A very interesting look back on this game since its the one that really set the trends of the 7th gen for 3rd person shooters for the most part. It feels a lot more like a 6th gen adventure game than you probably remember compared to the later installments. Way more rough around the edges than I ever realized back in the day. The framerate is awful, the visuals flicker and blur all the time thanks to unreal 3, its buggy as fuck. But the online still works in 2024 which i couldn't believe initially. Its charming in how earnest a lot of the shit in this game is. A bunch of stuff feels like it was put in there because the devs thought it was cool as hell and you know what, i agree. Gears is cool and don't let anyone tell you otherwise

Gears of War is a great shooter that's just fun all around. The guns feel great to use and the gun variety is decent, although it could be better, the enemy designs are cool, the movement feels really damn good and tactile and the level design is great and it's very fun to make your way through the different levels of this game. The story does bring it down a bit as it is fairly uninteresting with pretty nothing characters and a pretty underwhelming ending, however, this is still a great game and an absolute blast to play through.

Edit: I lowered it half a star because I feel like it fuck you.

I’m gonna offer a bit of a different opinion on the franchise’s 2006 start. Having played this game many years after its initial release, I can plainly see some cracks in the facade that I think make it age worse than it could have. First let me preface, for the time this game was a milestone of gaming no doubt. The graphics and advanced cover system were the most fleshed out than previously seen in older games. My problems with the game are more apparent after the passage of time, when innovative graphics can no longer make up for other issues. Gears of War, as it exists today, is a fundamentally derivative game that offers some mild amusement from its gratuitous blood and bullets gameplay.

To begin, the story blows chunks. You don’t have to be an elitist to not care for the overplayed macho, grittycore aesthetic that permeates this game like year old milk. If anything that alone is perhaps the biggest marker of age for this game. It’s every apocalyptic military story ever told, just done infinitely more boring with characters I cringed at everytime they talked. There does exist a sweet spot between embarrassingly bad and charmingly stupid, it’s just this game gets nowhere near it. And it’s not to say I have a vendetta against the era of stupid action shooters of the mid and late 2000s. I used to terminally binge the Army of Two games on the PS3, and believe me when I say those were not getting any writing achievements.

I couldn’t find an ounce of humor, intrigue, or heart anywhere near Fenix and pals. All that matters is that you’re generic badass number 49028, you have a voice to rival pounded gravel, and are tasked with saving the world from aliens by planting bombs in a bunch of random places. All the while you have to babysit some goofball squad members freshly picked up from your local MW2 Lan party. Actually that makes it sound more fun than it is. It’s more like a squad of robots who were made to act like what they thought frat boys acted like. And babysit is the right word, because no matter the difficulty your squad mates insist on sharing a single brain, and will go down quicker than you can roll your eyes in annoyance. It’s like I’m back playing COD zombies with my younger cousin with how often I have to go pick them up.

Now despite my exaggerated frustration this is not an indictment on the game as a whole. I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of stinker stories. If I tune out the dialogue it’s really not so offensively bad. It’s digestible and provides the barebones pretext for why you’re blowing up everything in sight. What really matters here is the gameplay, everything else is more cosmetic than anything in a game like this. And I’m….. lukewarm on the combat.

The cover system is a lot like the general movement of the game. It has a very heavy weight to it. And it is most certainly not up for debate as to whether you’ll use it a lot. If you don’t liberally use cover you will go down startlingly quick, even on the easiest difficulty. Add on that every enemy is a bullet sponge and you’ll be spending most of your time playing whack-a-mole with the enemies as you go from cover to cover. As bad as that sounds It only really becomes a slog when you die and have to do a section all over again. Still, for such an emphasized mechanic I wish they touched up the cover system a little more before calling it a day. For one thing a way to go around a corner in cover without leaving it would have been welcome.

Oddly enough, the very idea of such a heavily emphasized cover system goes a bit against the design philosophy of the rest of the game if you ask me. We’re these roided badasses and we have to constantly hide and take potshots? Screw that, give me some dynamite and a minigun and let me go ham. But hey, It’s a novel gimmick and the deepest use of it I’ve seen so far, so I won’t complain too much. Heck, I even started to kind of dig the cover system when I wasn’t being shot at from thirty different directions. It just takes a bit to get used to the heft of your character. The bosses are okay, but I hated the vehicle sections. Unneeded and unpolished vehicle sections are something that ought to be left in the past. I mean who creates a vehicle that can only power driving OR the light turret? Bad engineers, that's who.

