Gears of War session

Today, me and my brother went down to the Bullring to try out the Gears of War game for the X-box 360. Concealed in a small box, we and like 6 other players had a multiplayer session, 4 vs 4, 1-life deathmatch.

Before this session, i've always protrayed Gears of a very standard action game but with pretty level designs and good graphics, and in some respects, even after playing the game for a good 30 minutes or so my thoguhts not changed that much. The game is how i pictured it before, tough, burly looking men fighting aliens with cool explosions, gore and nice weapons to use. Nothing special but also nothign boring, but theres something a bit weird, this game actually got my adrenaline running, playing this game was fun despite some flaws with it. Killing an alien with a chainsaw is somewhat satisfying but also kind of cheap and shallow as well. Shooting a whole clip into an alien without it dying is a bit annoying. And the whole 'if you're hurt, just move away and rest a bit' health bar is an increasingly annoying trend in games that make it unneccesarily easy.

Anyways, with the multiplayer sessions ,i managed to get top spot in 2 out 3 of them, the third session i came 2nd in overall points but still top of my team. The aiming was generally good but not really precise or highly accurate but nothing very outstanding. The movement of the player was mainly rolling about, a feature which i loved as i dodged everywhere, getting close enough to the player to launch an insta-kill chain saw attack, with this ability coupled with the not so accurate controls, i suspect a lot of kills online will be from close combat chainsawing.
Also, there seems to be some sort of slow-down/lag in the process, whether its the software itself or the networking we weren't sure but lag in a LAN session is very rare and does kinda hinder the pace of the game abit.

Overall though, im quite impressed with Gears, its very actiony, not generic in some respects but also not too special that i want to go shell out £300 for an X-box 360. Its good, and i expect good reviews from it, but hopefully the full game turns this out more than a mindless shooter fest. The game comes out this month, November 17th, and early previews says its great.