Does Emergence Day sound to you like a haughty euphemism for childbirth? Does the phrase "Can't stop the Train, baby!" hold no irony for you? Even if you're a stalwart PC-only gamer, it was hard to miss the hype surrounding the release of Epic's Gears of War on the Xbox 360. If you did happen to be living in a cave - a cave without electricity, even - or were visiting the moon during November of last year, then you had no reason to feel slighted by Epic and Microsoft for not bringing Gears of War to the PC at the same time as the Xbox 360 release. PC gamers on planet Earth, however, likely felt a twinge of hostility toward Epic for withholding a PC release until the Xbox 360 version sold enough copies to buy designer Cliff Bleszinski 24-karat gold pants. When the subject of a Gears of War PC port was first broached with Epic vice president Mark Rein, he initially refused to acknowledge the existence of any such master plan. But as sales of the game quickly approached infinity plus one, Rein's denial soon turned to cageyness and then to confirmation. Which leads us to today: PC gamers, Emergence Day is nigh. It's time to tear through some Locust the way nature intended: in high-resolution goodness, with a mouse and a keyboard.
More Than a Port
With the release of Gears of War on the PC, gamers have more to look forward to than a vanilla port to Windows. Most noticeable is the inclusion of additional single-player content, comprised of five chapters which come later in the campaign. Players will finally have a chance to take on the monstrous Brumak (much to the chagrin of those without PCs, the new content will not be making its way to the Xbox 360). On the multiplayer side, three new maps have been added, as well as a new game mode, King of the Hill. For those who live and breathe by accolades, 50 new achievements have been added. If you also fancy yourself as a designer, then here's your chance: in a move sure to foster goodwill with the PC community, a fully functioning editor is included in the box. Microsoft and Epic have done their best to ensure that you'll pick up the PC release, even if you already own the Xbox 360 disc.
Light on Story, Heavy on Action
The single-player campaign starts off just as it did on Emergence Day a year ago, with no back story or plot set-up but with plenty of attitude and action. The story - COG versus Locust Horde in the ultimate battle for supremacy! - remains just as stilted and contrived, but it's enough to drive the action. The new chapters are welcome as well, and it's very cool indeed to finally get a chance to come face-to-face with the Brumak. The extended story is less of a bonus and more of a necessary inclusion, as it was clear that the chase and eventual showdown with the Brumak was cut from the console version to make a 2006 holiday release date. Now, the story feels more complete, though the ending is just as unfulfilling as it was last year (though it does beg for a sequel).
Gameplay hasn't changed, either: the game is still an exercise in managing ammunition and finding appropriate cover. By default, the space bar is the catch-all key, serving to initiate a sprint, take cover or roll between cover. While the W, A, S and D keys can be double-tapped to initiate a sprint or a roll, there's no reason that these actions couldn't have been separated to multiple keys. As it stands, there's no option to do so. I found aiming with a mouse and navigating with a keyboard more natural, but if you prefer the gamepad, Gears of War has a configuration option pre-set for the Xbox 360 controller (provided you have windows drivers, of course). I had no problems with the Xbox 360 gamepad, but the precise aim offered by a mouse is what I missed when playing the game on a console, so I moved back to the keyboard-and-mouse combo.
When Squad Means Solo
Squad controls are available toward the end of the first act, and they're as useless here as they were on the console. I spend my time finding better cover for myself instead of ordering my squad to either "Fire!" or "Fall back!" (yell using your gruffest Marcus Fenix voice). For some reason, I'm able to execute the reload double-tap with more precision on the keyboard, with a fairly consistent level of success (timing a reload just so greatly reduces the time spent changing out clips). The same difficulty levels are available, but a happy medium between the shooting gallery that is Casual mode and the sometimes-frustrating Hardcore mode would have been nice.
A baffling issue that hasn't been addressed is the lack of headshots with weapons other than the sniper rifle; a well-placed headshot with the Lancer, for instance, does the same damage as a shot to the foot. While it does have a tactical feel, combat is often reduced to waiting for that one last enemy to poke his head from behind some cover, until he's finally finished off and the satisfying area completion sound is played. And if you think I'm going to spend my time healing injured squad mates who will be automatically healed after an area is cleared out, you're wrong. I'll cover my own bacon, thanks, and the dense AI teammates can cover (or not cover) theirs. These are nitpicks, though, because the game is largely a solo shooter, and in that regard it has few equals, regardless of platform.
