Gears Of War

If you're planning on buying Gears Of War I urge you to do your homework. The first point you should deal with, is if you can run it. I have to say, this is the most problematic, buggy, difficult install for a game I have ever had the misfortune to attempt. After say, 6 installs I finally had the full game on my PC, uninstall paths, icons, shortcuts, registry, everything. I attempted to play it and it wouldn't start whatsoever. Not even an error to go by. In my infinite wisdom, I googled the error and found a few posts on Epic Games' forum. After a thorough reading, 3 different patches and claimed fixes, and more re-installs, eventhough I have admittedly had to fix some games' problems after install, this game actually beat me and to this day I haven't got it to work on my PC. It's not a hardware or software error for me, neither is it an OS problem as i'm running it on Windows XP with a graphics card capable of running Crysis and such without problems. Luckily, a friend of mine got this to work on his computer (Luckily!) so I got to play this through, and to be honest i'm glad it didn't install on my PC. The gameplay is repetitive, and often irritating. Co-op mode is fun, however. I haven't played online so I'm afraid I can't really mention that.

Still, I urge anyone thinking of buying this to at least glance through Epic Games' forums and see for yourself how many people have had buggy installs and are ranting for a patch to fix it.

Microsoft rushed this out for Christmas - Thanks A Bunch(!)

Having just finished Gears of War, im left feeling un-satisfied. This game really didnt hit the right buttons for me.

Reasons to buy this game are few and far between. Lets start with some of the most obvious reasons not to. Firstly, this game was never, and will never be a game with true PC blood. Whether you like it or not, you have to face the fact that its just not designed for the PC platform, its one of few games that isnt.

The first time you notice this is on installation, if you have any troubles, Microsoft have yet to develop a technical support for the PC version (as far as i can see) so be prepared to DIY from the beginning!

The next BIG noticable non PC moment is running the game itself, Microsoft have (whether out of lazyness, or just a bad idea) not even changed the icons on the menu's, so your stuck with the Xbox icons. This seems to be microsoft's 'genious' idea of Windows Live (which is trying to turn online gaming into Xbox online gaming (xbox live). And you have to ask yourself... why!!?

Once your up and running, the game kicks off straight into the action. Its an entirely enjoyable game for around 3 or 4 hours (it was for me), them basically it just got dull.

The guns are somewhat ridiculous, and the sounds for them are even worse, it sounds like your firing elastic bands at the enemies. The bad guys are known as 'grubs' and come in all different shapes and sizes, some harder to kill than others. This shows itself by how many bullets you have to stand pumping into each one before it dies (becomes tedious!).

Your characters are the most muscular, fool hardy, yet horribly cheesy characters, saying things like 'whose next' when you take down an enemy.

This only scores a measly 2 stars because frankly, i wasnt impressed and im not one to score low easily. Its a very, very console style game, a real run-and-gun arcade style action. But hey, if thats what your into, take it home today!

Onto the plus sides, fantastic graphics. Fairly instense scenes (the sprint button works a dream!) and its pretty long (loads of levels!). The melee attack is fun for the first few times you do it, chainsawing blood all over the camera!

Graphics: 9/10
Storyline: 5/10
AI: 4/10
Weapons: 2/10
Playability: 3/10

Overall: 3/10

If your still unsure (there seems to be a mixed opinion here), then check out some of my other reviews and see what i enjoyed!

NOTE: Ran just about fine on the following specs:

AMD Athlon 64 4600x2
1.5gb ram
Nvidia 8800gt

Although stuttered a bit in cut-scenes (reccomened another 500mb ram)

I dunno about this game I have played a bunch of FPS in my time but this one seems odd! Don't get me wrong it has some real nice graphics and the effects are cool but the game play is so damn boring! You can tell this is an Xbox port as it has "joypad" written all over it, from the way it handles to the timed entry of enemies. It's not an easy game to play as the enemies provide some challenge although after a few hours playing you will probably turn this game off! Then there is the crashing! I purchased this game purely on the fact that the video looked cool and I just wanted another shooter to add to my collection, thinking I could escape the crashing I read about the other customers reviews! Wrong! This game is bugged. How Microsoft can slap this in a box and call it a finished product I will never know... actually hang on did I say Microsoft!

this game rocks on the pc higher res than on the xbox360 and more chapters etc

but has a bug when you first start a ms patch will be avaible soon

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Gears of War\Binaries\Startup.exe

to start gears of war on the pc if you get the bug search for that to make it work

This game is unplayable. Twice I have got half way through this game and my game save has disappeared. This is a common occurance check the net. The game saves are copy protected so you can't make a back up of them. I have downloaded the latest patch and it makes no difference. I am playing this game on XP. You might be lucky and get to the end of this game without losing your game save but if you don't it is very frustrating.