To recap, Gears of War’s story, world, and characters were enormously lame while its gameplay and cover system grew on me ever so slightly. Sure, I still wish the cover wasn’t so pivotal or momentum breaking at times, but I can be more forgiving for the first entry in the franchise. For 2006 this is a great looking action title that no doubt influenced a great deal of games in its wake. While I find it hard to believe anyone can utterly adore this game and not be drowning in nostalgia, I’ll give respect where it’s earned.

This game was great! The only parts I didn't like were how magnetic the cover mechanic was (I've died so many times because I could not get off of a wall or cover object) and the fact that the turrets did not have a crosshair so it felt like I was guessing where it was aiming. And FINALLY, (it may be a hot take) I'm not too fond of the co-op split-up moments in the campaign. I played with a friend and it was so annoying; if ONE of us died (even though we both had a companion NPC with us which couldn't revive us, which alone doesn't make sense), we instantly lost and had to go back to the previous checkpoint

Much like my recent venture into the Halo franchise, this was another one of my dives into an Xbox classic that I missed because I grew up playing on PS3. Gears 1 shows the backbone of a really fun combat system, a story that actually has characters, and is quite a fun time. The boss fights are not exactly the best part of the game, for crying out loud the last boss is just a meat sponge with nothing interesting. But overall I had a good time. Really wish 2 & 3 were available on PC as well, because I guess I just have to make the jump to Gears 4 & 5 now. Good time, recommend.

I played the og Gears game. It was a bit fun and a bit annoying at the same time. I felt this game have the most variety of gimmick levels in the trilogy and I somehow liked most of them. But I didn't enjoy with the rest of the things that much

In one level you ride a minecart, in one level you use a satellite gun to rain lasers, in one level you must use light effectively to stay alive from shadow bats, in one level you ride a... damn vehicle(I didn't like that one) etc. and I had a lot of fun with their variety of interesting premises for levels, also I liked that it always stick to it's serious tone to the point this game could be my favourite in the trilogy but it still have so many annoyances.

In this game, any auto guns are worthless. I played this game on hardcore and enemies just don't die to the body shots, they don't even stumble of your shooting compared to the sequels, they just continue to run like nothing happened and because of that every fight takes too long to the point of boring you. So you have to use heavy weapons mostly and also headshot with them to be able to minimize the time you spend on shooting enemies. I was wondering If they didn't test the enemies themselves and I understand what the hell is going on when I arrived to the vehicle section of this game.

Why? Because this vehicle needs two person to operate. How do you operate you ask without getting crazy when playing that section solo? With playing co-op of course!
So with co-op way, auto weapons actually have purpose with assisting, so no gun fight takes a damn 10 minute I assume. I only can assume because I decided to play this game solo and as a result some sections was pretty infuriating. For example I can't count how many times I died in that damn vehicle section or in minecart or in train etc. Oh also checkpoints are really few. This results with, you dying to a one shot shotgun or rocket or grenades and so it ends up resetting the whole wave arena fight of course. But I think my patience improved a lot with playing ps1 games so I actually beat this game, I was even gonna respect it's difficulty but I still hate the one-shotting attacks, so... unfortunately no. It wasn't that of a good time.

Another thing I can say is, it's movement mechanics are really hard to get a grasp on. Because when you initiate running or rolling or getting to cover, you really have to think twice because getting out of that or animation to finish takes time. First I didn't like it, but it managed to give me the feeling that I am a hulking tank, so I actually started to enjoy it. I also realized that if I take analog stick to opposite direction and then press the run button, character does a 90 or 180 degree quick turn so this knowledge actually made the game more fun for me.

Unfortunately I can't say the same for the cutscenes nor the characters. Other than pre-rendered cutscenes, every in game cutsceney looks ROUGH and clunky. Good thing is they are pretty short but they sometimes manage to take me out of the scene sometimes so... In my opinion this game would be better without them. Also characters aren't more than cliche grumpy angry soldier guys.

