At its release, Gears of War was considered one of the greatest games to grace the new generation of consoles. With stunning visuals, an intuitive cover system, and a ground-breaking co-op mode, it was atop nearly all game of the year lists and is still widely regarded as sheer brilliance. But how does Gears hold up a couple years down the road? Now that we’ve seen what else is out there, is this still one of the best games ever?

The first thing that has to be said about Gears is that it was in no way built with single-player in mind. Even on the Casual difficulty, enemies will rip you to shreds quickly if you get caught out in the open, and your squad mates are just as useless as any other shooter. Crank the difficulty up to Hardcore or Insane and you might as well just turn off your Xbox; you won’t be making it through alive. On top of the extreme difficulty, the story is paper thin and the characters are the personifications of every tough guy, meat head stereotype there is, so you won’t get sucked in by enthralling narrative or compelling plot twists.

All that is fine though, as even though the development team won’t admit it, this game was made for co-op. Sure, they threw a single-player campaign in there to keep the purists happy, but the whole point of Gears is to grab a buddy either locally or online and go out there and kick some Locust hide. Laying down suppressing fire for a buddy as he flanks a heavily fortified enemy position is just as fun today as it was in 2006, and making it through the game with a friend by your side is one of gaming’s true accomplishments. It’s clear even now with games that focus exclusively on teamwork (Army of Two, [/i]Rainbow Six[/i]) that nearly all of them owe their ideals and mechanics to the system hatched in Gears, and none of them come even remotely close to doing it as well.

Continuing the innovation was Gears’ cover system. At the time, the idea of tapping a button and sticking to cover was still fresh and novel, which is surprising given how long we’ve been holding a gun and shooting baddies. However, Gears was one of the first to dedicate a large chunk of gameplay to finding and sticking to cover, and the system is beginning to show its age. First off, everything is handled by the A button, and I do mean everything. Tapping it brings you in and out of cover, holding it goes into the now infamous “roadie run,” and using it in conjunction with the control stick governs SWAT turns and diving rolls. Strangely, it also handles jumping down from raised platforms and hurdling over obstructions. It can be somewhat irritating and immensely counter-intuitive to force your character to press up into cover against an object just so you can vault over it and continue with your objective. Even when the game was first released many reviewers harped on these items as issues, and now as we look back and see just how many nuances you can put into a cover system, we’d be remiss if we didn’t call out Gears seminal gameplay mechanic as overly-simplified and somewhat wonky.