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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Gears of War 3 (2010)
Epic Games
Impression published on Thursday, 2011-10-20 | Videogame | 2 stars
At the time of this writing, Metacritic has Gears of War 3 holding steady at 91%.
Given the technical prowess on display in this game, the score should arguably be higher, but it is difficult for me to imagine a reviewer enduring this game's abysmal "campaign" mode1 and then passing up the opportunity to ding Epic for a few points.
But, of course, the campaign/story mode has almost nothing do with anything (except insulating Cliffy B from critics who might otherwise be tempted to penalize Gears on the grounds that it is just a tech demo with no meaningful single player mode)2: for all of its creative shortcomings, Gears of War 3 is a genuinely impressive technical tour de force that easily sets the bar for drop-in/drop-out multiplayer competitive and cooperative game play on Xbox Live.
And, speaking of the disparity between the game's amateurish3 creative/design work and its masterful technical execution, the single most remarkable thing about Gears 3--the thing that made the deepest impression upon me during the hours I spent grinding up to level 54--is the fact that the player is constantly confronted by this great disparity between the technical and creative teams who cobbled this experience together.
Indeed, it is almost impossible to play this game on any mode for more than a few minutes and not reflect on what must be going on in Epic's HR department: that there is such a patent mis-match between the abilities of the creative/design and technical/network/graphics teams can only mean that Epic HR must be entirely staffed by technical experts who share John Carmack's famous contempt4 for any aspects of game development that do not explicitly have to do with technical execution.
More's the pity: with a little design work, the bosses could have been actual tests of gameplay techniques that are taught in the single-player mode (rather than rote elaborations on boring, 90's FPS boss concepts like "the bullet-sponge" and "the slow guy with the periodically vulnerable target box"); with a bit of help on story, the narrative might not have constantly stolen its own fire and/or descended into inadvertent self-satire at every cut-scene; with some additional thinking on scenarios and setups, the squad combat cover-and-flank thing could have been integrated with the dynamic dialogue thing and seemed less like aesthetic polish and more like the core of both the competitive and cooperative experience.5
Bottom line: this game is great fun. If someone (e.g. someone like Valve) takes up its core technology and wraps a serious design and creative effort around it, they might just end up with something legendary on their hands.
- In terms of its repetitiveness and utter lack of design, Gears 3's campaign gives one-mode, one-difficulty classics like "Pong" and "Arkanoid" a run for their money; adding insult to injury in this mode is a wit so lame it makes the Insane Clown Posse sound like Louis CK and scenario writing so inept it makes the 1960's TV Batman look like The Wire.
It is almost impossible to say enough bad things about the acute crisis of imagination that produced this plodding, inchoate clusterfuck of a gameplay mode and the temptation to write at length about its half-baked scenario/level progression, absence of meaningful difficulty gradations (changing nothing about the game and simply granting enemies ability to kill the player in one hit absolutely does not mean that you have created a new difficult setting), incoherent/meandering "plot" and so on is a great temptation indeed... - I am most definitely not the only one to take up the topic in the context of a review (or an impression) and the fact that developers such as Bleszinski, who wind up at the helm on envelope-pushing tech demos such as Gears 3, have so much trouble deciding when it is and is not appropriate to add a single-player mode to their game is one that really deserves fuller consideration (and probably its own essay).
- And when I say "amateurish" I mean something more like "phoned in" or "hastily completed the night before it was due", rather than "done out of love and possessed of an endearing scrappiness."
- Carmack, the famous FPS innovator and patriarch, noticed in Kushner's Masters of Doom that the "[s]tory in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
- Another weird thing about this game that I don't have the time or the inclination to try to understand in this essay is how desperate its designers are to make you feel like you are succeeding, even when you are doing anything but: Gears 3 has this "experience points for everything" piece that works together with an awards and achievements system that congratulates players for dubious achievements such as suffering the most deaths in a competitive match, failing to score any kills in a cooperative round, etc. and I honestly have no idea why constant congratulation was deemed integral to the final product (but something about it just doesn't sit right with me).
