There’s a moment at the end of the second act of Gears of War 2 where, all of a sudden, the infamous Unreal Engine 3 ‘Meatcube’ demo makes sense. At that point, you’ll realize why Epic thought it so important to show Marcus Fenix blasting around a giant hunk of meat at the Games Developers Conference, and just why getting those wibbly-wobbly meat physics right were so important.
We won’t tease you for longer than this sentence – Gears of War 3 is awesome. The campaign is epic, with action sequences that are more intense, weapons that are more powerful, enemies that are more formidable and heroes that are more relatable than ever before. The multiplayer is extremely generous, with a horde of new maps and new modes that are instant classics, as well as perfectly suitable for either competition or cooperation, experts or beginners. All aspects considered, this is a spectacular shooter.
Gears of War 3, however, is not just another shooter. This is the end to a trilogy, the final (for now) chapter in one of this console generation’s defining franchises. As such, it arrives with a lot of lofty expectations. Fans want much more than an awesome game. They want the absolute best game in the series, and a satisfying conclusion to the story they’ve invested in for half a decade. By those high yet not unreasonable standards, Gears of War 3 falls short – only by a little, but enough to affect our score and our discussion. First, though, the awesome…
Most adventure-gaming devotees love nothing more than to slip on their unauthorized commemorative Grim Fandago T-shirts, sigh longingly, and bemoan the fact that the genre is as dead and buried as that game's skeleton protagonist, Manny Calavera. And unless they've been willing to indulge in short episodic offerings from bigger studios like TellTale or iPhone re-creations of classics like Monkey Island, they'd be right. But the emergence of the new sci-fi noir adventure game Gemini Rue from indie studio Wadjet Eyes, with its substantial length, small winking references to LucasArts classics (a dialog option to sell jackets, among them), and ambitious dual-pronged narrative show there's plenty of life in the old point-and-click girl yet...
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