Yeah that was my own journey with this game. I can't say it was a bad time but I can't say it was good either. They balance it for me so... this is the result. If you like super serious and dark shooter vibes you are gonna enjoy this game. But in my opinion, if you want to get entertained of this game, don't play on solo. Play with someone. Otherwise you can go crazy like me in some sections and your experience can get soured as a result like me

Gears of War é sem sombra de dúvidas um dos jogos já feitos… E é isso. Pra ser bem sincero ele consegue sair dessa ideia de ser só mais um jogo de tiro em terceira pessoa e se destacar no meio da multidão, mas, se eu parar pra somar os pontos negativos aos positivos da minha experiência, ele sai em um evidente 0 a 0.

Particularmente eu acho absurdo a construção de mundo feita pela Epic Games aqui. Tudo parece minimamente crível. As armas, graças a parte sonora e ao sistema de reload delas, soam mecânicas (no sentido literal da palavra). Os ambientes devastados e a gameplay frenética trazem uma sensação de guerra muito hollywoodiana - superando (pra mim) a maior referência sobre o tema que eu já tive no mundo dos games, Halo 2.
A trilha sonora é simplesmente muito boa. Tal qual Star Wars, é uma OST que se utiliza muito de trombones, trompetes e bumbos pra compor e ampliar a sensação de aventura mesclada à ação frenética dos combates.
Voltando a falar da ambientação visual, é impressionante como conseguiram mesclar super bem o tiroteio dos brucutus dos filmes dos anos 80/90 (como Rambo e Terminator), com elementos de horror, que horas flerta com o torture porn/gore e até surrealismo de algumas obras do gênero, e hora se utiliza de subterfúgios da ficção científica pra não só compor a atmosfera densa do jogo, mas ainda consegue atualizar esses elementos outrora datados, pra um mundo moderno (de quase 20 anos atrás… Mas ainda válido pros dias atuais).

De forma geral, é conhecido que esse jogo é bastante inspirado em Resident Evil, e em alguns momentos ele se inspira até de mais. Em um jogo de horror com elementos de ação (como são boa parte dos jogos da franquia da Capcom), ter cenários mais claustrofóbicos em momentos de ação aliado a uma mira relativamente lenta (em comparação com jogos de tiro em primeira pessoa) é bom, agora em um jogo de ação com leves elementos de horror só tornam a experiência frustrante (o que se intensifica em dificuldades acima do casual). Em momentos de combate em que tem muitos inimigos atirando de longe e ao mesmo tempo os Wretches (minions menores que por sinal são muito parecidos com os Grunts de Halo) estão indo atrás de você, essas mecânicas de gameplay tragas de Resident Evil só servem pra piorar a experiência de jogo.
Já que eu citei o combate, ele funciona super bem na maior parte do tempo. Na dificuldade Hardcore (que foi como eu zerei) o jogo propõe um desafio bem gostoso. Em contrapartida, o que prejudica mais ainda a gameplay é a burrice artificial dos companions. De verdade, eu pensei muito em dropar desse jogo logo no começo justamente porque em quase todo combate do ato 1 eu morri tentando reviver os personagens de apoio. Sendo que, a “inteligência” artificial do Dom, em específico, ao longo dos 5 atos só foi piorando, ao ponto de que em muitos momentos no meio do tiroteio, ele ou se jogava no meio dos tiros ou simplesmente saia do cover e desligava, e se mantinha exposto até o último inimigo. Na luta final ele foi um gigantesco estorvo, até o momento em que o Boss resolveu simplesmente bugar em cima do corpo caído do Dom e parar de me atacar.
Por mais que eu tenha elogiado parte da direção de arte do jogo, na minha visão, esta envelheceu extremamente mal. O jogo se utiliza muito de uma paleta acinzentada tanto nos personagens (primários e secundários) quanto nos ambientes, com pouquíssimos momentos de um leve contraste com elementos em vermelho, preto, laranja e/ou marrom. Isso faz com que seja comum (mais para o começo do jogo) confundir os bonecos com alguns elementos do cenário e até os da sua equipe com os inimigos. Isso se intensifica com o fato de que a modelagem de todos os bonecos ser muito parecida entre si, mudando apenas suaves detalhes, que durante a gameplay se tornam despercebidos, causando essa confusão relativamente recorrente no início do jogo.
Pra mim, o principal problema desse título vem dos checkpoints. Jogando no casual, imagino eu que não é muito problema, mas em dificuldades mais altas, em que morrer é relativamente comum, ter esses auto saves mal posicionados é um gigantesco incômodo. Foi comum eu morrer no final ou até logo depois de uma luta e ter que fazer o combate todo de novo porque o jogo só gravou meu progresso antes da luta. E isso só piora, já que muitos combates se iniciam com cutscenes ou até diálogos in game em que personagem é forçado a caminhar de forma lenta, ou seja, se seu último checkpoint foi pré tiroteio e você morreu no final ou logo após e o jogo não salvou, além de lutar tudo de novo você vai ter que ver a mesma cena até você prosseguir até o próximo save point. E eu não sei se pareceu claro, mas não tem forma de save manual, fazendo com que todo o seu progresso seja totalmente dependente da boa vontade dos devs.

