overview
Gears of War 3
Gears of War 3 is the spectacular conclusion to one of the most memorable and celebrated sagas in video games. Developed by Epic Games exclusively for Xbox 360, Gears of War 3 plunges you into a harrowing tale of hope, survival, and brotherhood.
In Gears of War 3, fight on as Marcus Fenix, the grizzled war hero and leader of Delta Squad. Eighteen months after the fall of the last human city, the war against the Locust rages on. Meanwhile, deep beneath the surface, a fearsome new threat is infecting the planet from within. With survivors scattered and civilization in ruins, time is running out for Marcus and his comrades as they fight to save the human race.Gears of War 3 will feature four-player co-op for the first time in the series. A fully controllable mech suit, called a Silverback, will be available for use in certain parts of the game, armed with a machine gun and rocket launcher. They have two operating modes, in assault mode it is controlled like a standard character, in stationary mode, they lock into position and deploy their armor, as well as cover for other Gears from their legs.
The player will once again play as Marcus Fenix, although at several points throughout the game, control will change to other characters.
There will be several new Locust enemies in the game, including the Savage Grenadier, the Savage Theron, the Digger Boomer, the Locust Siege Beast and the Kantus Knight, as well as the return of the Berserkers (both ordinary as well as Lambent). Additionally, the game introduces the new Lambent enemies, such as Drudges, Polyps, and Lambent Stalks. There will also be new weapons; the Retro Lancer (a lancer with a blade bayonet attachment that fires slower), the Digger Launcher (a gun that launches small digging creatures through the ground at high speeds that explode), the Sawed-off Shotgun, Incendiary Grenades, the One Shot (a heavy sniper rifle that, as the name suggests, kills enemies in a single shot), the Vulcan (a machine gun that requires two gears to operate, one for the gun and one for the ammo) and the butcher's cleaver.
Four new playable female characters will be introduced: Samantha Byrne, Anya Stroud, Queen Myrrah, and Bernadette Mataki, a character from the Karen Traviss novels. Other new playable characters include Jace Stratton, a battle-hardened soldier who appears in the comic series and is mentioned in the second game, and Griffin, leader of a group of human survivors called the Stranded. Hip-hop star Ice-T will voice the character of Griffin, while actress Claudia Black will be the voice of Samantha.
There will also be an enhanced progression system with players able to gain experience and level up through all modes, including the campaign. the final level is 100, as announced at the horde 2.0 G4tv interview. Also, in this interview weapon swapping, money swapping, and ammo swapping was confirmed.
MultiplayerGears of War 3 will include a new mode called Beast mode. Similar to Horde Mode in Gears of War 2, the player instead attacks COG members as the Locust creatures (starting with weaker creatures such as wretches and tickers). Tokens are earned for killing enemies, allowing the player to upgrade their character to a stronger class of Locust such as the berserker and boomers.
Horde Mode is also featured in the third installment, dubbed "Horde 2.0". Instead of previously being a simple "find a spot and hold out" game as in Gears 2, Horde 2.0 plans to be far more strategic. Players will now choose an area as their "Command Post" and earn cash from kills which can be used to build defenses around it, such as wire and laser fences, automatic and manual turrets, the silverback mech, and exploding decoys. Every tenth wave will now feature boss monsters from the campaign, including Brumaks, berserkers, Lambent Berserkers, and more.
Epic has announced that the game will run on dedicated servers due to fans complaining of several issues that hampered the multiplayer in Gears of War 2. Variants of the original multiplayer modes will appear in Gears of War 3. In Team Deathmatch, a similar game type to Warzone, every team has a total of 20 lives per round, and when all the lives run out the match turns into a mixture of Warzone and Execution rules. Capture the Leader is a combination of Guardian and Submission, where the leader will have to be captured and held for 30 seconds. However, the leader will still be able to struggle and knock his captor around, which causes minor damage and can turn a match around. Also, there is King of the Hill, which is very similar Annex from the two previous Gears of War games. Additionally, players can earn awards based on their performance and unlock several different character variants. New executions, weapon skins, and mutators (customizable options for private matches), can also be unlocked.[citation needed]
Nine months ago, Point Man and his F.E.A.R. squad were tapped to stop a telepathically gifted cannibal who had begun a murderous rampage. Point Man learned the target was his brother, Paxton Fettel, working alongside their tortured and psychically powerful mother, Alma Wade. Despite this revelation, Point Man followed orders to destroy them and subsequently ravaged the surrounding city and most of his F.E.A.R. team. Now, it is clear that Alma’s psychic influence survived— and worse, she is about to birth something that could destroy the world. Fettel has returned from death with an unclear agenda, refusing to leave Point Man's side and asking for help to reach Alma. The remaining F.E.A.R. squad is still trying to complete their mission. With his chain of command broken and Point Man calling his own shots, where will his allegiance lie?
The F.E.A.R. series has always relied on two major factors as selling points: excellent enemy A.I. and plenty of "gotcha" scare moments. Neither of those show up much in F.E.A.R. 3. Instead, this F.E.A.R. is retooled to allow for cooperative gameplay across the full single-player campaign, and it sure looks pretty -- but it just isn't much for the scares anymore.
