Xbox 360 owners might well be forgiven for a wry look and tapping foot after an array of next-generation false dawns. From the undoubtedly sleek yet obviously launchday distracted Gotham 3 through to more recent outings such as Saints Row, which took away in structural innovation what it gave in incrementally improved game world depth, it’s fair to say that Microsoft’s whirring white box was yet to host a title that didn’t add a few flakes of ear wax to an otherwise perfect recipe. However, such dark days have ended with the arrival of Epic’s Gears Of War, a title totally unashamed to be a videogame, whose ambitions stretch no further than removing all possible barriers between players and graphic, involving, accessible violence. And boy, does it succeed.

Though the cynical might term the game an over-the-shoulder shooter, it’s not without one or two influences from elsewhere in the spectrum. Most immediately apparent among these is EA’s homage to all things discharged and smoking – Black, with which Gears shares a quite unbelievable level of visceral intensity, as well as level design crafted to the inch to ensure nobody escapes battle unhurt. GRAW too, reaches similar levels of bowelemptying pre-firefight tension, only here your accompanying squad tails along largely to provide an excuse for some co-operative action later on. In reality, the game sports a style all of its own; the fast-paced action is concerned just as much with how you dance between the rotting remnants of a neo-gothic metropolis as whether you can centre the crosshair once you reach your destination. It’s a combination that instantly turns anyone taking control into the world’s greatest action hero, and who exactly does that not appeal to?

Whilst critical knives have been sharpened in response to the rather transparently modular nature of the level design – each fork in the road providing one route packed with ammunition stocks and another to continue along the single defined path – exploration isn’t exactly the main event here. Besides, over-egging open-world elements in a title such as this would have had such a chronic effect on intangibles such as pacing and atmospheric tension as to make it not worth considering – this is certainly more carefully focused exhilaration than claustrophobic frustration. What’s more, in-game chapters dovetail into each other masterfully, often with little more fanfare than a revised title appearing on screen, and certainly without the need to pause for breath.

Building up the sense of an organic world surrounding you further is the fact there’s just three instances in which your men are crudely scooped from the scarred land and delivered to fresh surroundings. This includes the desperate night-time drive across a fractured highway, fending off the deadly nocturnal Kryll using light as your only weapon – a sequence you’re in full control of. Every inch of the way, you’re convinced that what you see before you is more than just a bunch of lifeless triangles, comprising but a small part of a pre-existing, highly changeable war zone in which only you can bring about salvation.

Its ability to immerse isn’t where the amazement ends, though. Almost every step you take will form part of some breath of fresh air innovation, destined for incorporation into future third and first-person also-rans. At times, you can quite literally see videogame clichés eroding before your very eyes. For starters comes the fast-becoming-astandard almost total lack of an HUD. Weaponry menus and the like pop up as and when they’re needed, whilst damage to your person is indicated by a splattering of blood across the screen and directly over your aiming reticule, your health recharging should you find a suitable hiding spot. The effect this has on the experience being believable as a chaotic sequence of skirmishes is obvious. Another on-the-surface simple refinement comes through the control system, which eschews separate commands in favour of mapping most of the core mechanics onto a single button. At a stroke, any potential avenue for confusion is then closed, as your rolling dives between cars and chancy headdown sprints through a hail of bullets require no digit realignment for the final kill. Even your swift evade is no more complex than a double-tap of the exact same button.

Of course, all this welcome streamlining leaves room for further refinements, including the assignment of each of your four storable weapons to a direction on the D-pad for ease of access (weapons that, incidentally, are slotted onto impossibly gruff hero Marcus Fenix’s back while not in use). More useful still, however, is an ability to focus the camera at the tap of a button on pre-scripted items requiring urgent attention, such as puzzle hints and the ‘emergence holes’ from which your Locust foes emerge. Such amendments may seem insignificant by themselves, but are symptomatic of the attention to detail Epic has shown in trying to cater for every possible battlefield need. The epiphanies don’t end there, either, with the much-trumpeted active reload system proving a multiplayer blast alongside a chasing camera angle that will become one of the 360’s visual ‘wow’ moments.

The arsenal available for our protagonist to tear around fictional planet Sera with isn’t particularly wideranging, but like every other aspect of the game it has been finely honed to promote balanced medium to closerange combat. Past the standard assault rifle, which itself packs quite a punch, lie one or two more amusing instruments of destruction. The Torque Bow, for instance, operates much like a regular crossbow, only the poor unfortunate tagged won’t just have being pierced through the torso to worry about, but an explosive charge attached to the head of its arrows – if fired with care, of course.

Similarly excellent are the alternative close-range attacks that are attached to each weapon, which can reach unsurpassed heights of brutality. We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve breathed a sigh of relief at clearing a room of the horrific horde within before feeling that familiar chill at the guttural screams accompanying a rifle chainsaw kill from an AI-controlled squad member. Not to mention the aqueous sound effects bound to such action, as soggy body parts bounce off the turf. Wholly unpleasant stuff, and therefore excellent.

The environments also play a large part in keeping proceedings tactically gung-ho. Simply put, cover has been so intelligently placed around each of the pitched battlefields that it’s pretty much impossible to find guaranteed safety anywhere (and not due to the sniper rifle, either). Smart AI routines will see your opponents attempt flanking manoeuvres left and right if you’re so insolent as to camp behind a crevice, blind firing like a big yellow belly. Later on, hurried evasion techniques will be needed as yet smarter enemies take it upon themselves to charge under friendly cover, leaping right over the barrier you’re stationed behind to flush you out.

There’s a definite sense of comfortable progression to your opponents’ reactions, which is marked by the passing of chapters as well as difficulty levels. After presenting you with slow (though not wholly meerkat-like) grunts for the entire opening chapter, there’s no obnoxious abrupt shift to a situation in which you’re knee-deep in the enemy without respite or faced with irresistible new variants. Instead, the game first gives those selfsame grunts a carefully orchestrated territorial advantage, such as during a memorable (and multiplayer-enabled) assault on the base of a once grandiose open-air stairwell littered with crumbling brickwork, right-angled walkways and haunting monuments. Such moments – of which there are quite a few – force you to make a tactical assessment of every combat arena before you even consider pulling the trigger. As a matter of fact, after playing Gears right through to its atmospheric and (relatively speaking) painfully difficult conclusion, we had only one AI fault to report, and that came when a single errant foe became lodged behind a suitably chunky carcass. A quick blast of the shotgun soon sorted that out, mind.

Much has been made of Gears Of War’s multiplayer capabilities, especially its co-operative campaign mode, which takes advantage of a handful of five to ten minute forks spread throughout the game, allowing teams to part ways in eliminating some otherwise troublesome threat. Even though gunning alone doesn’t provide all that much variety, when more local players hunch around the action via a wonderfully quaint split-screen mode, it’s difficult to see how it could ever become tired. This is, however, affected by the game’s only real downside – the fact that its slick brand of cinematic combat will skip to credits after around six to eight hours, although the lifespan side of this problem can be remedied by upping the difficulty level from ‘humiliatingly easy’.

Aside from this one flaw, though, Gears Of War is an extremely slick, polished piece of work, capable of converting the most entrenched hippy and – most importantly – genuinely difficult to pick fault with.

Dave Shaw