Gears 3

[Darksider]

I'm surprised no one's made this thread yet.

I picked it up at a midnight release and beat it a few hours ago. This game really blows claims of gears having no plot out of the water. Cole's flashback to his glory days was heart-wrenching, and the ending was suitably bittersweet.

Gameplay wise, It's the finest of the series. It's not too different from Gears 2, but the little improvements they did make are excellent. The Hammerburst's iron sights are great for popping the heads of grubs and glowies. I was honestly worried that the Lambent enemies would take the fun out of the cover-shooter gameplay by being more resilient and rushing you constantly, but Epic preserved the gameplay balance quite well.

I haven't tried the new beast mode yet, but my freinds tell me it's a lot of fun. I think that'll be my next goal.

[Vendetta]

I found the Lambent dull and unsatisfying to fight against, and we basically broke the game by finding that you can, on Hardcore at least, basically rush down and chainsaw everything and this is about ten times easier than trying to shoot at it (protip, run to the side of an enemy then turn to face them when you're already in chainsaw range, the enemy won't react to you in the same way as if you run directly at them, and you will almost always get them). Also, since you can't instagib now on Hardcore even the longest fights can just be corpse drags.

And yeah, we get it Epic, you have proper bossfights now, with pattern changes and stages and everything, but do they have to be so damn long. It doesn't make them hard, because your resbots always seem to be playing on easy (tanking two or three hits that would down you in one go on HC) so you're not in much danger of losing, just tedious.

We completed it in pretty much one sitting, and I really can't find much enthusiasm for going back to it for anything other than achievements. Oh well, horde and beast might fill some time until BF3 comes out.

It's still Gears, but it turns out I'm over Gears.

[Stark]

The Anvil fort bossfight is pretty funny for resbots; your team are amazingly fast one-track guys for getting players back up... which is good, because on HC even touching the trails puts you down. Hooray?

Getting around enemies for melee works with everything, not just the chainsaw; in beast mode you can solo a wave with a wretch doing it. I found the bosses really short in coops, but I finished the game solo and the final boss totally forgot the rule of three.

The story is a real mixed bag; the 'new' characters (besides anya) are with one exception worthless window dressing that do nothing but stand-in for the regulars doing stuff off-camera. After the first act with dreams and flashbacks and stuff, the game drops anything interesting with flow, and act 4 in particular has way too much walking in with fingers in ears. The 'finale' is a really cheap and weak ending that's more generic scifi than gears.

The engine is ridiculous, with amazingly lighting effects, particle effects, shadows, etc. The art design is good, with lots of cool environments to play in. The VA is good, but it's kind of jarring to hear them spurt out 'do you remember what we did in that novel by Karen Traviss, Marcus' instead of taking the piss.

I enjoyed the campaign, but the resolution was really forced and lame. Horde and beast are a laugh, and I suck too bad at versus to bother learning how to play before BF3 comes out.

[Vendetta]

Getting around enemies for melee works with everything, not just the chainsaw; in beast mode you can solo a wave with a wretch doing it. I found the bosses really short in coops, but I finished the game solo and the final boss totally forgot the rule of three.

I think we were fighting the anvil fort boss for a good half hour, didn't have to restart, it just decided to take infinity bullets. By the end I got tired of trying to be clever, just picked up a shotgun and point blanked it in the guts when it charged me, let it down me and then get my mate or a resbot to pick me up.

And yeah, the endboss just shows that everyone else isn't just following the rule of three because they're unoriginal, but because having to repeat the same set of steps ten or more times is a bit dull.

[PeZook]

So, do the COG "end" the war with the use of another devastating superweapon that still somehow fails to do anything to their enemy?

[Stark]

No.

Imagine it's a Voyager episode.

You now know the finale.

[OmegaChief]

Marcus from the future travels back into the past to give you a gun with a LASER CHAINSAW leading to you butchering your way through the badguys where you press a button which leads to a lot of fancy effects of the enemy being defeted (Like in the first game) with everyone then patting themselves on teh back as they head off the rebuild, fade to black with no resolution beyond that?

[Stark]

Closer than you might think.

Marcus from the future is an old guy, right?

[Vendetta]

Also, Marcus
Spoiler

takes off his do-rag. And boy does he look dumb without it.

[OmegaChief]

... I hate it when my sarcastic retelling of Voyagers terrible finale in a Gears context turns out to be close to the mark, god damn it.

[Stark]

Story written by Karen Traviss, lol? The plot elements are good, but the execution is pretty bleh, especially towards the end where they basically wrap up the entire conflict in fifteen seconds.

And giant weapons of mass destruction fucking up both sides and prolonging the conflict was a core theme. Seeing the results of the Hammer strikes was pretty cool, but somewhat undermined by the city being called 'Char'. Y'know, that planet Galvatron hung around on?

