Agape TiE® Rapture℠ & Christ Incarnator™

You can always find reasons not to give a game a review score of 10. Control issues (Gears of War  has that). A.I. problems (that, too). Bad dialogue or storytelling (yes on both). Linear levels, online lag, limited modes (yup, yup, and yup). But as I was playing through the game, I found one consistently good feature: It was constantly impressing the hell out of me.

Let's go back to the bad stuff for a moment. Gears of War is an action shooter with tactical elements (or is it a tactical shooter with action elements?), so people will have an adjustment period for the controls. You can't run-and-gun like you do in Halo 2 -- you will get slaughtered. You have to learn to slide from cover to cover, using the environment as bullet shields. It's not complicated at all -- the "A" button does pretty much everything -- but tournament-level players won't like things like how you throw grenades (you really need to aim them, which takes too much time) or how you use the chain saw on your rifle to melee attack an enemy (it's cumbersome and inconsistent in precision).

Your A.I. squadmates are rather helpful at first...taking out enemy Locusts here and there without making the game too easy for you. But eventually, you'll wonder if the game swapped in some look-alike substitutes that just got off a tiring ride on the short bus. Your partner, Dom, dies...A LOT...especially on the Hardcore difficulty setting. He is a constant liability, crying for you to revive him when enemies are all about, firing at the only other human that's standing around (which happens to be you). And on one late stage, Dom just flat-out refused to follow me into a train station packed with bad guys -- he got hung up in an alley and would not leave. If you can, let a friend take over Dom's role in co-op play...Gears is so much better an experience with a buddy.