I don't plan on saying any spoilers personal, but the article does so read at your own risk!
So this d-bag from IGN decide to write an article about Gears 3 called, "Contrarian Corner: Is Gears of War 3 "Vapid?"' Just reading the title I knew this was going to be good. After reading the article I still have no idea what it's really about except some guy rambling and using big words lol. Just to prove how much more this guy is a d-bag he didn't even post a spoiler alert the first hour is was up. So here is the article below and if you don't believe me read it yourself or try to anyways lol. Link to the full article.
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains massive plot spoilers from the Gears of War 3 campaign.
In retrospect, it makes sense that the most memorable moment in Gears of War 3 is a suicide.
Two years after having killed his wife because she had some brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, Dom is overtaken with nostalgic remorse and decides to drive a truck into some large fuel tanks at full speed. This is followed by a pleasantly dissociative collage of burning metal, dead bodies and the vaguely familiar architecture of an alien planet, underscored by a sentimental cover of an 80s pop song. "The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had," the words to the original go, though this can go without being said as the camera lingers over all the ruined artifacts of life.
Gears of War 3 is the video game equivalent of a cult of death. It's most imaginative invention is the union of chainsaw and machine gun. Its pace is rooted on near constant confrontation with animalized villains, and its variety derived from the various combinations of instruments and backdrops you're given to kill them with and against.
The game's drama comes in prolonging the amount of a time a player can survive the adrenal tension before succumbing to their own death screen. Everyone will die, but you prove your worth in demonstrating how many other people you're able to kill beforehand. In this way, Dom's self-immolation is revered because of the dozens of Locust he takes with him.
Like the first two games, Gears 3 is an unpleasant experience but it's one that's difficult to walk away from. As with other practices of masochistic endurance, there's always a sense that one could have lasted a little longer, which creates an irresistible compulsion loop because the mechanism for trying again is directly beneath one's own thumb. There's so much stress in the game, every bullet strikes with a concussive squish, filling in a bloody stamp of a skull on the center of the screen.
Enemies are nightmarishly unaffected by bullets, or worse still, they stumble briefly only to recover as if nothing at all happened. Meanwhile, they somersault away behind cover while the lengthening duration of gunfire decreases your effectiveness, widening the aiming reticule into a useless circumscription of futility.
In single player, the computer intelligence guiding the Locust is mercifully slow-witted and predictable, but in multiplayer the tension between landing multiple bullets on a moving target while your accuracy degrades is torturously high. Each subsequent kill is less a victory and more of a momentary reprieve, a tic-tac of adrenaline in a maw of unbroken aggression.
Tetris and Rock Band use this same sense of tension and relief too, but Gears 3 combines the mechanic with a gruesome attitude. Its metaphor for failure is not the disappointed boos of concert-goes but the scarlet gore of a arterial blood and organ meat.
When you lose a life it's a worst-case scenario of physical defilement. Or at least it seems to be. Even with the viscera erupting, the game has a twinge of reverence about its graphic violence, there is none of the psychotic aftermath I'd imagine comes with any chainsaw party. There are no scalpings, no jewelry made from body parts, no morbid defilements post-mortem. The gore is less of a theme than an affect, an aesthetic choice designed to have a momentary impact but not meant to be dwelled on.
This creates a strange impression of piousness and restraint that is surprising to find in a game about guns, chainsaws and men who shout the word "polyp" at one another repeatedly. Why does a game with things called Gunker, Reaver, Scorcher, and Boomer need consistency? Why do its characters--who kill their wives and and wear metal shirts--need moments of reverence and reflection? Put another way, why would anyone wanting to make a game about reverence and reflection use a set of mechanics that relied on machine guns and chainsaws? These aren't contrasting textures, they're incompatible elements that make Gears 3 incessantly consumable on the one hand and insufferably vapid on the other.
There are slivers of personality hiding in the leaden whirligig. One of the game's hidden unlocks will play a sit-com laugh track every time an enemy is killed, a satisfying counter-texture that makes the violent tension seem self-consciously ridiculous. Another unlock turns the blood spatters into bursting explosions of flower petals, a teasing acknowledgement that the visual context of the game mechanics could have been a lot of other things besides guns and guts. It could have been a surreal gardening game in which a harried man with a watering hose tries to conjure flowers from every moving thing he encounters, for instance.
Meanwhile Beast Mode allows players to step into the role not primarily capable of killing. Instead players have the wonderful opportunity to control the roach-like Ticker, zooming around an arena chewing up spiky strips and barbed wire obstacles so that one's teammates can advance into protected territory. It's an exciting, but sadly limited, example of a combat system where vulnerability and weakness are foregrounded, not just force and brutality. It's dumbfounding to encounter such creative and humorous life exiled to the game's most marginal parts.
One of the prizes for finishing the game is unlocking "Insane" difficulty. It's an unremarkable mode, that only makes it harder to endure the unpleasantry of being surrounded by things that want you dead. The game doesn't embody insanity or mental dysfunction at this level, it only invokes the word for shocking impact. This habit of hyperbolically dressing up something otherwise familiar is a common sin in creative expression. In the absence of an especially meaningful thought we can make do with an amplified one.
As players we can come to admire not the expression but the depth of conviction required to make it--the audacity of dressing a pass/fail shooter in the kaleidoscopic robes of a brain turned against itself. In truth, Gears of War 3 gives us the familiar cuts of self-pity and compulsion, jamming them incongruously into the acts of men who refer to themselves as parts in one loud, suicidal, death-obsessed machine.
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