Finally finished Gears of War 3 and loved it

After finishing the Deus Ex: Human Revolution game and DLC, I jumped over to the old Xbox 360 to play Gears of War 3. Actually, this is the 3rd time I’ve started GOW3. Each previous time, I was either distracted by work or home crises or something, but this time, I was resolved to play the game.

Yes, GOW3 could fall into Yahtzee’s “spunkgargleweewee” game category, as it mostly involves running from one chest high wall to another with an overbuilt space marine. But it is a very well done, atmospheric, cover-based shooter. While there are still lots of unanswered questions about the Locust and the Lambent, and why the Locust Queen looks human, none of that hurts the gameplay for a second. In general, you know where to go, what to do, and, to some extent, why, and that you need to kill lots of baddies on the way.

In the previous GOW games, I quickly dropped the standard Gears’ Lancer rifle, because the enemy rifles were pretty good and ammo abounded, while Lancer ammo was hard to find. In this game, ammo was fairly easy to come by if I kept my eyes open, so I stuck with the Lancer through the game (with some excursions to explosive weapons for certain enemies). I’m glad I did, because using the Lancer’s chainsaw to rip through close-in enemies was great fun (and typically better than shooting when the enemy closed on you), as was executing injured baddies by splattering their guts all over the place.

The fights were fairly tough, but sufficiently well balanced that they tended not to get too frustrating. The GOW games have a particularly good checkpoint system, so if you die, you don’t have to repeat much (unlike the frustrating, yet wonderful Dark Souls). I’m happy that the GOW series has reached a reasonable conclusion, though I see that there is a prequel coming out to hoover more money from our wallets. Well, if it is as good as GOW3 was, I’ll pay…