--- Gears of War ---

    Gears of War is a new series from the company that brought us so much fun with the Unreal series.  Gears, although it's a shooter in the same vein as Unreal (complete with hulkish armored guys), is a bit of a different take, since it's in 3rd-person view and employs an interesting cover system--a tiny touch of realism in a very 'unreal' genre.  

    This 3rd-person view also adds some much-needed personality to the game, allowing us to identify with the characters.  There's a considerable amount of dialog in the Gears games, which is also a departure from the "strong silent type" characters in so many notable 1st-person shooters (Doom, Quake, Half-Life, etc).

    Gears brings a few other things to the mix as well, such as some sequences that mix up the gameplay style: driving, flying, etc, boss fights, and co-op play, which always goes over well with us here at GamesWeLike.com.

    Well, a picture's worth a thousand words, and a video's worth a few thousand pictures, at least.  We have Gears videos in a couple other pages of the site: the Bugs section, and the Now Playing section, but we've collected them all below.  Enjoy!

We have 3 Gears 1 bugs.  The first one is self-explanatory.  If you don't see the bug, get your eyes (or your monitor) checked.  Click for Video:

Number two is maybe not really a "bug", it's just a strange side effect of Gears' ragdoll physics system.  But it's hilarious.  Don't miss this one!

Number 3 is pretty simple: a Berzerker wants to kill us, but can't seem to move.  So it just runs in place.  I tried to jar it loose, but no such luck.

These two made us laugh.  Playing through Gears 1, we joked about how the only guy wearing a helmet got shot in the head.  Well, someone at Epic Games must've heard the same joke, because they put some dialog on the subject into Gears 2.  The first video is the scene from Gears 1.  The other is the scene from Gears 2.

This is the intro cutscene for a new character, named Tai...and a good (mild, actually) example of the over-the-top, absurd type of situation I referred to above.

This has probably happened to a lot of people, but it's always fun to see a bad guy get double-chainsawed.

These two are bugs from Gears 2.  This first one is nothing special, just a misplaced collision detection.  There's a one-way invisible wall right at Marcus' feet.  Weird--unless you've ever built anything with the Unreal Engine.  :-)

This one is just a floating piece of ice left over after I blasted a stalagmite.  The other stalagmites all fell down completely when I shot them, but this one is special.

And lastly, here are some videos of some of the "cool parts" of Gears 2, although the entire game is pretty much cool.

In the "Now Playing" section, when we first picked up Gears 2, I mentioned it had some really over-the-top story elements.  Here's the biggest example: being inside a giant worm:

I also mentioned that poor Carmine was the only Gear in our squad with a helmet, and how the game joked about it.  We were sure he was going to take a bullet through that helmet, but he didn't.  The poor guy wasn't lucky enough to die that quickly.

Getting out of that giant worm was fun:

Gears 1 had some really annoying parts where the "Krill" would get you if you weren't in enough light (which was hard to determine exactly).  It was dumb and petty and a really bad idea.  Thankfully, there are no Krill in Gears 2.  It does have a much more gameplay-friendly version of that idea, though, called "Razor Hail".  Razor hail is just what it sounds like: hail that will kill you.  But unlike the Krill, razor hail is easily avoidable: just stay under something.

The driving sequence in Gears 1 was also a Krill section, and it wasn't very good.  The driving sections of Gears 2 are much better.

Here's one of the game's bosses.  Bosses are good.  We approve.

In Gears 1, there were two types of enemies that you saw, but really didn't interact with much: the Reavers (flying squid-looking guys) and the Brumaks (lumbering dinosaur-looking guys).  In Gears 2, there's no shortage of interaction with them.  In one sequence, you fly around on some Reavers:

And in another sequence, you get to ride a Brumak.  And from the looks of it, it's not just any Brumak, it's the Grand-daddy of all the Brumaks.

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