Hands On With Gears Of War Multi Player |

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Last week the OXM team were lucky enough to be invited to a secret location in central London as Microsoft's guests. Once there, we were treated an afternoon of hands-on play with a number of titles featured at X06.

TopGears of war one of the most brutal games ever!Top of our collective agendas though, was Gears of War. Whilst some of us had been fortunate enough to play Epic's uber-title before, for others it was their first chance to get to grips with the Locust horde. And get to grips we did!
Taking us through his multiplayer hands on experience with Gears of War is OXM Nab Gil - a man who, to this day, is still quivering from the memory of it all. At least, that is his explanation for the shakes....

If you can judge a multiplayer game by how long the post-battle talk lingers, then the overriding impression of Gears of War is that it hasn’t just ripped the crown from Call of Duty 2’s cold dead hands, but it has neck stomped on the other Xbox Live games for good measure.

Twenty four hours after our playtest, we’re still talking about it, about acts of individual bravery, of being showered in the bloody stumps of colleagues gibbed by a shotgun at point blank range. The comment “did you see what I did with the chainsaw?” punctuates each story.

Make no mistake; Gears of War is brutal.

Sitting in on an eight player, four-on-four team Deathmatch, we’re given a brief overview of the controls, along with the repeated assurance that GOW’s streamlined interface is ideal for the pick up and play style. A seven second countdown later and we’re on the mean streets of the first multiplayer map of the day: Gridlock.

After holding down A to charge forward, the camera instantaneously flicks from a static over-the-shoulder viewpoint to a tracking shaky cam by your character’s feet. The shift embellishes the experience rather than detracting from it, as you race to the next cover point. What results next is a bloodbath. You’re aware of the escalating battle around you as the two sides clash in the middle of a debris filled street, as bullets whiz by your head and a balcony explodes in front, body parts flying everywhere, indicating someone has found the rocket launcher. Grabbing some cover either side of a nearby archway, I watch as a comrade leans round the corner and has his head taken off in one shot. The other side has answered back by finding the solitary sniper rifle on the map.

I swung under the archway just a opposing Locusts does the same. Even at such close range their panic means wild gunfire goes over my shoulder. Tapping B I charge them, an unmistakable sound roaring to life at the end of my rifle. As chainsaw meets flesh and I bellow a dark laugh as my Marine pulls the serrated metal through the twitching body and ends with a sickening twist, splattering blood across my screen as the remains fall apart on the floor! Kicking aside an arm, I cock my gun and head for the nearest piece of cover. It's easy to understand why developer Epic Games is riding proud on an 18 certificate rating...

Five minutes later and we walk away victorious. The initial thoughts that flare up are incredibly selfish, but with good reason; that you feel incredibly lucky to be an Xbox 360 owner. This is the game you’re going to show off to friends, to Sony supporters, hell, even complete strangers on the street. It’s like Apocalypse Now had a lust-filled affair with James Cameron’s Aliens. Visually, it gives what could be another generic battlefield a fresh coat of paint, by ramping up the detail of the devastation. The streets are littered with debris. Smashed cars, torn masonry…and what is still upright bares the scars of battle. It feels dirty and decrepit, the smattering of balconies and buildings show off the stunning gothic architecture.
And it’s a far cry from the sterilized blandness of other sci-fi themed videogames, a fully realised urban environment that feels like it can crumble apart at any moment. The other map on offer, Clock Tower, takes place in the garden ruins of a Cathedral, around the titular structure that is even more impressive, with broken spires plunged deep into the greenery. Occasionally the tower’s bell chimes out, and if you pause long enough between fire fights, the sounds of roosting birds can be heard overhead. It generates a truly tense atmosphere were a orchestrated score would not.

