[XBOX360 # 95] E3: HALO3 & GTA4 (met exclusive content :9.)

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Get down! Shut up! This game will own you...


Crouched behind the burnt shell of an old sedan, I was hiding for my life. Around me, my teammates were being slowly eliminated one by one by COG forces. Peaking over the hood of the car, I was able to lay down just a second of suppressing fire before a COG soldier popped up and started suppressing me. Bang. All three of my teammates are dead, and two COG soldiers are darting in and out of cover, honing in on me. I see one going for high ground and a rocket launcher. I switch to my sniper rifle and zoom in on the second story of a building a hundred feet away. Then his little human head pops into view and I put a bullet in it. Now it's me, an evil Locust foot soldier, against some other guy on the local area network, the hero of Gears of War, Marcus of the COG. Before I can celebrate my kill and look for my last enemy, I hear the most dreaded sound in Gears multiplayer: the chainsaw. While I was busy sniping, this guy had zipped in and out of cover and circled around me. My own blood spattered about as my Locust soldier fell to the ground dead.

Wow.

It's been a long time coming, but we finally got our hands on Gears of War, one of the most anticipated titles for the past year on the Xbox 360. Epic ran a four-on-four team deathmatch session behind closed doors at the Microsoft booth at E3 this morning. There were obviously a ton of great games to see -- Mass Effect, Too Human, the Halo 3 trailer again. But after finishing about a half hour of intense multiplayer action, there was one game I knew I had to see again: Gears of War. I don't care if I have to hold Cliffy B. hostage or spray hot booth-babes with a fire-hose as a diversion, but I will play Gears again before the end of this E3 -- it was that fun.

We played four rounds of Locust vs. COG action, and the first thing you'll notice about this game is that it is not run and gun; it's stop and pop, as Epic likes to say. By running up to a car, a tree, a wall, a ledge -- anything -- and pressing A, you'll take cover behind it. You can move left and right, hit the fire button to throw out some blind fire, hold the left trigger to pop out and take aim. If there's another piece of cover close by, you can aim in that direction and roll right behind that. While there were occasional bugs that will be ironed out before the final release, like not being able to leave cover, Epic nailed the controls. They are intuitive, simple, fluid and seamless, and pretty damned fun.

The second thing you'll notice is the outstanding level design. Keep in mind we only played one level, but there were multiple paths that all lead to several natural "stand-off points" where opposing players will eventually butt heads and the battle will be decided. At these points, a lot of different things will happen. Good teams will work together. One player, for instance, can lay down suppressing fire on an enemy behind cover, while another player works his way up in a flanking maneuver. At the same time, another player can coop up in a second-story tower with a sniper rifle and cover him. At the same time, the final player can slip unnoticed along through a building on the edge of the map and slip behind the entire enemy force. Of course, the enemy is trying to do the same thing to you the entire time, resulting in some tense standoffs.

Because the cover system is so effective, you will actually feel nervous when you're not behind cover. If you hold the A button, you'll start an all-out, crouched sprint. The camera starts shaking so you won't be able to take aim (as if you could do so effectively at a sprint anyways), nor will you be able to really see enemies that are far away. The camera angle also drops very low, so you'll feel you're in a scene of "Saving Private Ryan" as you displace and look for more cover. Some people may not like not having the ability to sprint and shoot, but I think it adds even more importance to taking cover and lining up effective shots. Try as you might, but it's just impossible to run at a full sprint and train your crosshairs on anybody.


Weapons are placed strategically around the map, usually in places that are wide open to enemy fire, making it a bit of a risk, reward situation. The sniper rifle, for instance, is located on the ground in the middle of a small clearing right in the middle of the map. So I found myself sprinting to it, grabbing it and sprinting back behind cover. But being on the ground is not the ideal place for a sniper, so I snuck up some stairs to the second story of a bombed out building and took cover, waiting for my first victim. Players come equipped with an assault rifle, shotgun, pistol and grenades, and each weapon is quick-mapped to a direction on the D-pad. You always have slots for grenades and pistols, but you'll drop either the rifle or shotgun when you want to pick up another big weapon, like the sniper rifle, rocket launcher -- we also thing we saw a Gatling gun.

Visually, Gears looked outstanding. While we saw some minor frame rate issues yesterday, we didn't notice any slowdown or graphical hitches in this LAN setup. Obviously we weren't playing on Xbox Live, so who know how it will perform online, but if this session is any indication, it will be pretty damned good. Epic says there will be other multiplayer modes but isn't saying what. We do know there is a team deathmatch, obviously, and we can all assume there is the standard death match as well. Capture the flag would be an interesting option given that you can't really run around in the open with a flag without getting your face shot out. The Gears framework would definitely give CTF a more methodical approach and a new spin on an old favorite gamemode. Then again, we all hope Epic does something completely new that we haven't seen before, so we'll keep you posted on that.

Gears of War is playable only behind closed doors at E3, but whispers of the game's awesomeness are spreading throughout the convention center. Halo 3 is still the star for Microsoft after the fantastic trailer, but Gears is something new, fresh, different and really, really fun, and we can't wait to play it again, even if it takes a fire-hose and booth-babe to do it.