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Fallout 3 and Gears 2 Review Followups

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I made the mistake of reviewing both Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2 before I had finished them. I tend to play pretty slowly, and I was afraid that if I waited until I beat the games, then the reviews would be pointless. So I played both games for a few hours, and then threw up my first impressions, and in both cases, my first impression of the game was misleading.

In the case of Fallout, I said that the game was clever, and perfectly captured the feel of the original. I stand by the fact that the game is clever — at one point, you have to rescue your dad from a virtual reality he’s been trapped in — and the scope is quite ambitious. But honestly, the graphics really started bugging me.

Everything in the world, literally everything is the same dull gray-brown color. Everything is dusty and dirty and rusty and falling apart. Even when you get to the last bastions of civilization, the color scheme only shifts from dirty gray-brown to clean gunmetal-gray. Frankly, it’s depressing. I get that they’re modeling their future on the photos of Hiroshima after the bomb, with all the wrecked buildings. But this is set 200 years after the bomb! You need look no further than Chernobyl to see that even radiation-savaged land is eventually reclaimed by nature. And when you combine the never ending monochromatic scenery with the Oblivion engine’s soulless faces peering out of the uncanny valley, you end up with a game world that I really wanted to love, but couldn’t quite get into.

I didn’t realize how much this bothered me until I started playing Fable 2, with its colorful scenery and its stylized characters. I’ll talk more about this when I review Fable soon, because while the contrast between these games couldn’t be more dramatic, there’s several key points where they overlap, and in every one of them, Fable comes out on top.

And as for Gears, I said that it was good, but basically just more of the same. However, just a bit further than I had progressed when I wrote that, the game gets absolutely crazy. While the gameplay is nothing different, and there were a few points where I got frustrated, the sheer scale and insanity of the boss fights more than redeems the game. Plus, I hate to say it, but as thin as the plot normally is, they managed to drop a pretty interesting twist towards the end that has me looking forward to the next installment.

Gears of War 2: One Paragraph Review

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Gears of War 2

If you liked Gears 1, you’ll like this one. It’s more of the same, with slightly better graphics. One thing I liked is that there’s a little more color. The world is still mostly brown and gray, but as they walk through cities and forests, you get to see that the Gears world is not, in fact, monochromatic. Absurd environmental features are still present (replace “krill” with “razorhail”), and the storyline is still non-existant, but the key bits that made the first game great are all there. Excellent cover mechanic and guns that are fun to fire. That crazy power chord that plays when you clear a room of enemies. And nutty over-sized boss fights. In fact, they pretty much open the game by throwing all the biggest monsters from the last game at you to establish that they have bigger ones to play with this time around. It’s not a huge improvement over the first game, but it didn’t need to be.

Gears of War: One Paragraph Review

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gears_of_war

When I first got Gears of War, I thought there was no way it would live up to all the hype, but it would be a good way to kill time until Halo 3 came out. When I started playing, I was unimpressed. The lack of a jump button and the cover mechanic seemed unnatural. But when I found myself still playing the game several hours later, I thought, “Maybe there’s something to this.” I’ve now beat the game on Hardcore difficulty a few times, and I can safely say that the game lives up to the hype. It’s beautiful, and the gameplay is addictive. There is always a second player, which is controlled by either the computer or another human, so co-op is just as enjoyable as single-player. The way these huge guys throw themselves into cover is satisfying, to the point where using cover and rolling around is a rewarding experience, not something that gets in the way of the firefight. The plot is poorly explained, but there’s a real sense of urgency that comes through, and at the end of the day, it’s just a lot of fun.