I tried. I succeeded. I failed. I tried some more. It’s a good game. But damn, if isn’t vastly overrated, I don’t know what is. Is it really deserving of its heaps of praise? Is it a game that ought to have the acclaim that it does? The millions of copies; the lavishly gushy reviews; the awards; the attention; what makes Gears so much better than everything else out there?

You don’t need a microscope, or even a pair of binoculars to spot what makes Gears appealing, but those tools are equally unnecessary to locate the flaws so blatantly displayed. You only need one eye open to see that it sports some of the best visuals seen in a game to date, and even on a standard-def television it’s brilliance shines through in its clean and anti-aliased-to-frickin-hell-and-back-again awesomeness. You can argue against the enormously thick characters that could eat Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer for breakfast being overly masculine, and horrendously generic. But you’d be fighting against of the of the games main strengths. You see, it’s not the "big dudes" that makes Gears so popular. It’s the fact that these guys look so damn convincing. And act it, too.

No, you’ll be hard pressed to find problems with Epic’s creation from an "ooh, that’s purty" point of view. And honestly, if you complain about the story you’re simply missing the point. They have, no doubt, created one of the best looking games out there, minor framerate hiccups, and odd animation glitches aside. Flesh tears to pieces and chainsaws scream, and blood gets stuck on your screen. That’s a pretty good selling point right there, and more than enough for a lot of people to be more than happy to take part. There’s something underneath that ripping simulation that people used to care about. Some called it gameplay, if I remember correctly. And for Gears, it’s just all screwy.

Let’s look at an example: you’re playing online, the people are pleasant, and your team is working together…scratch that. Start over. You’ve muted the bastards. No less, there’s a dude running at you with his chainsaw revving. You’ve learned, with experience, that you should shoot him and cause him to lower his chainsaw and become stunned for a second. That should give you time enough to position a nasty headshot and end his reign of terror until the next round. You shoot him in the face. The bullets hit the wall behind him, and you get cut in half. You curse into your mic for all the world to hear, making Xbox Live a better place all around.

Ok, so maybe it’s lag, maybe it’s the faulty hit-boxes; something went wrong and caused you to die. It won’t happen next time, now you’ve learned your lesson. There’s one slight problem, however. Gears has not been built to cater for players to gain in skill over time. The only way to GET BETTER is to know the little tricks and exploits in the system. Or, the more popular route, to get damned lucky. This holds mostly true for the single-player as well, although the cover system is actually used in a mostly logical fashion, as opposed to online’s use of getting stuck on walls at the most inopportune times, and having your body explode into several large still quite manly chunks.

The shotgun is the best example of Gears complete package of inconsistency, and its struggle to keep players on equal ground. There’s the fact that most shots don’t work, but that’s no big deal, right? And there’s that host shotgun issue—where whoever is hosting has a significant advantage in dealing damage to players, mostly resulting in one shot kills from longer-than-normal distances. But again, that’s not important. Go into any online match, and simply watch people fire their shotguns. If a player holds the L trigger to line up their shots, they should be quikcly be labeled a complete and utter noob. If a player fires all shots blindly, filled with the hope that one or two bullets will hit, Gears will answer your prayers more often than not, and reward that crappy shooting with a kill, or hell, maybe two or three in succession.

I’m going to call it the shotgun-spray philosophy, because it has seemingly carried over through the rest of the game. Once the people at Epic, and the testers, agreed that this design decision was good, they simply throught the rest of the game should feel the same. Cheap, and lacking any sort of momentum. Excuse me while I go back to playing Counter Strike, a game that I currently suck at, but have the chance of gaining skill in.

The single-player "storyline" has its share of quirks as well, but that’s just it. They’re mostly quirks and can be overlooked. The co-op is the way it’s meant to be played, for example. Gears by yourself feels unfinished and rough in more than a few ways. There’s no middle difficult, or adjustment for the friendly a.i. Your computer controlled teammates are going to be just as stupid on every difficulty, and your enemies will be harder to kill as you progress. But your comrades never lose their sense of humor, at least, as you walk, and walk, and walk some more through countless unskippable scenes where one liners that were funny the first time will make you angry at the game. It’s such a beautiful game, but I’ve never gotten angrier at such simply things as not being able to skip the dialog.

I’m barely even scratching the mountain of problems with these few examples. Honestly, Gears is a very flawed game. It’s also a very satisfying and angering game, however. It has a way of teasing you, almost like it has a mind of its own. Just when you’re readying to toss the 360 control through the window (wireless, baby), it will give you a couple kills, and make you happy. But the inevidible will come. The flaws will come out of hiding, usually minutes after that moment of rightness. It will cheat on you once again, never learning its lesson. Well, I can’t take it any more, honey. I’m leaving you.