Better on XBOX 360

Gears of War...it's one of the ubiquitous XBOX 360 titles alongside Halo 3. Pretty much everyone owns the game, and if they don't, it's likely because they don't own a 360. I was the later -- not really into console gaming, so I was anticipating the PC-port of the game.

Well let me say that whoever ported this game absolutely blew it. There are too many bugs and oddities to really say that it's as good as the XBOX 360 version. But I will start with the positives about the game itself.

Gears of War is a dark dystopian tale of a small group of rag-tag soldiers fighting to save humanity from an invasion. The invading force is a repulsive race known as the Locust; they're big, ugly, and angry. Sure, it sounds like a very generic story -- and it is. There's nothing wrong with that though, as GoW pulls it off with some stunning visuals and innovative game play.

GoW is entirely third-person, meaning you have a camera following your character the entire time. For the first few minutes it feels awkward, but has some distinct advantages as the game progresses. You're allowed to see the fluid character movements and well-animated actions they take, and are afforded a very wide point-of-view...helpful for surveying big areas and battles. You're given control of your fellow soldiers (squad) at times, making the 3rd-person camera even more useful.

Gone are the silly things we've come to expect from first person shooters. You can't carry 10 guns, 1000 rounds for each, 20 grenades, and all the other stuff. You get 3 guns, and a few grenades. Ammo is scarce, and you quickly learn how to place your shots and perform some actual squad maneuvers. That's right -- GoW is a challenging game. Enemies learn how to take cover, flank you, and use the surroundings to overtake you. You will not be able to just run forward, guns blazing. Actually, you can do this -- you'll just find yourself dying very often. On that subject, you'll notice that there's no cheesy health meter. As you take damage, the screen turns red. If you can find cover, you'll recover and can get back in the fight. There's no such thing as a health or armor powerup. Reloading is slow, and you can actually jam the gun if you're reloading too fast.

Environments are full of despair and destruction, and really suck you into the story. Everything looks legitimate and realistic, and is fully interactive. Everything has a decidedly "dark" feel, and there's plenty of areas where you simply can't see what's coming next. Enemies jump out at you, ambient sounds will keep you on your tip-toes...it's just like a good horror movie with some gun battles thrown in. You'll see a variety of environments, from city streets to cathedrals to underground caves.

The controls are very first-person in feel though, and you'll quickly grow acclimated to them. The added melee feature is tricky, but once mastered, you'll find it invaluable at disposing of enemies at close range. Squad commands are easy to issue, and you'll of course get different layouts.

Realism is there for sure. All the environments use highly-detailed textures, necessitating a powerful video card. A high-resolution display really helps this game come to life. Sounds are boomy and loud, so crank up the speakers. It is true that the system requirements are steep, but the game does scale surprisingly well (which is typical of Unreal-based games). A mid-range video card (7800, 8600, , X1600, X1800, etc.) can handle the game at 10247x68 with moderate detail levels. High-end cards (8800, 9600, X1900, 3870) and SLI setups can absolutely crank things to maximum, enable anti-aliasing, and just blow you away. But to reiterate, a modest desktop computer with a $150 video card can still have a lot of fun.

So how did they screw the game up so bad? First and foremost, the game is buggy. Several patches have fixed this, but right out of the box it would randomly crash and throw strange graphical errors. GoW uses the ridiculous "Games for Windows" service, you're forced to create an account and use this to track your game progress. The problem here is that GoW randomly corrupts and loses saved game files, so you can undo several hours of work in an instant. As of May 2008 (6 months after release), there's no fix.

Another major annoyance is the massive install time. Even with a fast hard drive and fast DVD drive, it takes over 20 minutes to install. Larger games (Call of Duty 4, Crysis) take half the time. Once installed, the "launcher" is finnicky and won't work correctly at times. Running the auto-play on the DVD seems to load a different game than the EXE file placed on your hard drive.

GoW for PC does offer an extra chapter to extend the story, and XBOX 360 owners were annoyed by this! Is the extra chapter any good? Sorta. It does fit the game, and doesn't feel tacked on, but the game was fine without it.

GoW was a great game on XBOX 360 and it continues to be great on the PC. Everything you loved from the XBOX 360 version is here, and it actually plays very well on a mid-range computer. The biggest problem is that the game is buggy and poorly ported. I expected better given that it's based on an Unreal engine and was so ridiculously popular on 360. All this time to port it, and they couldn't get the basics right...ouch.