Each character is fantastically realised. Huge but limber, you’ll find there’s a real sense of physics when a Marine slams into cover by a nearby wall, sending billows of dust from the brickwork as he grunts with the force of it. Picking up a rifle produces a cool animation were he flicks it off the ground and into his hand, spinning it once round his arm before cocking it – at three seconds at most, it never outstays its welcome. But it’s the Locusts that really shine. Rather than uniform sets of armour, each character model is given its own design, ranging from the fearsome albino visage of a snarling, sharp toothed warrior to a helmeted, cloak wearing behemoth. It makes you realise that Epic aren’t pumping out generic alien beasties for Marcus Fenix and co to fight.

The leap between this and last year’s graphical offerings is huge, with the Unreal 3 Engine proving the Xbox 360 is only limbering up to its true next generational potential. Because here’s the kicker, Gears of War feels and plays differently from anything you’ve tried before. It has its roots in the strategic squad based warfare genre, but has grown that seed at an accelerated rate and brings its own special blend of gameplay mechanics to the fore.

Forget comparisons to the other squad-based games like Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six. Epic Games has given the warfare genre a much needed kick up the backside, allowing arcade styling to stick the boot into heavy handed realism while a killer control system looks on. You can’t run around relentlessly shooting – your head will be quickly detached from your body. You do need to keep moving, as the tide of battle moves quickly, but it specifically cover you need to be moving to.

Run with A, holding the button down and directing your character with the left thumbstick towards a jutting fragment of wall will slam them behind it and they’ll automatically adjust to the size of the cover. Slide up to either end by pressing left or right on the stick and use the right stick to pan the camera round. Pull the left trigger to step out of cover, right trigger to fire, alternatively hit right trigger first to blindly fire round the corner. Continue holding your chosen direction and tap A at a corner to either slide across to another piece of cover, or roll out of cover in that direction.

It may sound similar to the Ghost Recon set up, but in reality it’s a completely different beast. The two maps on offer were relatively small, but this actually improved the gameplay, as it meant teams were constantly jostling for the best positions, sliding round cover in the small courtyards to get a better firing angle on each other. There were no safe areas to hide until only the stragglers were left, and the better vantage points required a lot of guts to storm and successfully hold.

Weapons selection was mapped to the D-Pad, with shotgun, rifle, pistol and grenade all within easy reach. The grenades, whose throwing arc is designated by a neon targeting indicator, can be doubled up as a melee weapon, extended spikes on each meaning they can lodged into the chest armour of a foe before the pin is pulled. It’s not known yet if players have a few seconds to try and rip free the explosive, but if it’s like the chainsaw attack, then the first successful tag is usually fatal.

The rifle is great at both long range and short range fire fights, but a lot of the closer combat employed the shotgun, perfect for tagging a passing enemy with a surprise attack from behind a corner. A series of cement blocks in Gridlock lead to a number of tense cat and mouse games as opposing players tried to second guess were each were going to appear from. The loser ended up squatting on the floor, blood emptying from their wounds... but not necessarily dying. Downing a player doesn’t mean they’re finished. Epic have devised a system to give you the chance to revive injured team mates. Once you drop, a heart icon will appear on screen with the A button you can keep it pumping with repeated tapping. Hold out for long enough and a nearby ally can come along and revive you. Too long, or don’t hammer the button enough, and you’re dead, same if you take another bullet.

Incorporating this gameplay mechanic yielded some interesting strategic possibilities, were we deliberately left a wounded enemy and hide nearby until his comrades came to rescue him. Then, stepped out of cover at this moment, it gave the team the perfect surprise attack. But mostly we couldn’t help but try out the neck-stomp execution, slamming our foot down onto someone’s unguarded head with a tap of X, or holding a shotgun to their noggin and antagonise them for a few seconds before pulling the trigger!

I could discuss war stories until the game’s release date in November, and we haven’t even mentioned the single player campaign which you can play cooperatively with a friend. Like I said, Christmas 2006 and is going to be an extremely good time to be an Xbox 360 owner, with Gears of War promising to the icing on a very large, very delicious Xbox 360-shaped cake.