There’s nothing more annoying to a PC owner than having to wait for a game that millions of others are already enjoying. Used to waiting ages for games like GTA, Halo and Fable, it came as no surprise to the PC aficionados that they’d have to endure yet another interminable wait for Gears of War, the game that sold the Xbox 360, to get to their beloved platform of choice. And just about a year later, Gears of War finally arrives for the PC, and to make up for all the lost time, brings along enough candy and flowers to make sure you don’t ever remember being stood up on this grimy, bloody date.

For those who have been sleeping under a rock, Gears of War’s story is a string of meaningless plot devices strung together to get you going from point A to point B, while killing humanoid enemies in the most sickeningly glorious fashion possible. There is no opening cutscene that fills you in on the story so far, no plot expositions a la Half-Life 2 and the most you’d get is two seconds of an in-game cutscene that tells you that you’re in prison. More details are fleshed out in the manual and as the game progresses, but it just serves to punctuate the orgasmic combat that Gears delivers in spades, fought long and hard by hulking soldiers muscular enough to make a battle tank look anorexic.

But no one really cares about all of that, because Gears of War uses an absurdly simple gameplay mechanic that draws you completely in from the beginning all the way to the very end. Playing out from a third person perspective, the game perfects the cover-and-fire tactic that many have tried before, but few have succeeded. Sera might have been torn apart by conflict and burned by orbital lasers, but it still offers enough cover points and areas open enough to out-think and outflank your opponents. Every bit of combat from the first encounter in the prison blocks to the final confrontation with the Locust General all follow this mechanic, which, combined with the cleverly minimalistic level design works towards sending one adrenaline rush after another coursing through your bloodstream.

But the real beauty of the game is not whether it brings anything new to the table (in case you are wondering, it doesn’t) but how well it glues together the level design, the gameplay, the sounds and everything else into one slick package that you’ll want to keep opening again and again. The environments, for the most part, look almost identical but play out completely differently simply because of the way the cover points are placed. At other times, areas that look really vast end up being painfully claustrophobic as the game gates you off and throws in some friendly Locust who love nothing more than spraying you with hot lead – a feeling that you will never experience better than when facing off against the Dark Wretches or the Theron Guards on the Insane difficulty level.

Helping players blow their enemies to pieces is a wide variety of weapons that, for lack of a better word, are plain awesome. The primary weapon is the Lancer, a rapid-fire machine gun with an attached chainsaw bayonet that allows players to walk right up to an enemy and saw them from tits to toe, showering the screen with an obscene amount of blood while the hapless victim does the danse macabre and lets out a final, satisfying death scream. If you’d rather prefer to rain death en masse from above, the Hammer of Dawn (like UT2004’s Ion Painter, except classier) allows you to call in a satellite burn from an orbiting laser and then laugh with pure malice as enemies try to rush out of its way before exploding into a thousand red chunks. And if the sniper rifle, the rocket launcher and the ultra-awesome shotgun aren’t your thing, you always have the option of dispatching your downed enemy by putting your heavy boot into his skull in a hyper-violent (yet extremely satisfying) move straight out of American History X.

Even an act as simple as reloading a weapon serves as a critical gameplay element in Gears of War. Pioneering the concept of Active Reloading, Gears’ weapons can be reloaded with a simple press of the R key, upon which a little white bar starts moving across a meter. Time it right and hit the R key again as it crosses a little white marker and Marcus jams a new clip into the gun much faster and does a lot more damage than usual. Screw it up and you’ll hear an annoyed grunt as the gun jams and you waste precious seconds smacking in that new clip. Needless to say, this is the first time the way you reload can make all the difference between clearing and reloading a checkpoint.

And to make all this absurd violence even more believable, the sound design does an excellent job of complementing the action by providing extremely satisfying effects throughout the game. Slide into cover and the heavy armor worn by the Gears will clink convincingly as it hits the stone; duck just as a rocket misses you and the whistling sound bams your blood pressure up a few notches; discharge a shotgun point blank into an enemy and he explodes with a sickeningly gratifying squelch that sounds like someone just smashed a large pumpkin into oblivion. The voice acting, however, is comic at best and every one of the lead characters sounds as if they eat red-hot gravel for breakfast, lunch and dinner, punctuating every kill ridiculously with “Get back in your hole!” or “’Sup, bitches!”

