Gears of War 3 Beta Impressions

I’ve spent the past few days running around in the Gears of War 3 Beta and have greatly enjoyed what I’ve seen. I loved the first two Gears of War titles, but mostly played single player and co-op modes as the multiplayer never struck a cord with me. While I’m not the best shooter player, I can hang in most games, but Gears was always different. In the Beta for Gears 3, I enjoyed my multiplayer time more than any other previous play session in the series.

The Beta has four maps - Thrashball, Checkout, Trenches, and Old Town - with three game modes - Team Deathmatch, Capture the Leader and King of the Hill. While each of the modes have been previously available, little tweaks keep things feeling fresh. In the new TDM, each team has a set number of respawns; once depleted, dead enemies sit out until one team is picked off. It’s a fresh take on the classic mode instead of racking up a certain number of kills for your team. If you keep dying and use up your team’s respawns, expect to get mocked. But if you make it to the last one standing when the other team is all still alive, you better have a full ammo clip and go out guns blazing. I’ve been in both situations already in the Beta, but I keep coming back for me. The maps are all very well laid out with great interactive elements (shooting down the scoreboard in Thrashball never gets old and is much cooler doing it yourself than seeing it in a video online).

The Retro Lancer and Sawn-off Shutgun make an appearance and are immediately selectable from the weapon loadout screen both before the match and between respawns. The Retro Lancer has some power, but you need to be more precise than with the standard Lancer. I’m not a huge fan of the blade rush as opposed to the chainsaw, so I’m not sure how much I’ll use the gun. The Sawn-off Shotgun is overpowered and has a blast radius that will make for plenty of players just going cover to cover trying to shotgun blast their way through the map. Hopefully Epic tweaks its power down a bit. The One Shot makes an appearance and you better avoid that red laser when you see it across the map. It’s damn powerful. Whatever weapon you have equipped, the executions are absolutely brutal and bloody fun.

You can’t make quick-saved custom classes in the Beta, but hopefully more weapon choices and saved loadout slots are available in the final shipped game. I’d love to quickly select a class as Baird with a Hammerburst and Gnasher or roll with Dom and the Lancer and Sawn-off Shotgun between rounds. Customizing both your character and weapon are possible as you unlock various medals and ribbons for completing in-game tasks (ie. finish the match with an execution, killing a certain number of enemies with a certain weapon, etc.). You’ll get new character and weapon skins, mainly, but I have hope that more will be available in the retail game. All the unlocks in the Beta are aesthetic, but seeing someone going around as Cole Train clearly lets you know they’ve put in work.

The overall feeling of Gears of War 3‘s multiplayer seems faster. One of my big turn-offs to Gears and Gears 2 online was the slow pace of the game. While I love the heavy/weighty feeling of the characters, everything seemed to move at a snail’s pace. Whether it’s the new map layouts or the tweaked gameplay, I’m happy that the game feels a bit sped up, yet still retaining the series’ signature feel. I saw a few camera and weapon issues, but that’s to be expected as things are tuned and tweaked. I’ll be peeling myself away from Mortal Kombat and Portal 2 to make sure I get in plenty of time with this Beta before it goes away in mid May.