Gears of War Review

One button did it. Slam into cover, roadie run between chest-high walls, blind fire, then swing wide to flank, and an entire generation of third-person shooters followed. Epic paired that with active reload, a rhythm test that turns the dullest verb in shooters into a small gamble with a real payoff, and the chainsaw bayonet, which remains the most memorable melee attack of its console generation.

The engine is doing enormous visual work here, with normal mapping and bloom so aggressive that the brown and grey palette became a decade-long trend, but Sera's ruined classical architecture still looks deliberate rather than merely dark. The story is a thin sketch of hard men shouting about the Locust Horde, with almost no motivation past the next objective and a protagonist who has one expression. The campaign is short and the cooperative mode is the real product, but the mechanic at the centre was genuinely new.