Cohen
L16: Sensei
Hier mal noch andere Eindrücke: Hyper, Hyper 
Didn't know you guys wanted impressions here. Sounded like you all just wanted to talk about getting it or not. I got some initial impressions here that I'm cross posting.
Gears of War isnt bad. Well, I guess I should clear this up: it's not as bad as I expected it to be when I first heard about it and from what little I saw at E3, but not as good as I hoped after hearing a few hands-on experiences. The game is very solidly built and I really don't have any complaints about it. It just doesn't feel that special yet.
Gears of War decided to redesign how you play a 3D shooter. Or the controls are just very different from anything that I have played. There is extremely heavy emphasis on cover and hiding. It took me quite a while to get use to the controls because of this emphasis. Unlike Lost Planet, which feels very natural like a glove that fits perfectly, Gears of War is not and is more like a really cool glove with flames and skulls on it that is just a little too small but will fit if you work it out a little. If you don't have good cover and you can't learn how to stay well covered then you're dead. Plain and simple. There have been very few instances where I have been able to run into a fray with guns/chainsaws blazing and last more than a couple seconds.
I am playing it in 1080p (I don't know if the game is native 1080p or how the hell the 360 is working it, but either way, my console is set to that) with the color setting on "Vivid" (I started on lucid, but didn't like it as much). It's pretty, but no where near what was promised in Unreal 3 Engine shots that I saw two years ago. At the start of the game you're given two options for difficulty: Casual or Hardcore. There was a third option which was grayed out (I still don't like how most games now make you unlock hard difficulties), so I assumed casual equaled easy and hardcore equaled medium. After about an hour with the game I was pretty sure that hardcore is the hard mode for the game and there is no easy mode. But it's good, and I stuck with it. It doesn't feel as fair for a hard game as God Hand does because many times in Gears of War I was left wondering why the hell I was able to survive doing basically the same thing as last time when I had died.
If I had to compare this game to other games I would say it's a combination of Doom, Time Crisis, and Halo. The shooting sections feel like Time Crisis because you get to a location, duck, pop-up, fire, duck, reload, repeat. The doom aspect comes from the enemies and their ferocity, also the occasional "ahh, I'm safe OH CRAP MORE?!" moments. The AI and team segments feel heavily Halo inspired. To say that the game played just like any of those though would be a lie, overall it comes off feeling very original.
The part of the game that I have been paying more attention to than I probably should is the "Destroyed Beauty" theme for the setting/story. So far the game is doing a good job with it IF you're looking for it. The strength of the game's story is how subtle it is. Unlike another game with the same abbreviation of title (*cought*godofwar*cough*), the thematic content and underlying ethics/principles is more in the narrative than the story telling. Little things like "this place use to be gorgeous" or "You're the guy from the Alphon Wars, Coool!" with the response from the main character being "Not really" are where the emphasis lay. Unlike a fair slice of jRPGs which take these ethics and principals and literally spell them out for you, this game allows for you to pick up on it. Most of the back story and history is in the Art Book, and it's well thought out and implemented into the game impeccably. As an added bonus, the voice acting is on-par with (or even exceeding) most big budget Hollywood action films. The only thing that could make the voice acting better is if they got the voice actor for Brock Sampson to do the main character. Oh, and one of the achievements is an excellent Clerks reference.
I'm going to stand with my initial statement that the game is well crafted and very solid, but not really doing anything that goes above and beyond for me yet. I am only about three or four hours in though, so all impressions are initial. I really hope that the story and narrative stays together here.
So I played a few more hours of multiplayer last night, and I must say that I warmed up to the game a bit more. Here's a recap of my thoughts from last night:
a) Shotgun is weak up close! I can't tell you how many times I had an opponents back and hit him with four or five consecutive shotgun blasts at close range, only to have him turn around in the middle of the battle and lay me down with a clip off the supposedly medium-range assault rifle. Basically I use the rifle at range and up close until situationally necessary to chainsaw them. Perhaps the only advantage of the shotgun up close is that it has higher accuracy at close range, but at the expense of the usual kick you get from other videogame representations of the weapon.
b) The running is still mostly retarded (in terms of having to pivot yourself in a straight line with your surroundings, then charging forward), but it is entirely necessary. I learned the all-too-hard way not to try and stand and trade with a guy revving his chainsaw bayonet while you reload. Running from a battle is often your best option, it just sucks that it often turns into bumper cars or "snag on the scenery" and you get pelted anyway. I hate it when I run and auto-cover on a wall depite having no desire to. I'll say it again, they should have assigned a clickable option to take/leave cover, or at least put an optional toggle in the menu.
c) The multiplayer maps are badass badass badass and beautiful beautiful beautiful. Also I would recommend everyone go to their options menu and turn the visual settings to "Vibrant" for amazing looking color saturation. It really kicks things up a notch further!!
d) Teamwork does help in multi, but I'd love it if they facilitated the teamwork a bit more with the option to set waypoints for reference ("He's on the left staircase" can be quite ambiguous on a lot of these stages). Also, why not have some kind of onscreen team indicators like most other multiplayer shooters? I don't mind being penalized for shooting my teammates, but again, at a distance they often resemble the enemy, and last night we were switching between COG and Locust so often that I could have used a friendly reminder a time or two that I was now a space marine and not an alien.
e) No crouch walk still bothers me.
f) No in-game voice indicators so you can see who's talking? Even the smallest little icon would have been pretty unintrusive!