Ao meu ver, Gears of War é um jogo de muitos altos e baixos, sendo os baixos não decepcionantes mas frustrantes. Claro com uma visão de alguém de 2023 esses defeitos se tornam mais evidentes, mas em comparação com os demais jogos de 2006 e trazendo uma ótica daquele ano, Gears ainda é um bom jogo no geral e vale a pena experimentá-lo mesmo depois do remake de 2015 feito pela The Coalition.
Mas como eu to aqui pra te trazer a minha experiência e não pra te convencer a jogar o jogo, Gears of War ainda é um produto inerente à sua época. A gameplay é divertida, mas beira o confuso, nada intuitiva e em alguns momentos nada fluída. A intenção da direção de arte é realmente muito boa, com elementos geniais tragos de outras franquias da cultura pop, mas em vários momentos exagerada demais em um contexto já exagerado. A história é legalzinha mas nada muito desenvolvida. Eu sinto que, esse jogo foi totalmente construído pra ser experienciado em multiplayer, e por mais que ele permita jogar solo, eu enxergo que muito das frustrações que eu tive com esse título, se resolveriam jogando em dupla (principalmente a parte da IA dos companions). Não só isso, mas muitos dos problemas aqui tragos vêm de que, esse foi um pontapé em algo totalmente novo pra sua época, e que eu não duvido que foi resolvido nas 5 sequências que esse jogo teve até 2023.
Em 5 anos em que tenho o Xbox como minha plataforma principal, por algum motivo eu negligenciei Gears, e jogando essa primeira aventura do Marcus Fenix eu me arrependo de nunca ter dado uma chance antes, pois tal qual o que Half Life foi pra mim a alguns meses atrás, o primeiro jogo pode não ter clicado 100% pra mim ao ponto de o tratar como um grande clássico, mas deu um ótimo empurrão pra eu querer ver o que as sequências destes (Gears e Half Life) trazem de inovação em gameplay e história pra suas respectivas épocas.

The first classic franchise for the Xbox 360 era!

I was pumped for Gears of War the moment I saw the poster when it was coming out and it didn't disappoint. The gameplay was gore-some, the characters were memorable, the world-building was cool and the music is great.

The voice acting really sells the fun machismo dialogue. With a weaker performer, Marcus Fenix would come off as painfully dull and annoying but John DiMaggio gives him the right amount of grit and badassery to make him an entertaining protagonist. Also who doesn't love the Coletrain baby? Best side character of the franchise!

What Halo did for the original Xbox, Gears of War did for 360!

Everyone knows Gears of War as the game that defined the duck-and-cover-shooter subgenre of TPS so I won't go into the history lesson. I'm sure the multiplayer of it was interesting when it was around (which I was not) so I was left with the campaign that doesn't have the enemies duck all that well if at all.

The gameplay is pretty good in the story. Weapons are fun and the levels are visually distinct and shake things up. Sometimes there's a time limit, sometimes there's a puzzle like the Berseker segments or how to get around while staying in light so you don't die to bats. Others you drive an awful car or have to "protect Jack while he opens the door" (Translator's note: Jack will not open the door until you kill every enemy, so if one gets stuck like can happen in Fenix Manor, you will have to hunt it down on your own), but the good gimmicks balance out the bad here. Even the final boss can get stuck, him getting stuck on Dom's corpse and thus allowing me to unintentionally cheese him was a memorable part of my playthrough.

The presentation is really solid. The voice acting on some side characters is questionable but the main 4, Marcus, Dom, Baird, and THE COLE TRAIN are all great performances. The graphics are pretty good for 2006, even if the realistic human models come off as uncanny in 2023. The real winner though, is the soundtrack which was far beyond what I imagined it being. Gears of War isn't always a smooth ride like the Cole Train, but it was certainly an enjoyable one.