[Vendetta]

I think the only thing that genuinely surprised us in Gears 3 was
Spoiler

Dom dying halfway through, not at/near the end. That actually was quite a good scene, reusing the instrumental Mad World from the early Gears trailer and generally being loads more dramatically satisfying than the ending, which was "press button to make all your problems to go away now".

[Stark]

The biggest problem, though, is that that led directly into the weakest part of the game; it wouldn't surprise me if people got bored in act 4. I quite liked a lot of act 5, although it was all generic infantry fighting, and the acting etc were fine... but someone really should have read the script before they approved it.

[Losonti Tokash]

Yeah, I was expecting the cast to start dropping left and right after that. But the end was just...ugh. Especially just that whole end sequence.

[Stark]

At least the lightmass bomb went PING like a submarine. I hesitate to think that a cheaper end to the game could even be concieved.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Incase anyone wants to save themselves $60 on the pretext of story: Spoiler

You learn of a hidden island where the leader of the COG has hidden the top scientists of Sera behind a man-made hurricane. After destroying the machine, and having a Metroid-esqe escape sequence, you fight your way to where Marcus' dad is being held in a tower.

On the way up, you drop a huge stylized globe on the queen and her giant death-beetle. Once you reach his lab, he takes you to the roof to activate the superweapon, and Mentions knowing about the locust and lambent well before E-Day.

Upon reaching the superweapon, it requires a lengthy charge up sequence. So, -surprise- the queen and her giant laser-bug aren't crushed, and infact take 2.5+ hammers of dawn to kill. (on normal.) That's draining an actual hammer of dawn targeter, not 2.5 blasts.

The machine finally charges, killing the all lambent and locust. Somehow, Adam Feenix had gotten far enough in his Phazon Imulsion infection that he's turned to dust. The queen crawls out of the wreckage of her beetle, saunters over to Marcus, taunting him all the way. He stabs her with Dom's knife, delivers generic good guy revenge speech, game ends.

Also Carmine survives.

In a highly amusing and quite annoying note: The Lambent Berserker can spawn in Horde as a boss. It is EXACTLY like it is in campaign. Including it's far, far too large pool of HP.

I beat the game on Normal in about 7-8 hours, and everything after act 1 was pretty much a disappointment. Anvil's Gate was fun, but ultimately just "Kill things until we start spawning an endless wave of the breakthrough enemy." The catapults were a hilarious backward step for the Locust, although they finally demonstrated that Raven pilots are hopelessly retarded.

Everything that was a boss fight took about a third too long. The "Formers" were just Mass Effect's Husks, the polyps were just tickers mrk2, the rest of the lambent themselves were a bad joke.

[PeZook]

So, in other words, the "majority of the questions" are answered. As in, all except the most interesting ones?

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Pretty much. Seems to be code for "Anything but what people actually want to know."

[Stark]

All the low-level grunts-eye-view stuff is abandoned after the second act, after which the banter largely stops and you're on the exposition train to generic scifi foozle.

It's a sad thing that the writer apparently tried to turn Gears inti a regular property, with lots of 'read the EU kids' and every interesting plot line unresolved, but laid on the hackneyed crap so thick nobody even care anymore. The Anvil Gate section is somewhat off-key given the near destruction of Hoffman's character on the altar of a Travis self-insert character who does literally nothing in a game. Fierce loyalty and results at any cost? Nah, YOU go save the world. Hoffman don't care!

[Darksider]

I found the DEM ending rather annoying, but to be honest, I was kind of expecting it. The ending of the last game and the general set up assured there wasn't any other way to remove the locust and lambent as a threat. They wrote themselves into a corner and I just don't see any way the ending could've been anything other than a DEM that takes out the locust and Lambent, or yet another grimdark kick in the balls.

[Stark]

Too bad ending the Marcus/Dom story didn't require the war to end at all? If only the previous games hadn't established a theme of the futility of superweapons and massive military attacks with the only result being increased suffering for everyone, maybe it wouldn't have been so terrible. Anti-war message converted into typical SW EU rubbish is a pretty serious step backwards.
Spoiler

If the game had ended without the 'oh yeah and then all the badguys died lol' part, it'd have a weak story but not be terrible. Sadly, Fenix's death to bring a victory wasn't enough - had to END IT ALLLLLLLLLL.

[PeZook]

Well, to be honest, the only reason the Lightmass bomb strike was futile was because the COG sat on its ass instead of finishing the job while the Locust were disorganized

But yeah, Gears 1 and 2 seemed way more complex: the Locust started the war with their genocidal attack in the hope of taking over the surface to escape lambency, but they got themselves nuked and flooded, essentially getting their civilization nearly destroyed - both situations that wouldn't have happened if their relations with humanity didn't start with massive slaughter.

Humans, on the other hand, kept sacrificing more and more of their people in futile attempts at total victory. And, arguably, if they weren't such enormous warlike assholes to each other in the first place, the Locust might've approached the problem differently.