In all I had a lot of fun last night and playing online MP greatly helped acclimate me to the experience, but there were still plenty of moments where the control painted me into a corner or that I wished that they had changed a few simple things (or given ME the option to change them, perhaps?) in order to smooth out the experience. I couldn't help but be a little taken aback by people saying "this is the best game I've ever played" or telling me "you've just gotta get used to it" when lodging a valid complaint against the game's controls, which of course must be the case if you want to play the game but is not a valid justification for the devs overlooking their missteps.
But anyway..I'm going back to give it another go! Nice having today and tomorrow off!
.For those of you who have yet to go beyond Act 1 and aren't quite feeling it, fear not, Act 2 is significantly better. Act 1 was almost entirely composed of shooting while Act 2 has introduced a whole slew of fun gameplay mechanics and unique scenarios (along with significantly more impressive visuals). I feel that Act 1 was designed to ease the player into the core shooting mechanics and allow them to experience that with a larger team. These mechanics are obviously critical to the core gameplay, of course, so it would make sense to focus on them initially. As Act 2 swings into action, however, they clearly begin to assume that the player has a full grasp on these mechanics and begin to introduce new gameplay mechanics into each scenario.
I'm fairly impressed with the music as well. The score is suprisingly strong at times and really works beautifully with the action. I was REALLY skeptical of this aspect up until release, to be honest. Trailers and such tend to hint at the type of music one should expect within a game, yet Gears footage was always devoid of music. They struck a great balance between a high energy "movie-like" score and something much more sinister.
Here's hoping Acts 3-5 are as different from one another as 1 and 2 were. Resident Evil 4 was also broken up into 5 chapters and each of the five chapters were wholly unique and it seems as if Gears may have taken that same approach.
No no no. I have yet to finish Act 2, but that cutscene involving the helicopter crash (among other things) was the only pre-rendered scene I've seen yet. I thought it was pretty obvious, though. While the video was nicely compressed, you could still easily detect the fact that it was a video.
BTW, has anyone noticed any texture pop-in? For the most part, it's been perfect, but I've noticed textures loading slowly after dying a few times. While fighting out of the gas station, for instance, all of the textures loaded up as N64-like blurry maps and remained that way for a few seconds before snapping in Halo 2 style. There were a couple other moments like this as well. The majority of the time, you never see it, but it does happen off and on. Hopefully that is simply an issue with the game and not the impending death of my 360
Absolutely amazing, I haven't felt this excited after buying a new game in years. I can't say that this is the best shooting game I've played, as I've only had it for a day, but I've never felt such a rush while playing an online multiplayer game before. While the whole package appears to be great, I mainly care about the online versus. I can see myself still enjoying the multiplayer in this game a year from now.
I purchased my copy at around 7:30 PM PST at a local Gamestop in Southern California. I showed up at around 4 PM to see if they had any copies in stock, despite not having a pre-order, but the clerk told me to come back at 7 PM, after selling me a pre-order. I called the store at 6 PM, and was assured that the shipment would arrive no later than 7 PM, confirming what I was told earlier.
Once I arrived at 7, I quickly noticed the 50 person line that stretched around the store; apparently they didn't receive the shipment yet. After another hour or so, four employees left the store, traveled to the far end of the parking lot, and returned with seven or so boxes full of Gears. The manager explained to the group of waiting customers that they had enough copies of the regular edition for all that pre-ordered, and enough collectors editions for half of those who pre-ordered those versions. He also spent another five minutes or so before allowing the distribution of GoW telling us that we had the "privilege" of being the first set of customers that could pre-order Halo 3, and that if we didn't pre-order it now, there was little chance of securing a copy next year (yeah, sure).
Another hour of waiting in line to check out and pay for the game, and I had my hands on a copy of the game, which I thoroughly enjoyed for several hours when I arrived home. Of course, thirty minutes into playing the game, my neighbor messaged me bragging about how he secured his own copy of the game. He went to the exact same Gamestop a bit later after I returned home, and easily acquired a non pre-ordered copy. If I would have been patient, I could have gotten a copy without the hassle.
Shit.