And hey, that's OK. I mean, it's a little weird for a game literally titled F.E.A.R. to not be that scary, but whatever -- F.E.A.R. 3 is still a pretty darn enjoyable first-person shooter, especially if you get someone to play with you (or if you delve into one of its rather innovative multiplayer modes). The campaign, though, follows all the standard FPS tropes: You start out escaping from a highly fortified insane asylum, and move on to a blighted cityscape in which you fight all sorts of psychic and physical phenomena. You can play as either the series' usual protagonist (the gun-totin', bullet-time-usin' "Point Man") or his brother (Paxton Fettel, an insane and very powerful psychic). And, if you've got a friend, you can co-op through the entire campaign. The Point Man is a very direct and traditional guns-'n'-grenades-style guy, while Fettel is mostly spectral, and aids the Point Man by psychokinetically throwing objects at enemies, teleporting, and even possessing the baddies' bodies.Aside from these few relatively minor negatives, F.E.A.R. 3 is a very solid shooter that covers a lot of the right bases -- I just wish the developers had put as much imagination and creativity into the single-player campaign as they did into coming up with new multiplayer modes. And, you know, actually made it a bit more scary
And hey, that's OK. I mean, it's a little weird for a game literally titled F.E.A.R. to not be that scary, but whatever -- F.E.A.R. 3 is still a pretty darn enjoyable first-person shooter, especially if you get someone to play with you (or if you delve into one of its rather innovative multiplayer modes). The campaign, though, follows all the standard FPS tropes: You start out escaping from a highly fortified insane asylum, and move on to a blighted cityscape in which you fight all sorts of psychic and physical phenomena. You can play as either the series' usual protagonist (the gun-totin', bullet-time-usin' "Point Man") or his brother (Paxton Fettel, an insane and very powerful psychic). And, if you've got a friend, you can co-op through the entire campaign. The Point Man is a very direct and traditional guns-'n'-grenades-style guy, while Fettel is mostly spectral, and aids the Point Man by psychokinetically throwing objects at enemies, teleporting, and even possessing the baddies' bodies.Aside from these few relatively minor negatives, F.E.A.R. 3 is a very solid shooter that covers a lot of the right bases -- I just wish the developers had put as much imagination and creativity into the single-player campaign as they did into coming up with new multiplayer modes. And, you know, actually made it a bit more scary
The story continues where F.E.A.R. 2 left off, which is to say that it's so overwrought with angst-cum-horror tropes that it might as well be a Nirvana video directed by Wes Craven or something. It's not good, is what I'm saying, kids. Anyway, you spend most of your time fighting F.E.A.R.'s trademark A.I. soldiers who haven't had a particularly large A.I. upgrade since the original game. They still provide a decent challenge, but with F.E.A.R. 3's new, ubiquitous cover, gunfights become pretty formulaic: find a piece of cover, get behind it, pop up and bust some heads, get a grenade thrown at you, run to another piece of cover, boom, repeat. Gee, scary.
Where F.E.A.R. 3 excels is in its multiplayer, both via the aforementioned co-op single-player campaign (it's much better when you have a buddy with you to help tackle enemies and challenges) and the dedicated multiplayer modes. The developers certainly did a bang-up job of keeping things interesting. It's unfortunate, though obviously necessary, that the co-op mode doesn't feature any sections that you must cooperate through, as with Portal 2's separate (and incidentally awesome) two-player mode, but that's not a huge deal. F.E.A.R. 3's dedicated multiplayer modes, though, have some really nifty ideas built in. The first mode (called "F***ing Run") sees four players fighting through waves of enemies while a wall of psychic energy (which instantly kills whoever it touches) constantly pushes them onward. It's also got a "zombie" mode, where you and your team hole up and try to survive waves of zombies, the hook being that the level size continuously shrinks after each wave -- via an encroaching fog effect -- making it harder to run-and-gun. Finally, a three-on-one mode called Soul Survivor casts one player as a ghost who has to possess the level's A.I. enemies and kill the other players to win, while the others have to take out said enemies. Whichever mode you choose, it's pretty darn fun; the only gripe being that (certainly in the PC version, anyway) it's awfully hard to find other players to saddle up with.
Where F.E.A.R. 3 excels is in its multiplayer, both via the aforementioned co-op single-player campaign (it's much better when you have a buddy with you to help tackle enemies and challenges) and the dedicated multiplayer modes. The developers certainly did a bang-up job of keeping things interesting. It's unfortunate, though obviously necessary, that the co-op mode doesn't feature any sections that you must cooperate through, as with Portal 2's separate (and incidentally awesome) two-player mode, but that's not a huge deal. F.E.A.R. 3's dedicated multiplayer modes, though, have some really nifty ideas built in. The first mode (called "F***ing Run") sees four players fighting through waves of enemies while a wall of psychic energy (which instantly kills whoever it touches) constantly pushes them onward. It's also got a "zombie" mode, where you and your team hole up and try to survive waves of zombies, the hook being that the level size continuously shrinks after each wave -- via an encroaching fog effect -- making it harder to run-and-gun. Finally, a three-on-one mode called Soul Survivor casts one player as a ghost who has to possess the level's A.I. enemies and kill the other players to win, while the others have to take out said enemies. Whichever mode you choose, it's pretty darn fun; the only gripe being that (certainly in the PC version, anyway) it's awfully hard to find other players to saddle up with.
Aside from these few relatively minor negatives, F.E.A.R. 3 is a very solid shooter that covers a lot of the right bases -- I just wish the developers had put as much imagination and creativity into the single-player campaign as they did into coming up with new multiplayer modes. And, you know, actually made it a bit more scary.