Games for Windows Live: Put It Out To Pasture
As one of Microsoft's marquee PC games, it's no surprise that Gears of War is a Games for Windows-branded title, and the box comes with a free one-month Gold-level trial of the Games for Windows Live service. We've covered Games for Windows Live in-depth at YouGamers before; it's Microsoft's branded online service. Think of it as Xbox Live moved to the PC. You can, in fact, use an existing Xbox Live account when signing in to Games for Windows Live, and that's exactly what I did. My meager list of achievements and embarrassing Gamerscore are loaded each time Gears of War loads, reminding me how little I actually use a console for gaming.
Warning: just like the console version, be aware that only one campaign progress file can be associated with a single Games For Windows Live account. While running some benchmarks, I started a new campaign with my primary Games For Windows Live sign-in, and promptly lost six hours of progress. Adding insult to injury, GFW Live would only let me start again from Chapters 1 and 5 in the story, seemingly oblivious to the fact that I must have also completed Chapters 2 through 4. A traditional PC save-game system would do just fine, thanks.
It's impossible to discuss the multiplayer experience without assessing the value of Games For Windows Live, and as you may have heard, the service is far from perfection. The interface is clunky, using very little of the available screen real estate, and even sports button icons from the Xbox 360 gamepad. From within the game, I was able to browse my friends list (total friends: zero), change my account settings, and set up voice chat features. Gears of War for Windows multiplayer is still in its infancy, with few populated servers and even fewer servers worth joining.
If you're familiar with the banter on Xbox Live, then you know what I'm talking about. Turn up the obscenity a notch with Games For Windows Live, though; I guess computers are stashed in the basement or kids' rooms, out of the earshot of parents, instead of in the family room. The in-game server browser could also use an overhaul, as it's difficult to sort lists of servers and mark favorite servers for future sessions.
Solid Fun, Empty Servers
While I could do without the Games For Windows Live experience, I managed to find a small server playing the Warzone game type, which pits Cog versus Locust in a last-man-standing battle (incidentally, most game types were Warzone, with Execution a close second). This is old hat for Xbox 360 players, but matches are separated into three tiers: Ranked matches, Player matches and List Play matches. Ranked matches feature universal ranking as well as achievement scoring, Player matches have no ranking but do offer up achievements, and List Play games are just for fun. There's also a worldwide leaderboard, which was looking pretty sparse the day after release. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), there is no cross-platform play between Xbox 360 and PC players; the same technical decisions that prevent moving PC content to the Xbox 360 prevent the inter-platform online matches.
Along with the Warzone and Execution modes, Annex and Assassination make their way from the console release. New for the PC is the King of the Hill mode, which is a mash-up of Execution-style killing mechanics and the objective control system from Annex mode. I spent some time playing King of the Hill on the Mansion map, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I'm a multiplayer curmudgeon, so that's no small feat, and I went as far to plug in my microphone and return the favor when insulted. It's likely that my fellow players were Gears of War stalwarts from the console side, because they had tactics down to a science. On an average cable connection, lag wasn't an issue, even when the action reached a fever-pitch of intensity.
But if multiplayer in Games for Windows titles continues to require the ill-conceived Games For Windows Live service, then servers will be continue to be ghost towns. I don't expect to by playing much Gears of War online once my trial Gold membership expires. My Gears of War multiplayer final score: Gears of War, 1; Games for Windows Live, 0. As soon as I find someone interested in a cooperative run-through of the game online, I'll have to write off an entire day of work.
Still Lookin' Good After All These Years... er, One Year
Gears of War was a visual triumph when it was released on the Xbox 360, and today it remains one of the console's best-looking titles. A showcase for Epic's multi-platform Unreal Engine 3, Gears of War on the PC is a stellar visual experience. Without even delving into the technical aspects, the game is an example of how effective art direction can authentically transform a designer's vision into on-screen pixels. Each art asset helps to build the theme of a specific area and adds to the overall visual package.
