Ever since lead designer Cliff Bleszinski famously posted photos of himself hobnobbing with celebrities at E3 while promoting this game on the SomethingAwful forums, I’d been predisposed to dislike Gears of War. It didn’t help that the look and feel of the game leans heavily towards testosterone-fueled machismo of the worst sort. So it came as a pleasant surprise to me when I finally got my hands on the PC version this month and found it to be a more than decent game.

The machismo is all there of course: huge guns with chainsaws for bayonets, grunts with big bulging muscles and anatomically implausible jawlines who make frequent references to kicking ass and toughing it out while the only female presence is a lieutenant who is mostly heard and not seen. The well above average dialogue however manages the difficult task of making it seem familiar rather ridiculous. Combined with the excellent duck-and-cover mechanics and satisfying shooting action, it adds up to a very playable shooter.

Probably the most striking thing when first entering the game is how sombre it looks. Not only does it seem like the only colours in the world are grey, brown and black, but almost every building is in ruins and the detritus of a broken civilization is scattered everywhere. This is probably appropriate since the background story is that it’s based on a human colony called Sera that’s been in perpetual war for the past 14 years since a horde of aliens known as the Lokust burst out from underneath the human cities where they’d apparently been living all along in huge underground caverns and drove the humans back. The good news is that despite the limited palette, the game looks gorgeous with all of the latest graphical tricks. Everything from the classical splendour of Sera’s buildings, to the leathery ugliness of the enemies you face is rendered in incredible detail. One rain-drenched battle at night is particularly impressive from a graphical point of view. You can see the rain falling from the sky, splattering on everything and running in rivulets on the ground even as sudden flashes of lightning throw the entire scene is stark contrast.

There’s nothing in the plot that you haven’t heard of before. You play Marcus Fenix and you’ve just been broken out of jail to play a key role in humanity’s last plan to defeat the Lokust for good. This is the kind of game where the plot is there just to provide some context for the gameplay instead of being the main attraction and for the most part it serves well enough. The story takes you from firefights in the streets of abandoned cities, to underground mining complexes and Lokust tunnels to abandoned houses and even, now a staple of many shooters, onto a runaway train. Along the way, you get to fight a decent assortment of Lokusts, including the garden variety weapon-wielding drones, the small and fast wretches that attack with claws and bites, the slow and tough boomers who intone “Boom!” whenever they fire their rocket launcher and the elite Theron Guards and Sentinels who can easily one-hit kill the unwary when armed with the fearsome Torque Bow.

Gameplay-wise, the most distinctive mechanic of Gears of War, and one that it shares thus far with only one other game, Rainbow Six: Vegas, is the use of cover. I first played Rainbow Six: Vegas nearly a year ago, and ever since then every other shooter that still uses a run-and-gun mechanic has seemed a little silly. If you’re not familiar with it, simply said, every solid object in the game can be used as cover. Simply tap the correct button and your character cowers behind it. From there, you can expose part of your body for short lengths of time to let off a burst of weapons fire, or blind fire your weapon with little risk of getting hit but little chance of hitting anything either. Gears of War also allows you to quickly move from cover to cover when they’re close enough and to do rolls and dives for cover as appropriate. Since your enemies use cover as well, standing in the open and shooting is suicidal so you’ll end up getting into the habit of scanning the local area for good places to find cover during every battle.

One complaint that I have is that the cover system in Rainbow Six worked better, giving you more control of where and how to pop your head out to shoot. I’ve also found aspects of the controls to be clunky at times, partly due to the game’s overloading of the spacebar to do too many different things including rolling, moving to cover, running and leaping over cover. Most of the time, it works flawlessly, but on the rare occasions when you die because you wanted to run but the game made you dive to cover instead, you’ll probably end up cursing the computer like I did. A couple of times, I also got stuck when I bumped into a piece of destructible cover and had to melee it to pieces before I could move again.

One unique mechanic that Gears of War has is a reloading mini-game which gives you a small damage bonus if you manage to time weapon reloads perfectly or simply reload faster. It’s a little distracting at first, but it does make things a bit more interesting by giving you one more thing to monitor while in combat. If you ignore it, you simply reload slower than usual. In other aspects Gears of War follows the recent trend in shooters to dispense with a health bar. When you take damage a cog appears onscreen and bleeds redder as you take more damage. Once you stop taking damage, you’ll gradually heal back to full strength again. One thing I’ve noticed is that the enemies in this game are somewhat tougher than in comparable games. Even the low-level drones take two or three bursts of gunfire to kill, so you’ll want to try to hit their heads whenever possible for extra damage and maneuver cautiously because even ace marksmanship won’t save you when you get surrounded by enemies that’ll take more than a couple of bullets to kill.

The core gameplay is pretty much flawless. The shooting action is simple, straightforward and highly satisfying. Ammunition is for the most part plentiful, though it still makes sense not to waste shots, especially using rarer weapons like the sniper rifle, the Torque bow and the rocket launcher. Unlike some other shooters, there’s relatively little downtime to admire the scenery, impressive as it sometimes is. You’ll pretty much be shooting stuff up all the time. To liven things up, there are a number of boss battles and other special sequences including driving an armoured vehicle through the city while fending off hordes of the bat-like kryll.

One very special annoyance that I have is the unbelievable lameness of the last boss battle. Granted, playing at the medium “Hardcore” difficulty, I found the overall game to be highly challenging, and decidedly harder than comparable games at normal difficulty, but for the most part the various set-piece battles and boss battles are doable with some forethought and good tactics. The final boss battle however I found to be punishingly difficult and I had to drop down to “Casual” difficulty to complete it. I found it incredibly galling that while the rest of the game trained you to maneuver around carefully and make liberal and creative use of cover, the final battle takes place on a narrow platform with almost no room for any movement. Combined with the firepower of the final boss and his special invulnerability shield, beating him comes down to nothing more than luck and retrying many, many times.

Despite this and other flaws previously mentioned, Gears of War is still one darned good game. It isn’t terribly cerebral and it probably won’t make a huge lasting impression on you, but pure action games really don’t come much better than this.