Product Reviews

Good things come to those who wait, but PC users who've been holding their breath for Epic Games' much-lauded Xbox360 title, Gears of War, are probably looking a bit blue in the face. Despite being one of the 360's launch titles back in November 2006, Gears has had a long and rocky road to the PC. So has it been worth waiting for?

The action takes place on the planet of Sera, which, wracked by years of human conflict, finds itself facing a less familiar foe: the Locust Horde. Bursting forth from beneath the cities, the vicious Locust soon force mankind to retreat to the Jacinto Plateau. This is where you come in.

As hard-nut soldier Marcus Fenix, you're liberated from an unjust prison term and conscripted back into active duty to swell the rapidly diminishing troop numbers and, yup, fill the Locust Horde full of lead at every opportunity. But where most shoot-'em-ups rely on the mouse-manipulating reflexes of a cat, Gears has a more tactical feel. You need to work as a team with your computer-controlled comrades, using cover and flanking manoeuvres to beat increasingly ugly Locust. That might sound tricky, but the controls are gloriously easy to get to

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grips with. Double-click towards some cover and Fenix will throw himself behind it.

Since Gears of War eschews the first-person, staring-down-the-barrel viewpoint in favour of a third-person camera that peers over Fenix's shoulder, you can keep an eye on the enemy while in relative safety. You can then use the left mouse button to 'blind fire', or, with the right button, bring up a crosshair to pick off enemies precisely. Diving from one piece of cover to the next is a simple case of bashing the space bar at the appropriate time, and it's not long before you find yourself gracefully spinning from wall to wall, rock to burnt-out car, picking off Locust as you go.

The storyline is more comic book than classic screenplay, but the slick presentation drags you into the action. Banter between team-mates adds to the atmosphere and keeps simpler levels from getting dull. The gravelly-voiced Fenix's insistence on congratulating himself after every kill makes him an entertaining, if clichéd, Rambo-esque good guy. As for the Locust, while the average grunt isn't too scary, some of the bigger family members, such as the Berserker and the giant Brumak, are downright fearsome.

We couldn't quite shake the feeling that Gears is better suited to an Xbox gamepad and a sofa than a mouse, keyboard and desk, but the developers, People Can Fly, have done a good job of porting it to the PC. The only fly in the ointment is Microsoft's Live for Windows service, which you sign into to save your progress. Although it didn't cause any problems while we were online, it crashed our copy of the game a few times when we weren't, leaving us to redo the odd tricky section. Fortunately, we were far too busy blowing the Locust Horde into tiny little pieces to care.