Textures never look out of place, and none stand out as being rushed or thrown in at the last minute. At the highest detail settings, there's a measurable improvement in overall visual quality over the console version, and the additional memory afforded by the PC allows for very detailed textures. Level design, while intentionally constricted in the name of gameplay, rarely feels contrived, which gives the environments an authentic feel. The planet has been at war for some time when the story begins, and the color palette is subdued and washed out to reinforce that notion.
One of the highlights of the Unreal Engine 3 is the lighting system. It's easy to argue that the bloom lighting is overdone at times, but for the most part the effect is used judiciously. When a ray of light pierces through the darkness and illuminates an otherwise pitch-black hallway, the effect can be mesmerizing. Dynamic shadows give buildings and characters a sense of place in the world, and the dynamic shadows in Gears of War are some of the best-looking around, with few glitches in rendering. If anything immediately stands out, even to non-gamers, it's the character models, which are extremely detailed.
Animation is fluid and without hitching, and Locust who wander near a grenade will explode in random ways, with a torso in one direction and a severed hand in another. As always, the ragdoll effect on corpses is exaggerated. The only complaint of any merit is with the blood splatter, which is prevalent and doesn't seem at all to fit with the game's art style. For a game with such a brooding and serious tone, the excessive and almost cell-shaded blood seems out of place. It's a minor complaint, and one that stands out only because the graphical package is so cohesive otherwise.
More Than Just Gears At Stake
Epic has a lot invested in the Unreal Engine, and its licensees are likely keeping a close eye on Gears of War to see how effectively (and efficiently) their own games can be moved from one platform to the other. Relative to console development - even next-gen console development - creating games for PCs is a difficult task. Where a console is a standardized hardware and software platform, PC developers must contend with a near-endless variety of hardware and software configurations. Add in legacy Windows XP machines and new Windows Vista-based computers, and the list of potential issues is doubled; split the XP and Vista camps into 32- and 64-bit flavors, and the number of target platforms doubles yet again.
Standard APIs simplify the task, but the amalgam of GPU and driver combinations alone are enough to make an engine coder's head explode. The PC market has seen a number of poor-performing (or completely unplayable) Xbox 360-to-PC ports over the past twelve months, which speaks toward the level of difficulty inherent in moving titles from Microsoft's console to the PC. Thankfully, even with the deck stacked against them, Epic (with the assistance of Painkiller developer People Can Fly) has massaged the Unreal Engine 3-based Gears of War to perform well on a range of PC hardware.
Power To The People
In fact, Gears of War runs on an entirely different version of the Unreal Engine - code that is so different that moving the new PC content to the original Xbox 360 release just isn't technically feasible (cue the whining and conspiracy theories, Xbox 360 owners). The engine powering the PC version of Gears of War is closer to Unreal Tournament 3 than to the Xbox 360 version, and the work spent optimizing the Unreal Engine on the PC is evident. Most gaming PCs will have no problem running Gears of War at a moderate resolution with medium detail settings, though Microsoft's minimum specifications are too underpowered to drive the game at anything but the lowest visual settings.
The game will run on a system with an NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or ATI Radeon X700 based card, but just barely, and only at a resolution of 1024 x 768 with blurry textures and no advanced lighting effects. For a more enjoyable experience, consider the YouGamers' minimum requirements, which will push the game at a respectable 1280 x 1024 at Medium detail settings (without antialiasing or anisotropic filtering). These requirements call for an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ or Intel Pentium 4 , 1 GB of system memory and either an ATI Radeon X1650 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 . With 256MB of video memory, a system with these specs will get you through the game with decent visuals.
A Relevant Aside, Then Back To Hardware
What follows is a bit of an aside, but stick with me here: in a video game, the quality of the visuals is inversely proportionate to the amount of imagination you, the gamer, have to use to the experience to life in your mind. Let's call this the "Imagination Factor". The higher the Imagination Factor, the more your brain has to compensate for the difference between the virtual world rendered on the screen and what you perceive as "real." As the Imagination Factor approaches one - the IF rating for the world in which we live - the less your noggin has to work to maintain the suspension of disbelief. Yes, I just now made up the term "Imagination Factor", and no, I have no idea how to actually calculate an IF rating (or if it's even useful to do such a thing). I do, however, have a point: the quality of the graphics in contemporary video games is advancing at a quick pace, which means that we're using less of our brains deciphering what game designers intended us to see; the vision is explicitly laid before our eyes. This isn't to say that the ideal game mimics our own reality with hyper-realism; the goal of a game is to express designers' visions on a PC monitor. Got that? OK, class dismissed (we'll save control schemes and input devices for another lesson).
