The graphics aren’t just awesome, they are beyond awesome. As you watch cutscenes or even the in-game action, the little things are sooooo vivid. The tattoos on the arms of the soldiers in your unit, the damage on the armor from previous battles the gristle and goo from the damage an enemy takes. It’s all so clear and sharp looking. When you look at a soldier, I kid you not, you can see the tattoo on his arm, some soot and dirt, the glistening of sweat and then the striations of the muscles in his arms. It’s un-frickin believeable, this is a leap forward in graphics, people are calling it the first “true” next generation title out there.
The Locust Horde themselves, look so mean, their overly large mouths filled with these “real” looking vicious teeth. If ever there was an army of boogeymen who sprang out from under the beds of children, these are they, and they are mean and nasty. And don’t think for one minute that a race of underground-dwellers would have some sort of underdeveloped war machine. No, they are as advanced as the human race, they have modern weapons, brilliant strategies and now, the numbers.
These creatures as you can imagine, are incredibly resiliant both in mind and body. Locust shoot directly at you, forcing you to cover as three more try and run to your side in order to catch you in a crossfire. They throw grenades in order to force you out of a hiding place, they place gun turrets in critical places and then wait for you to over advance before they start in on the other gun turret that you never saw. It’s a bloody and deadly game that has you moving fast and thinking faster.
Fortunately, you do run around with other similarly intelligent (A.I.) soldiers who will engage in firefights allowing you to move off to the side to go for the easy kill. They both give orders, and take them depending on where you are in the game. If a fellow soldier goes down in the heat of battle, you have the ability to go and revive them, if you are fast enough. It’s a unique and interesting dynamic since it’s not like you go over and start administering CPR or anything, more like you run to your fallen comrade and then grab them, saying something inspiring like “Get your ass in gear!” Clearly the developers wanted Marcus to maintain his hard edged demeanor regardless of the situation.
Taking a tip from both Halo 2 and Call of Duty 3, the game has no sort of health system. No “I’m low on health, let’s find a health pack” scenario. Nope, not here, when you begin taking damage a red gear begins appearing in the center of the screen, the more damage you take, the redder the gear gets. If you take cover and avoid further damage, your character recovers fully and then you can continue to fight.
If the gear gets so red that the skull appears, well, then you’ve taken too much damage and you are dead. This is something that will happen quite frequently in GoW. Luckily, the game has a gamer-friendly save system that makes checkpoints occur regularly and levels not too terribly long. You should know that the game (single player campaign) can be beaten in about 8 or so hours. Not a super long game, but one that is worth playing through at least twice.
