Gears of War 3

So I'm not what you'd call a "big gamer" (I'm neither obese, nor do I play a lot of games). I do, however, own an Xbox 360, and I was therefore eagerly awaiting Gears 3, which was released yesterday.

Now, my introduction to the Gears saga began with Horde on Gears of War 2, while visiting friends with Xboxes. This experience was sufficient to make me buy a 360 and a copy of Gears 2. Once I'd completed that, I bought Gears 1. I haven't actually *finished* Gears 1, but that is mostly due to a lack of time, rather than, say, lack of interest.

Anyway, yesterday was eagerly anticipated; I even went so far as to pre-order Gears 3  from Amazon (though they didn't manage to get it to me by the release day, which I consider to be a pretty major problem considering the concept of pre-ordering, and the concept of Amazon Prime... oh well!) Instead, I bought a copy from Sainsburys (and will sell the other copy to my housemates) and I spent much of the evening playing.

The first point I want to make is that, as I write this, I haven't finished Gears 3. In fact, I've only played through Act 1 on Normal difficulty, and played waves 1 through 33 of Horde on Normal difficulty. Then, extreme tiredness kicked in and I went to bed.

As far as gameplay is concerned, it feels much the same as Gears 2. The graphics have been polished a little, but it's basically the familiar experience; today's Penny Arcade pretty much sums it up.

I won't go into details about the storyline, but the first act has an interesting split to it, and the Horde mode has been enhanced somewhat, which makes it a little more interesting than the "wait, shoot, wait" cycle of Gears 2 Horde.

I haven't tried out the Beast mode yet, but that sounds like it should be fun; maybe I'll write more about that another day!

In all, Gears 3 delivered exactly what I expected... the third chapter in the Gears story, the familiar gameplay in familiar environments... having played the previous versions, I'm not having too much trouble playing through on Normal difficulty. I guess Hardcore and Insane are going to be more tricky; and probably even more fun.

As for achievements, the usual complement return (Waves 1-10 on Horde, Waves 1-50 on Horde, story progression in the campaign, etc.) though I haven't spotted any as ridiculously hard to achieve as Seriously 2.0 on Gears 2... yet!