by Andrius Davydauskas

Created on: May 14, 2009   Last Updated: May 18, 2009

Gears of War is a very popular third person shooter game developed by the creators of the famous Unreal Tournament series and the Unreal engine - Epic Games. It was first released in 2006 on the Xbox 360 console and later ported to the PC. It won countless awards and is considered as one of the greatest games of the 2006.

Gears of War is staged on a war-torn planet devastated by years of conflict between humans and The Locust Horde - an underground race that wants to exterminate humanity. The story focuses on a group of four soldiers: Marcus, Dominic, Cole and Baird who must find a map of the Locust underground caverns.

One of the best features of Gears of War is the co-op campaign. That's right, the entire campaign can be played not only with your AI comrades, but also with your friend or someone online. This makes for some great action packed moments and fun experiences. Another interesting feature is the cover system. The main characters and the AI enemies can use any object on the battlefield as cover. Your character slides to the nearest wall with a tap of the space button. Pressing it again while pressing your movement key at another direction will make him leap to the other side and take cover there. This makes the fire fights fast paced and intense as you have to constantly keep moving to avoid flanking or incoming grenades.

The game is played from a third person perspective and switches to an over the should view while aiming (similar to Resident Evil 4). There is a wide selection of weapons you will find ranging from a few different assault rifles to sniper rifles and even a target designator for an orbital based weapon. All of these features make a nice multiplayer game and the Gears of War multiplayer mode is enough to buy the game alone.

The graphics are beautiful, just like you'd expect from the Unreal 3 engine. The characters, levels and monsters you'll encounter are all greatly detailed and look terrific. The sound effects are great, as all of the weapons sound absolutely terrifying. The level design is pretty nice too. Abandoned factories, underground caverns, ruined palaces. The levels are varied so all the shooting wouldn't get repetitive and this works pretty well.

Overall, Gears of War is a great game, even though a bit over hyped and overrated (especially the story), it still gives what it promises and is definitely one of the best games of 2006.

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