As you’re destroying everything in your path you’ll quickly notice the lack of a health bar. GoW uses its own logo as an indicator of health and slowly fades into scene as you take more and more damage. Eventually you’ll die and get a big red skull stamp letting you know things are over. Though when you’re spending lots of time hiding behind cover you’ll slowly see the logo fade out signaling you can take more damage again. What’s also nice is that you can revive your buddies both in and out of multiplayer just by moving to them and pressing a button. It takes some time but it’s a lot better than having them just die and be dead like so many other team based games handle things.


He had a bad day.
On the innovative gameplay side of things, Gears employs a really interesting reload mechanism. Hit a button at the right time while reloading and your shells will get a damage bonus but hit it too late and you’ll jam your gun. Then there’s the amazing and overly hyped chainsaw. The gory and brutal visuals while using it are amazing and those who face this grisly death can never be resurrected. Also if you hold down the chainsaw button you can just run around and mow down anything automatically making the mayhem that much easier and fun to execute.

Speaking of weapons, this is another area Gears really shines which is honestly not surprising when you look at who the developers are. From assault rifles to the incredible Hammer of Dawn, you’ll have your hands full. Thankfully Epic’s track record for balance holds up here as well as everything feels like it does the amount of damage it should. For example, the Hammer of Dawn sends a command to a satellite to rain down some seriously impressive damage but it takes a long time to execute leaving you vulnerable to attack.


Chainsaw in all its gory glory.
While using this arsenal against computer controlled opponents you’ll notice that they’re anything but stupid. They use cover constantly just as you should and will do, and they are rarely seen randomly walking out in the open. Overly tough AI can hurt a game and thankfully Epic knows this as the opponents are good and may seem better than they actually are, but they can be taken down by most any decent FPS player. What’s also nice is that the AI player brains definitely increase in capability as you play through the game giving a nice sense of ramping difficulty through the short ten hours of single player gameplay.