twelve years after its initial release, I've finally found the time to sit down with a copy of "Gears Of War" and give it a playthough. Please note, I'm playing the original 360 version, on an Xbox One via the backwards compatibility, and not the remastered release.
My initial feelings about the campaign weren't, if I am honest, that great. A jumbled back story I soon decided to ignore led to a dull abandoned locations and repetitive encounters as small groups of enemies lumbered from ground to fall fairly quickly. The cover mechanic was cumbersome and fiddly and the game was really buggy, prescribed actions failed to kick in and on one occasional I climbed up a ladder which then glitched me to the middle of the roof and I had to restart. However, the further I got into the game, the more it improved. Generic corridors opened to towns squares and houses that needed to be defended from the (admittedly still pretty recurring) invasions. From there, the enemies and weapon types mix it up and bit, but it's the boss fights that remain the most memorable aspects of the game. I did get a better grip on the controls, although throughout the entire playthrough I kept snapping into cover when I was trying to jump out of the way. The active reload was a good addition though and it's one of the best game mechanics I've experienced - when you get the reload spot on, in the heat of battle and take down an enemy. I never did really get a handle on who the characters were and what we were really supposed to be doing but ignoring all that and just going in the direction it seemed to want me to go, and shooting what crawled from the ground became entertaining enough. And then, almost too quickly, it was over. The campaign was probably around ten hours for me, on the standard difficulty setting and trying to look around as much as possible for the cogtags.
I can only imagine what the experience was like to play the game for the first time in 2006, but in 2018, though it lacks the wow factor to compete with an AAA game now, I don't regret finally catch up.
My initial feelings about the campaign weren't, if I am honest, that great. A jumbled back story I soon decided to ignore led to a dull abandoned locations and repetitive encounters as small groups of enemies lumbered from ground to fall fairly quickly. The cover mechanic was cumbersome and fiddly and the game was really buggy, prescribed actions failed to kick in and on one occasional I climbed up a ladder which then glitched me to the middle of the roof and I had to restart. However, the further I got into the game, the more it improved. Generic corridors opened to towns squares and houses that needed to be defended from the (admittedly still pretty recurring) invasions. From there, the enemies and weapon types mix it up and bit, but it's the boss fights that remain the most memorable aspects of the game. I did get a better grip on the controls, although throughout the entire playthrough I kept snapping into cover when I was trying to jump out of the way. The active reload was a good addition though and it's one of the best game mechanics I've experienced - when you get the reload spot on, in the heat of battle and take down an enemy. I never did really get a handle on who the characters were and what we were really supposed to be doing but ignoring all that and just going in the direction it seemed to want me to go, and shooting what crawled from the ground became entertaining enough. And then, almost too quickly, it was over. The campaign was probably around ten hours for me, on the standard difficulty setting and trying to look around as much as possible for the cogtags.
I can only imagine what the experience was like to play the game for the first time in 2006, but in 2018, though it lacks the wow factor to compete with an AAA game now, I don't regret finally catch up.