Gears of War is Epic's best and latest game. After years of running alongside and often slightly ahead of Quake, Epic is trying a new genre hybrid, somewhere between Unreal Tournament's over-the-top grunge sci-fi sensibility and Rainbow Six's stately considered gunplay. You'd think it's a mix that would never work. But there was a time you might have thought the same thing about chocolate and peanut butter.
The irony is that although Epic has gotten even more outrageous with the sci-fi, they've also gotten more, umm, realistic with the gameplay. Well, tactical, at any rate. These fire fights are decidedly not running-and-gunning. They're all about cover. A button press will stick you to the nearest wall, where you'll carefully cower. You can blind fire is you just want to throw some lead, but the aiming trigger makes you lean out to take a shot. Depending on the difficulty level, it won't take many hits to kill you, so the idea is that you'll want to stay in cover. Although the characters are ridiculously bulky dudes piled high with armor that looks more like padding for some sort of futuristic gladiatorial sport, they're actually quite frail.
Not that being gunned down is anything you can't walk off. You can revive teammates by running to their prostrate form and slapping a button. They'll shrug it off and get right back into the fight. It's as if they just needed a hand getting up under all that bulky padding. This makes all the difference in multiplayer games, where you have to get to an opponent's kneeling character to finish him off, usually by splattering his skull. It's brutal and gratifying, and it means you usually can't win by hanging back. Gears of War doesn't think much of sniping.
This combat system accomplishes a few things. First, it establishes the idea of lethal guns. Although the noise of gunfire is curiously muted (Where are the Hollywood sound effects?), the consequences are appropriately dramatic. Rushing at someone who's shooting at you rarely pays off. Grenades are even more lethal because they can land behind your cover. And thanks, Epic, for the line that traces the exact path a grenade will travel when I throw it. If there's one thing worse than having to switch to a grenade and then throw it, it's having to playing guessing games with where it's going to end up.
Second, the combat system encourages tactical maneuvering. You want to flank an opponent to null his cover. The level design is all about these sort of situations. In the single player game, there are very few head-on assaults. And in the multiplayer game, it's almost always a good idea to work your way left or right. It's nice to have a shooter that appreciates the value of good old fashioned lateral movement.
Third, the combat system keeps a team together. In the single player game, your bot buddies are pretty perfunctory. They'll run around and shoot. When they're not getting in your way, they're helpful enough to be worth reviving. But in multiplayer, everyone on your team is a potential medic. Gears of War doesn't have to bother with a class system. It helps that multiplayer games are relatively intimate, limited to 4 vs. 4. But the combat system makes two guys exponentially more powerful than one guy. Every man counts.
Another clever bit of tactical gameplay is the way reloading your gun works. Who'd have imagined that Epic would find a way to make the act of changing a clip so fresh and interactive? You can simply tap the reload button and let the animation run its course. Or, you can try to tap it a second time to hit a sweet spot. Hit it to shorten your reload time. Miss it and you'll take even longer than if you'd just let the animation play out. Tag it perfectly, and your clip will inflict extra damage. This reloading minigame is exactly the sort of innovation the genre needs to pull itself out of the ghetto of graphics-intensive shooting galleries.