We're not jumping into virtual reality worlds just yet, but Gears of War has one of the lowest IF ratings of any PC game. It doesn't match the stunning quality of Crytek's Crysis, but to its credit Gears of War runs acceptably at the highest of visual settings on hardware that you can buy in a store today. Take the YouGamers' recommended system: an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000 or Intel Core 2 Duo E6350, 2 GB of RAM and either an ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro or NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (each with 512MB of video memory). These video cards (couple with a fast dual-core processor) have the processing power and the memory to run the game at up to 1920 x 1200 without many dips below 50 FPS. If you can afford a 768MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX video card and have a sufficiently fast CPU to avoid a bottleneck, then you can turn on antialiasing (under Vista with DirectX 10 only), though gameplay becomes choppy at times. With top-of-the-line hardware, the visuals exceed the quality of those on the Xbox 360 by a noticeable margin, due in large part to the higher native resolutions afforded on a PC.
PCs Can Be Finicky Beasts
Of course, this is a PC game, so the overall performance and quality assessment isn't that simple. Gears of War ships with support for both Windows XP and Windows Vista, with an option to turn on DirectX 10 rendering when running under Vista. First, what improvements or enhancements are made possible with by the DirectX 10 rendering path? Well, none, at least as far as my eyes can tell. A scene rendered using the DirectX 9 API under Window XP has no apparent differences from the same scene rendered using either DX9 Ex or DX 10 under Windows Vista. The only immediate enhancement available using DX 10 is antialiasing, and it comes at a steep cost in performance. Furthermore, under Vista, the DirectX 10 rendering path is actually slower than the DirectX 9 Ex one.
The best performance, with no apparent degradation in visual quality, comes under good ol' Windows XP, which had higher minimum and average frame rate numbers on the test systems. And while antialiasing improves the graphical experience in a noticeable way, it put the hurt on a 3.5GHz Intel Core 2 Quad system with 2GB of RAM an overclocked NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX. Even if you followed my lead and sold an organ to purchase such over-the-top hardware, turning on antialiasing will cause hitching and sudden frame rate drops. After all of my benchmark testing, I concluded that Windows XP was the way to go with Gears of War (for the curious, NVIDIA's ForceWare beta 169.04 drivers were used for these tests).
No graphics engine is without its quirks, and Gears of War has a couple. First, the in-game vertical synchronization option didn't work. Under both Windows XP and Vista (with DirectX10 on and off), the only way to achieve synchronization with the monitor's refresh rate is to force it through the graphics card drivers. Normally, vertical sync isn't much of an issue, but with Gears of War the tearing was pronounced when the frame rate strayed too far from my monitor's 60Hz refresh rate.
Second, the game engine seems to be linked to a 60 fps cap, of some kind; no matter how low I cranked the graphics settings and resolution on a fast PC, the frame rate never rose above 63 FPS, and the FRAPS counter spent most of its time at a steady 60 FPS. The game exhibited this behavior across operating systems and with both DirectX9 and DirectX 10 rendering paths, so I can only assume that the graphics engine is tied to an update cycle of 60Hz. Note that this internal frame rate is increased from the Xbox 360 version of the game, which ran at 30 FPS (though the console version's physics and game code worked in 60Hz intervals).
Ready For Another Heaping Helping
This was my fourth time through Gears of War, and yet I enjoyed every minute of it. Even with additional content, the PC release is the same linear romp through an action-movie script, complete with obvious and convoluted plot devices and hokey dialogue. So what makes the game so inherently enjoyable and worthy of such high praise? First, it's accessible: anyone can pick up and play in a matter of minutes, and even shooter neophytes won't feel like stooges on Casual difficulty. Second, and most important, are the high production values. From audio to character models to cut scenes to gameplay, the entire game feels like one coherent piece of entertainment. It delivers on the suspension of disbelief and sucks you in to the story from start to finish, and you walk away wanting more of the experience. Gears of War isn't trying to raise social questions like Bioshock or wow us with innovate gameplay like Portal. It is, however, a highly polished shooter that delivers in the area that matters most to gamers: it's just plain fun.
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