[XBOX 360] Gears of War 3

 

 

Gears of war 3 continues the story of course right off from 2,
The main differences in gears 3 is that it introduces many new enemy types
For the first few hours of the game you're fighting 'glowies' a new enemy type, its this mutated weird monster that glow brightly and you shoot the yellow part and they always explode. For the first bit of the game theres not much enemy variation, its just one 'glowie' soldier and some spiders. I wondered if the whole game would be like this.

Well thankfully as you progress through the game it introduces a lot more enemies. You do fight the classic Locust, quite a lot, but there is a lot of these annoying glowie enemies too. A lot of enemies in this game also have one-shot abilities, theres this guy that throws huge balls of goo at you that one hits you which can be more annoying than anything. You also have this weird tree that constantly spawns enemies unless you go around and pop all the balls on it.

Towards the end of the game you even fight some generic zombies for a bit, which just felt pretty shoe-horned in due to the times.


The guns noticably feel different in this game compared to 2. The Hammerburst even has ironsights and barely has any recoil, unlike 2 where it has a ton. The guns feel good and arent drastically different but it does seem like they were trying to make it more accessible to newcomers.


The game definitely has less filler on rails levels compared to 2 thankfully. 95% of the time you are doing what you want to do;  medium to big size battles in arenas shooting enemies. There a few sections here and there where you're on a turret on controlling some mech , and some weird underwater on rails level, but other than that its few and far between. Unlike gears 2, which had constant gimmicky vehicle sections.

The levels are also noticbly varied and more outside.
Most of the game is spent outside, not inside locations, unlike 2 which felt like you're just in  a cave the whole game.
You go through a lot of city locations , bridges, a sand level that has giant ants that come out of the ground like the antlions in half life 2, and towards the  end of the game some seriously impressive grand castles and palaces.


The characters this time around a bit puzzling, half the game you're playing as the classic team marcus, dom, baird, cole,  but then the other half you have these two females or some random guy named Jace, just seemed unnessesary and they werent as interesting as the original guys. you constantly have 2 AI partners with you the whole time, even while playing co-op. So 4 people on your team. Because of this, whenever you go down you can usually get revived pretty fast. The game is still quite challenging on the second hardest difficulty, its harder than 2.
Because a lot of the enemy types, the one hit mechanics especially from the glowies, and towards the end of the game this new enemy type that you cant damage unless you use explosives on him, it can be a challenging game.

Theres a few boss fights and one in particular is really hard, its this arena where a giant boss charges around at you , one hitting you, and in the second phase he makes lava wherever he runs which also one hits you.
Well the first time we did this I could not see the lava trails due to a glitch, this made us fail for like 2 hours straight which was incredibly annoying. We eventually restarted the whole chapter and did the boss fine, but wtf was not expecting glitches like that in a console game.

It's just another solid Gears game, its better than 2 as far as im concerned because of the greater level variety, not as many turret on rails sections, and fun gameplay. The game has some bad weaknesses at parts, mostly down to the new enemy types, the glowies arent especially thrilling to fight and are more annoying than anything, and theres a chunk of the game towards the middle where you fight boring zombies for an hour or two. The game ties up the gears story well and its got a lot of twists and turns and good cutscenes and funny dialogue between the characters, the last boss is a giant ant where you just shoot the yellow thing basically but still a decently fun fight.

7/10