It's interesting that in Gears 2 we see the Locust have a culture and civilization of their own, which made me hope for a more mature resolution to the plot than "Oh hey we have a third superweapon and THIS ONE WORKED! Yay! Happy ending!"

[Stark]

No, the lightmass bomb worked fine; it blasted the guys that had penetrated their defence. Turns out the Locust are a planetary organisation and it also created a terrible disease, so everyone just got worse off. The stuff in Gears2 around New Hope and E-day and stuff made the situation seem interesting and complex, with Chairman Hitler and Queen McTits playing a double-ended game for secret stakes while their entire species are driven to destruction by offensive after offensive like WW1 only with lasers from space and shit. I mean, they even had the Halo-esque transfer of power from the 'boomer faction' to the 'kantus faction' as conventional military strikes were abandoned for sneaky GIANT WORM ANYA stuff.
Spoiler

But yeah, turns out you just press this one button and it's all over. Great? I guess? If Marcus' dad had blown himself away to end the lambent threat (which was about to create an extinction event for everyone) that would have been fine - but killing all the locust (and apparently the entire fuel supply for the entire planet) with a blue special effect is the definition of story failure.

Basically they dropped a clumsy end on the franchise without really addressing anything interesting in the setting and just leaving a bunch of dangling threads for Traviss to make millions writing novels about. Do you know that a plaque in the game refers to a battle as occurring '25 BE', ie using fanon forum dating systems as an actual in-universe calender, as if people would make a memorial counting down to an event that hasn't happened yet?

I mean it's always been silly how these people apparently had lives before E-day and yet aren't 40+, but that's just offensively lazy.

[PeZook]

No, the lightmass bomb worked fine; it blasted the guys that had penetrated their defence. Turns out the Locust are a planetary organisation and it also created a terrible disease, so everyone just got worse off. The stuff in Gears2 around New Hope and E-day and stuff made the situation seem interesting and complex, with Chairman Hitler and Queen McTits playing a double-ended game for secret stakes while their entire species are driven to destruction by offensive after offensive like WW1 only with lasers from space and shit. I mean, they even had the Halo-esque transfer of power from the 'boomer faction' to the 'kantus faction' as conventional military strikes were abandoned for sneaky GIANT WORM ANYA stuff.

Wait, didn't the Locust emerge to kill everyone because they were getting infected by Imulsion, and wanted to escape to the surface and then destroy the hollows to kill all Lambent?

I mean, there were Lambent wretches in Gears 1 already. Unless I missed something and the bomb accelerated things, bah.

Anyways it is pretty silly that humans were mining and processing and researching Imulsion for centuries yet never realized that holy shit it's actuall a biological parasite!

Not to mention the Locust, whose culture was based around the goddamned thing. Though they at least have an excuse of being technologically unsophisticated.

Basically they dropped a clumsy end on the franchise without really addressing anything interesting in the setting and just leaving a bunch of dangling threads for Traviss to make millions writing novels about. Do you know that a plaque in the game refers to a battle as occurring '25 BE', ie using fanon forum dating systems as an actual in-universe calender, as if people would make a memorial counting down to an event that hasn't happened yet?

I mean it's always been silly how these people apparently had lives before E-day and yet aren't 40+, but that's just offensively lazy.

The best thing is how they introduced all these mysteries and plot hooks and then not use them. I mean, hey, the Queen looks human! And there were children shipped to the mountain under which the Locust live! Are the two species related? Has the threat which almost drove humanity to extinction actually been created by themselves?

Oh yeah who cares.

[Stark]

Tbh I think they were angling for the bomb accelerating some stuff, but yeah, the migration pressure on Locust was the lambent. It was only portrayed to the humans above by the government as a war of genocide to justify their ridiculous mass-murder businesses and keep everyone in line.

In G3 they actually say IT JUMPED THE SPECIES BARRIER AGAIN, so apparently we're supposed to think lambency is a disease and not some kind of super toxicity. And man, we all know what the Locust are, it's really heavily implied in Gears 2, but doesn't get a look-in in Gears 3. Who cares anymore, after all?

Man, in Gears 3 the Queen is basically human; she doesn't even have her wierd tenatcles anymore; she's just a slut in a bodysuit. But then she follows you for no reason (never sticking around long enough to kill you, and showing up late at the one place she knows Marcus is going) and then falls over. Man, imagine if there'd been a whole act around just what the government had been doing underground all that time, and if the first game had suggested Professor Fenix had some kind of detailed knowledge of the situation before he disappeared!

The funny part is that imulsion is pumped out of underground drilling rigs. But apparently underground is absolutely wall-to-wall locust. I was expected a bunch of stuff about how imulsion was in the groundwater now and how the environment was even more fucked etc, but all you really get is 'zombays'.