Months prior to release, many dubbed Gears of War as Halo for the Xbox 360, the killer app for the holiday season. Cliff Bleszinski’s labor of love reached an unprecedented level of hype. From specials on MTV to Bleszinski himself kicking off Microsoft’s E3 press conference with a demo of the game, you could not avoid Gears and its inevitable release a.k.a. "Emergence Day."

   So how can destruction be so beautiful? You will be asking yourself that as you play through Epic’s insanely over-hyped third-person shooter. But as you take on the role of Marcus Fenix, a former soldier who escapes from prison, and battle your way through planet Sera and the hordes of locust inhabiting it, you will soon realize the game achieves the near impossible: It lives up to the hype.

   The game begins with fellow-solider Dom busting Fenix out of prison, followed with a short tutorial. Fenix and Dom, members of Delta Squad, must find Alpha Squad because they posses something necessary for winning the war against the locust. The story’s about as shallow as a Hollywood action flick: It contains good guys, bad guys; and they fight! However, every other aspect of the game runs so beautifully – especially graphically – that you will soon forget about the story’s shortcomings.

   Throughout the campaign, your mission remains simple: kill and hide. Attempting to just run through the game with guns blazing without taking cover will result in a quick death. Much of the game requires the player to take cover behind destroyed cars, concrete walls, fountains, etc. A blood-red skull begins to appear on the center of the screen as you take damage. Once the skull fully forms, you die – the harder the difficulty setting you choose, the quicker this happens. The difficulty levels include "casual," "hardcore" and "insane."

   The game’s campaign spreads out over five different acts, and an achievement can be attained for beating each one on each of the three difficulties. And fortunately, if you beat an act on "hardcore", you also get the "casual" achievement, and if you beat an act on "insane," you will get the "hardcore" and "casual" achievement if not already attained. Other single-player achievements include finding a certain amount of tags from fallen soldiers and reloading your weapon accurately. A meter (think golf games) indicates when you should press the reload button, which in-turn determines how fast your weapon reloads.

   In many ways, weapons define a shooter, and Gears arguably contains the most horrific weapon to date in the Lancer Assault Rifle. At first, it seems like nothing more than your typical automatic weapon with average accuracy, but after closer inspection, you will notice it also includes a chainsaw – yes, a chainsaw. This can be used as a melee weapon to cut your opponents completely in half. However, getting close enough to a locust to use it will take some skill, which ultimately makes the gruesomeness all the more satisfying. 

   The controls in Gears stay true to the typical layout of a shooter -- with a few twists thrown in to innovate (and complicate). The right trigger shoots, left trigger aims, the B button is a melee attack – standard stuff. The use of the right bumper to reload seems convenient and should probably be standardized in the future. However, things do get tricky: For instance, the A button does way too much. According to the manual, A can be used to evade, get into and out of cover, mantle (climb), cover slip, make swat turn – and you press and hold it to run. As you can imagine, the multi-functioning of the A button can be problematic. For example, sometimes when you want to run, you will be sucked up next to a wall and vica versa. This will be a bigger problem for some than others, depending on how efficiently you can manipulate the game’s controls.

Photo courtesy of XboxSolution.com

   Gears features probably the best two-player co-op experience of all time. Co-op can be played via split screen, system link and, of course, over Xbox Live. When playing co-op over Xbox Live with a friend, you cannot help but come to the realization of this being a modern-day Contra. As much fun as taking on the locust with a CPU-controlled partner can be, once you play co-op with another human, it becomes evident that Epic designed the game to be a co-op experience. Nothing quite compares to working together only to emerge from a huge firefight or boss battle victorious.

   Of course, in addition to co-op, Gears features multiplayer versus action in two different flavors: team deathmatch and last-man-standing. "Warzone," the meat and potatoes of the multiplayer, consists of straight-up four-on-four deatmatch. Unfortunately, all multilayer modes limit you to eight players, which pales in comparison to the multiplayer modes of other shooters such as Halo 2 and Call of Duty 3. The multiplayer here still satisfies, but it could potentially be so much more.

   Gears, a major graphical achievement, exceeds everything before it because of the obsessive attention given to the smallest of details. The game boasts the most realistic blood and rain effects of any game to date. It must be seen to be believed. As not only the most beautiful Xbox 360 game to date, but just the most beautiful game ever, you can only understand the amazing aesthetics of this game by playing it. Everything from the gorgeous, destruction-laden environments to the thick, macho character models help make this an ultra-realistic, immersive visual experience. Everything practically glows in a way that makes the whole experience surreal.

   The sound in Gears achieves the same cinematic detail as the graphics. The music sounds better than most of what you hear in movies. The dialogue sounds a bit campy, but not necessarily out of place. After all, the game stars grunts, not rocket scientists. The weapons sound authentic, or how you would imagine they would sound – nothing generic here. The loud effect you hear once you kill all the locust in an area will be a sound everyone grows to love; basically, because it means you survived.

   It will take most players less than a mere seven hours to play through the game's 30 chapters spread out over five acts, but it's such illicit fun that you will probably want to play back through with a friend or on a harder difficulty level. Once you finish that, you can immerse yourself in the fun, albeit limited, multiplayer portion of the game. With 10 multiplayer maps to start out with and probably more from Epic on the way -- considering their long history of supporting their games -- people will be playing Gears for quite while, much like they did Halo 2.

   Gears does for the third-person shooter genre what Halo did for the first-person shooter genre, redefining it in every way by raising the bar of how console games look and play. Though the game misses perfection by a few marks -- it does get close. Tweak the controls a bit and make the multiplayer more in-depth, and the game would be a 10.

Rating: 9.4/10

Article originally appeared at XboxSolution.com