At the start of Gears of War, your main character Marcus Fenix gets busted out of prison to join a desperate war against the invasion of the Locust horde. He joins a squad tasked with tracking down the members of another squad, and by the middle of the first chapter you succeed in finding one of them: Augustus Cole, found fighting off Locust single-handed, whooping and wisecracking all the way. When he introduces himself, others immediately say “Cole Train?” and recognise him from his sporting exploits in what was clearly American Football. This interaction provided a lens through which I found myself understanding a lot of Gears of War.
The general outline of its gameplay is not that different from the Conflict series, as you lead a squad of four soldiers through a series of urban battlegrounds and siege (not to mention beige) set pieces. Cole joins just after another squad member is killed; the size of four is conveniently maintained in this manner throughout. You can issue orders to the squad or individuals, though get you the whole first chapter to get used to things with someone else in charge first. You can quickly heal downed comrades by reaching them and pressing X. Your variety of weapons includes the ‘Hammer of Dawn’ which works just like the laser pointer airstrike in Conflict: Desert Storm 2. Gears of War is a very different-feeling experience of war, though, and much of that is that it does feel a lot more like a sport.
Almost whenever you take on the Locust, it’s on carefully marked out pitches, with often symmetrical sets of objects to take cover behind. The cover mechanic is central to Gears of War, with simple controls to duck in and out of it, and to leap over it and make a run for it. And so in each conflict, in a very definite and defined way, the fight is a matter of gaining yards increment by increment. You have to avoid getting too greedy, but carry your position forwards when you can to dominate the space. The rigid framework works well as a way of simplifying tactics down and making them fun to work with. And when you do decide to make a run for it and gain a new position, the close-up over-the-shoulder view of the massive bulk of Marcus Fenix helps to make it feel visceral and heroic, especially when things blur as you speed up.
You don’t get much chance to rest between matches against the Locust menace as the game shuttles you straight from set piece to set piece, but you do get chatter between the squad members like that Cole Train one. The group dynamics are not dissimilar to Conflict: Vietnam, if not quite as reductive. Talk of shared sporting memories is one way the game brings out the idea of this as a world which fell apart within living experience. Gears of War was at the vanguard of a much-derided movement of games dominated by brown and grey, and its desaturated palette is very effective and making everything seem grimy and horrible and absent of life. It didn’t have to be the only way to do realism, but it fits. This place used to be beautiful, it tells you, and it really isn’t now.
That theme is reflected in a successful Gears of War TV advert which I remember for its choice of music. It set action scenes against Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’s mournful version of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears. The effect was slightly dulled for me and presumably other Brits by the omnipresence of that cover here, which was not just a #1 single but a Christmas #1, winning the famous Darkness v Darko battle of 2003. The emotional intent remained clear, and while nothing in the game takes things as far in tonal clash, there are uneven hints in there of trying to reach for a downbeat register with a similar kind of resonance, even amidst chainsawing Locust scum.
The final thing about being joined by an American Football player is that it emphasises how specifically American Gears of War is. More than that, it exists in a particularly constricted space of contemporary idealised American hetero masculinity, dialled up to faintly parodic levels. Everyone is a hulking, grizzled marine who would sooner call someone a jackass than express any other emotion than anger or disgust.
And yet, Gears of War isn’t set in America. It isn’t set on Earth at all. It’s set on Sera, another planet on which an apparently parallel version of humanity developed. Among the less significant effects, this means it’s free to have generic impressive architecture without it corresponding to any real place. When you go to a palace, Epic’s thesaurus gets a workout and it’s the House of Sovereigns. It makes for some narrative shortcuts and lets it build up a backstory in a different way, but it’s an alienating decision. There is a reason why fictional visions of the future don’t completely detach themselves from the current culture that writers and readers are grounded in. But unstated specificity can leave them looking bizarre from outside of their own time and place, like when looking back now at certain types of ’60s sci-fi that imagined a future in which technology all changed but not one in which social structures changed one bit. From a perspective outside of the culture of Gears of War, taking a squad of US Marines and transferring them unchanged and unacknowledged into another world carries a jarring message of the superiority, or at least inevitability, of that culture.
It also feels like a way of casting off baggage to tell as simple a story as possible. It can cast you as soldiers for a global hegemonic superpower without having to bring in any of America’s relevant history. It can give you a culturally diverse squad without having to acknowledge the racist climate in which those cultures developed. The plot eventually lets you in on evidence that the world of Sera’s humanity was not a particularly sparkling one, but there is a lot of straightforward good, or at least neutral, versus meaningless evil before that. And there is something disquieting about the imagery of the fight against the enveloping horde of the Locust from within the world (who don’t even get the individual personality of a plural ‘s’), even if it’s different insects which have tended to pop up as preferred tabloid slurs directed at immigrants in recent years.
The game of Gears of War is to hide behind cover and shoot at dehumanised advancing foes, one which reaches all of the way back to Space Invaders. Amidst its high-def grey modernity, bringing in some defined structural elements that hark back more to that original vision smartly helps it to work as sport. But its simplicity elsewhere keeps it from ever feeling like anything but sport. Its attempts at epic storytelling sit on top like an awkward sombre cover version.
Top of the charts for week ending 18 November 2006:
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