Epic, who make Unreal Tournament, have ported their Gears of War game from the consoles to the PC this year, and I think it is superb. Like most other games it only runs in Windows, and it has a knack of losing my progress, but it looks great and handles fairly well. It is a cover-oriented shooter, which means that in casual mode it’s a good deal less frenetic than UT. The normal flow is broken up with different gameplay from time to time, like the accursed Berserker scenes, which can get a bit intense.
My weapon of choice is the Lancer, a machine-gun with a chainsaw bayonet, followed by the Longshot sniper rifle, then a revolver that can replace the default pistol.
In additional to losing my progress, which may be fixed by a recent patch, the game has a couple of other annoyances. It requires the DVD to be in the drive to play, and since it’s a DVD that’s pretty inconvenient to copy to an image for use with DaemonTools. It also seems to require a Windows Live login to track progress properly, even playing the campaign off-line. That the DVD wasn’t smashed to bits after it lost my progress in act 4 speaks to the game’s attractions outweighing its annoyances.
