The third and final instalment of the Gears of War trilogy has landed, for half a decade Marcus Fenix, Dominic Santiago, Augustus Cole and Damon Baird have provided us with plenty of grubs to shoot, chainsaw, blow up and curb stomp. The guys at epic really pulled their fingers out for this game, overall there are 4 game modes which include: Campaign (arcade+standard), Multiplayer (TDM,wingman,KOTH,CTL and warzone), Horde 2.0 and all new Beast mode.
The game is set 18 months after the fall of Jacinto, the hollow is flooded, the lambent are loose and the CoG has gone. The opening of the game explains what happened to Marcus' father, Adam Fenix, You awake on a boat and are soon attacked by a lambent leviathan. For those of you playing solo you no longer only play as Marcus, you also play as Cole as you usually aren’t in the same place. There is new 4 player co-op many more enemies and weapons. For the majority of the game you are fighting the Lambent which can be incredibly annoying due to the fact that they always explode upon death, you also uncover many new secrets about the Locust, Lambent, the Fenix family, the CoG and Sera itself. There are 2 sets of collectibles which are random memorabilia and CoG tags, the campaign will last you around 8-10 hours which is the longest gears campaign yet and it is also the biggest and the best. Arcade campaign is the usual campaign but with scoring enabled adding a competitive nature to it and it also earns you a little more XP.
Multiplayer has been vastly improved, with the addition of social multiplayer means no more searching for matches after every game plus the ranks system has been toned down, it still has 100 ranks but the XP required has been lowered to requirements which are more easily met this time round. Game modes such as TDM and CTL are a welcome addition and a nice twist on the usual variants.
Horde has been completely redesigned so it is more like a 3rd person tower defence game, you can build barriers, turrets, decoys and the like to defend yourself from the horde, also every 10 waves there will be a boss such as a berserker or brumak. This makes the mode much more interesting, tactical and also surprisingly more difficult. Beast mode is similar to horde but you are the locust fighting the humans, you are given 1 minute to kill all humans on the map, each kill earning more time and more money to buy new characters like armoured kantus and corpser, if you can save up enough money you can even be a beserker to reign hell upon the CoG and stranded.
Gears of War has become one of the must own series on the Xbox but Gears 3 is the best yet, taking all that was good from the originals and improving, adding and of course including the new Unreal 3 Engine making the game uber good looking, the game defiantly lives up to the name of being "epic".
Gears of War 3 – 9/10
+A fitting end to a great trilogy