But this is nitpicking, considering there’s so much more to Gears, especially on the PC. The graphics have been given a shiny new upgrade, complete with support for high-resolution textures and the DirectX 10 API, with the result that the PC version looks oodles better than its Xbox 360 counterpart. But that’s not the only goodie PC owners get! Gears of War for Windows throws in five new chapters that sit between Act 4 and Act 5 on the Xbox 360 version, telling the story of how the Delta team got from Adam Fenix’s house to Tyro Station with the Brumak on their tail, in addition to three new multiplayer maps, a full-fledged editor for the modding community and a new multiplayer gametype called ‘King of the Hill’ that brings Annex and Execution together in a wonderful marriage of bloody carnage.

That and the spiffy controls that makes decapitating Locusts with the Longshot all the more easier. Using the RMB to aim and the LMB to fire, the controls on the PC also separate the “Roadie Run” sprint from the button used to take cover, so PC owners are spared the agony of trying to escape getting blown up by a Boomshot only to find themselves sliding into cover at the least opportune moment. But for those who prefer the Xbox 360 control scheme, the game (being a Games for Windows title) also allows players to simply plug in an Xbox 360 controller and have the console’s control scheme implemented straight away, including the rumble effects.

The multiplayer, while lacking the finesse or the scope of other games like Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament III, is still enough fun to keep you going back for more and see how good you really are with the cover-and-fire system and co-operating with your teammates. And if competitive multiplayer doesn’t tickle your fancy, take heart in knowing that Gears of War is practically built to be played co-operatively, with full support for Drop In-Drop Out co-op that allows you to invite your friends and have them show up in the game immediately. All of this is handled by the Games for Windows LIVE service, which may not be as refined and brimming with content as Xbox LIVE but serves its task quite well. And unlike Xbox LIVE, you can play online co-op with just a Silver account and have your Achievements tracked, but you will still need a Gold subscription to fully take advantage of all that the game has to offer.

But Gears of War isn’t without its flaws and most of its flaws follow it from the Xbox 360 version. The ally and enemy AI is still all over the place and for the most part, you will experience tremendous frustration as your teammates blatantly ignore your orders and rush in and get themselves downed. While some Locust are intelligent enough to work together to bring you down, some of them will stubbornly stay rooted in one spot and absorb bullets continuously until they go down. The difficulty level too ramps up terribly and while Casual can be too easy, Hardcore and Insane can be extremely unforgiving at times, something that’s experienced best when you try to destroy the attacking Reavers in Act 5 on Insane all by yourself. That, and the fact that this game has the worst (read easiest) boss battles in the history of gaming!

Having said all that, Gears of War is still one of the best shooters ever made for any platform, especially so on the PC, considering most of the other shooters that were released in the last couple of weeks turned out to be utterly disappointing, with the exception of Crysis, The Orange Box and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It might look stupid, it definitely sounds stupid, but whatever faults Gears has is more than made up for in its spectacular gameplay, which you will find yourself revisiting over and over and over again. For PC fans that have been waiting ages for the game to release, the game is now available in stores and is a definite must-buy. For Xbox 360 fans who have already finished Marcus Fenix’s mega-blow-‘em-up bloodfest, the PC version offers enough incentive to warrant the purchase with a Junker full of new content. Either which way, Gears of War has carved itself a spot in gaming history and it’s not going to go away for a long, long time.

The Verdict

[TABLE=6]

9 / 10

Distributor: Redington India
Price: INR 1649

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• Jay Says:
  November 27th, 2007 at 12:35 pm

  Great Review Krishnan!!

• Arjun Says:
  November 27th, 2007 at 5:44 pm

  great review man! i rofl’d when i read the cleaving from tits to toes bit.

• Krishnan Rajagopal Says:
  November 27th, 2007 at 5:48 pm

  I seem to have heard that expression somewhere, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where. It was sometime recent, but I am not sure if it was a movie, or a TV show or some game. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll come across it again sometime later.

• bobby sandhu Says:
  November 28th, 2007 at 8:00 am

  congratulations…. i read it.

  (X) | Acheivement Unlocked : Made Bobby Read

• Dev Kanchen Says:
  November 29th, 2007 at 6:31 pm

  Now I’m just waiting for the crazy-shopper-monster-in-me to wake up…