Gears of War

Product Description

Gears of War is a third-person shooter that places emphasis on using cover to avoid taking damage while moving towards enemy forces. The game uses a number of weapon archetypes, but predominately featured is the Lancer, an assault rifle that has a mounted chainsaw bayonet that can be used to kill foes at close range. The player can attempt an "Active Reload" of a weapon to reload it faster and temporarily boost the damage from the gun, but failing to perform the Active Reload correctly will cause the gun to become momentarily jammed while the player's character fixes it. When the player takes damage, the "Crimson Omen", a red cog representing the player's health gauge, will fade into the screen, becoming more defined with larger amounts of damage. The player can seek cover to recover their health, but if they take too much damage, they will become incapacitated. Once this occurs, a skull will fill the center void of the omen. Depending on the game type being played, the consequences will vary. If single-player career mode is being played, instant death will follow. If there is a second player, they will have to revive their fallen teammate.

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000VBFW7E
• Item Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Media: DVD-ROM
• Release Date: November 6, 2007
  

Product Features

• Gears of War's story plays out like a Hollywood blockbuster
• Unreal Engine 3 technology brings out the smallest details in the largest of battles
• To survive you must suppress your enemy, take cover, and use weapons and teammates to outlast the Locust Horde
• Gears of War for Windows features original content and all-new achievements to unlock
• LIVE supports online matchmaking for Gold members

 

Gears of War

 

Customer Reviews

This is an exceptionally good game. The cover mechanic is one of best implemented to date, the enemy AI is decent, it is beautiful, the weapons are interesting and feel solid, the boss battles are jaw-dropping, and most importantly it's a lot of fun. They even managed to make reloading your weapons compelling. The characters are a little over the top and the dialogue reflects that. But the storyline is suitably grand and it serves to move the campaign along well enough. This should have been a slam dunk must-have PC port of the XBox game.
But it's not. Saved games disappear. The save system is not only an offensively straight port of the console check-point system, but you have to create a Windows Live account to save your progress at all. What? Why? Don't answer that. I know why, and it has nothing to do with the gameplay experience.
I knew there was no quicksave feature when I bought the game, but I didn't know that the game would routinely lose all of my saved progress and achievements. There's a 40 page thread on Epic Games forums about this problem that's been around since the PC version's release in November. If there has been an official response from Epic or Microsoft I haven't been able to find it. That is too long for a massive problem like that to go unacknowledged and unresolved. Unless you have the time to finish the game in one sitting, don't buy this game until they fix the vanishing save games. Go play Half-Life 2, Bioshock, or some other game with a quicksave feature instead.

It might be a fun game to play... but installing and playing it is so hard! I needed to reinstall windows so that would work. I still have some random freezes. Windows Live is not available in my country, so I can only play (and save) offline. But worst than all, every 2-3 days it loses all save data and I have to start it all again from chapter 0 !
Common, next time test the game before releasing! Or release it as beta.