Missing It
When Epic announced that Gears of War 2 would never come out for the PC (“Epic: No Gears…”, 1UP.com), I had to force myself not to snicker. The PC version of the first game is, quite frankly, garbage. For a game with a budget that is obviously very large, the bugs, glitches, and overall lack of any adaptation to the PC platform that plague the PC port is simply inexcusable.
I understand it did wonders for cover systems in shooting games, and I cannot argue that. I found myself being able to take cover easily and effectively behind just about everything I tried to, so technically it works. It also fundamentally changes how you play a shooter. There is no strafing and no running (at least whilst gunning). Instead, you scramble desperately between pillar, car, and sofa, spraying enemy positions with fire. “Grit” is an obvious theme in Gears, and the cover system lends a weight to combat that carries the theme into gameplay as well as art style.
What Gears pulls off well, the setting, the gameplay, the mechanics, the feel of battle, it does so splendidly. If a World War II shooter was able to effectively mimic the weight, even the seriousness, that Gears brings to the table, I might actually find myself tempted to hop back into the genre. As a set-piece, science fiction shooter, Gears may perhaps desire no higher praise.
As an Xbox 360 game, I think Gears succeeds, and I am even the type of guy to say things like, “Lawl console shooters.” Of course, Gears is not technically a first-person shooter, so my snide comments are only a little misplaced. I suppose purists, people who believe that Gears is a 360 game and should only be talked about in such terms (Epic Games being among them), can stop reading after the last paragraph.
The fact is, I can detect no visible effort to turn Gears into a PC game. Even the button commands on-screen mimic the 360’s controller; menu screens are clearly controlled better by the keyboard than the mouse. Everything about the game screams at me to plug in a 360 controller, although I personally believe Microsoft would be happier if I just bought a 360 instead (and no, I am still not going to do it).
Even more confounding were the strange bugs that I desperately assume were not present in the 360 version – else every online critic I read has lost all credibility. After clearing an alleyway of all visible enemies, i.e. things shooting at me, I tried to progress and found myself stuck behind an invisible wall. I called for my squadmate, but he simply replied, “Nope, not going to do it.” I was about ready to reload my game when a sniper on a roof somewhere finally decided to fire. After killing him, I was magically able to move forward. Later, my roommate (now playing as my squadmate), found himself stuck inside a crate, unable to move until I went forward enough to trigger the next cut-scene. In other words, the game is highly scripted, which is fine, but the PC version, at least, somehow missed out on seemingly obvious QA sessions.
As revolutionary as the combat is, less impressive is the simplistic enemy AI, which never presents any challenge on Normal mode and never misses on Hard. They, too, follow obvious scripts, and I found it alarmingly easy to exploit them.
Gears of War 2, then, is a 360 exclusive, and I suppose I shall count myself lucky that I will have one less game to put on my stack of shame this Christmas.
