The original Gears of War made a big thing of tarnished beauty, of making its player aware of the world that had been taken over by its insectoid apocalypse. Better times were within living memory for its characters, but at some distance. For the player, though, they were being introduced to the after and the before at the same time, and the changes felt even more immediate, even if its world before wasn’t (quite) our own. Likewise, the game had a job of introducing us to all of its exaggeratedly macho characters and how they would react to that world, confronting them with big scenarios for big action. It was a post-apocalyptic game which felt like an apocalypse in progress.
By Gears of War 3, this is very much not the case. Establishing work already completed, its world can feel much more lived-in, if not much happier. It can, and does, lean on the familiarity of its characters, a chance to hang out with presumed old friends. Gears of War 3 starts off with a monster boat attack set-piece so large that it does it in two phases, with a whole step back in time to do a few missions of setup for a second squad led by Cole. This is a trade-off to bring scale in the place of stakes, except that it’s probably right to assume that players won’t think they’re in real danger at that point anyway. When a character death comes later in the game it’s with so much build-up and slow weightiness (including bringing in-game the song “Mad World” from the first game’s trailer) that it makes the unwillingness to surprise even clearer.
This is a game retrenching what has already worked, to a fault. The carefully-staged combat iterates in familiar loops with just enough variations of weapons and ammo to keep you from ever quite doing literally the exact same thing. Some enemies lug big energy balls at you to keep you from staying in just one place, not quite killing you in one hit as long as you make a token attempt to dodge. Monsters spring up right on cue wherever you go, in such a way that the hostility of some wreckage residents comes off as perceptive rather than paranoid.
The wise-cracking dialogue, full of macho ribbing, changes similarly little, although the weight of time and experience alone helps to make the camaraderie feel more real. The urge towards familiar ground is even stronger. Cole doesn’t just get to reminisce on his thrashball career some more, but gets a vaguely Duke Nukem sequence where he splats enemies in his old stadium and explicitly imagines it as the sport. This was always the obvious subtext of Gears of War so it feels especially indulgent, something more suited to a decades-later revival than an early sequel. The plot revolves more than ever around Fenix and his family. That more lived-in world gets smaller and smaller.
Without having played the first two games all the way through, Gears of War 3 is still a very playable game. It’s not like I was ever lost by the plot, nor by anything else. It even has a button to make the world fade out and light up where you need to go. Yet something about playing it as anything other than a committed fan felt like I was intruding, in a way that I haven’t found for even much longer-running or more intricately-plotted series. Basically, this doesn’t feel like a game about war, or destruction and change, or even chainsawing gnarly monsters. It just feels like a game about Gears of War. One which doesn’t even much to say about it, except: here is some more Gears of War.
Top of the charts for week ending 24 September 2011:
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