SiskoBlue said:
I never really thought much about the cover-based mechanic. Although I did like Gears of War for a couple of things;
1. Active reload, so having to press a button to reload had more of a point rather than making it automatic.
2. The Roadie run. That seemed new to me
3. I thought the pacing was good, a mix of tutorial, survival sections, boomers, that she-beast and the hand of god. That stupid UV bat light tank section and those exploding dog things.
4. Most importantly it was the first proper online co-op campaign shooter I'd ever played with a friend. All other attempts had proved too frustrating or broken.
Never understood what was going on with the Locust either. Humans were somehow on the planet, not Earth. The locust attacked on Emergence Day, for some reason. It seem suggested in Gears of War 2 that it was because they were being invaded by other Locust infected by gold oil...?!?
Actually it was an anology to how we ruin the world with oil.
The Locust lived under the planets surface, the humans were consistently digging for and overusing Imulsion on the surface of the planet.
Both humans and Locust were suffering from problems, the Imulsion turned out to be akin to a parasite
"Sera's dying, Marcus?the whole planet's infected. It's the Imulsion that's killing it. It was always the Imulsion, you see, and I can stop it."
? Adam Jonathon Fenix
Adam Jonathan Fenix struck a deal with the locust queen but could not live up to his end of the bargain, this sowed distrust between The Locust and Humanity.
"For a time, the humans of Sera knew the illusion of peace... until Emergence Day. At that moment, our people broke free from our subterranean, erupting into the domain of these ground walkers, and wiping out whole cities. We fought and killed the humans on their fine boulevards, in their homes, on their battlefields. And they fought back. In time, their valiant defense was crushed. With billions dead, humans denied their enemy control by destroying their own civilization. They launched devastating attacks on their own territory ?sacrificing their own citizens? so that we could not possess it. Such was their loathing and fear of us. Understand what a world must do to survive ?what humans must do, and what we must do. But survive we must. Now the humans' long struggle against overwhelming odds approaches the final, desperate stand."
? Queen Myrrah explaining Emergence Day
Long story short: Yahtzee's hatred for Gears of War is hogwash, it has a solid actually rather original story and it tells it well, aside from that the characters actually do have personality despite their big chunky pieces of armour and the series never strayed from showing humanity at their worst.
The main issue he has with it (that doesn't make him want to play it) seems to be gameplay, even though it has become a succesfull IP by it's own merit and standards, introduced the mainstream audiences to coverbased shooting, gamemodes like Horde and Meatshield, Reintroduced Execution type gameplay. (If you die in this match, you're dead till the next round) and a revamp of the King of the Hill mechanic with Annex.
Aside from that Gears of War enabled up to 4 players to experience the main campaign together, no seperate campaign, no "custom levels".
1 Yahtzee doesn't like the genre and that's fair but that doesn't make it a bad game
2 Due to his hatred for the genre he never got a proper whiff of the story
3 Yahtzee is similar to those 4chan fedora elitists who confuse complexity with quality, if anything Marcus Fenix was one of the most solid protagonists in recent years, it's not like he or the company pretended that he ever was more than he is, the more "in-depth" storytelling in Gears of War goes through Dominic Santiago, the comedy but later also more important plot points go through Tai,Baird and Cole.
4 Yahtzee has never mentioned the darker truths and story points that arise in gears of war (like an entire family of brothers dying by your side, The Carmines, like Kim dying, like Dom finding his wife enslaved and broken and her suicide.
If he had known he'd know stuff like this or have quipped about how it turned out it was actually the humans that provoked/drew the locust into retaliation.
5 In all honesty I don't think Yahtzee ever finished a gears of war game and he was too lazy to read the plot synposis.
