Customer Reviews

Gears of War

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I realize Gears of War is the darling of the gaming industry, and there's some great reasons why the X-Box version of Gears of War deserves that acclaim. For the PC, however, the customer truly gets the shaft. Most of the problems with Gears of War for the PC have been a complete showstopper for many, many users out there. It amazes me that here we are, years later, and still this game is plagued with problems.

What problems?

1) Installation may take 2 hours or more. Something in the system (signs point to DRM) throttles back installation of the product. I have no idea why it does this, but I've witnessed it on more than one machine.

2) The game will not be able to launch without patching. It will accuse you of having tampered with the code and tell you to re-install the game. Don't bother reinstalling, because that won't change anything. Instead, you have to patch the game. There was a server certificate issue that Epic/Microsoft fixed after it broke a lot of users' installations. The workaround involved moving your PC's calendar to a date/time before the problem (which, by the way, can cause other bad things to happen with other programs). I ended up rolling my clock back, patching, then rolling forward and rebooting to properly get the job done.

3) And speaking of patches...the patcher will often crash. Thankfully, it finishes the job before dropping dead; the last patch crash I witnessed appears to be the patcher attempting to launch the game for you.

4) The Windows Live account creates problems of its own. First it needs to be updated in-game: having the latest version of Games for Windows Live on your machine will not do because Gears of War cannot figure that out; it has its own installation. Second, you cannot log into Games for Windows Live outside of Gears of War and expect Gears of War to run; it won't understand this and it will prevent you from accessing content without explaining why. Leave the game, log out of Games for Windows Live, close Games for Windows Live, and re-launch the game. Third, other Games for Windows Live titles that can't detect a separate install of Games for Windows Live--like Halo 2--really don't like it when you bounce from one Games for Windows Live game to another. You should probably know that after you agree to letting the game update Games for Windows Live, it will then tell you that it may decide to restart your computer. I wish I could know that ahead of time, before I agree to a reboot I can't control.

Why does Games for Windows Live matter? For the same reason that I have now played Gears of War two-thirds of the way through, about 8 times: your saved games are dependent on Games for Windows Live. Your saved games will randomly disappear, or become corrupted and you have to start the game over. You definitely cannot access your saved games if you haven't logged into Games for Windows Live, and you may also find that your saved games won't transfer from one machine to another: I've had a message that my saved games do not exist "on this machine's hard drive". If you're buying Gears of War for its Multiplayer capability, you should know that you will not be able to access the full benefits of Multiplayer without a paid Live subscription: you will otherwise get limited features and no achievements.

Graphically, Gears of War offers an extremely well-rendered experience...provided you have some hefty hardware for it. I run the game on a dual-core AMD machine with 4GB of RAM and dual 8800GTS cards in SLI, and I still need to throttle the settings back to medium/low for everything (and I still have tearing problems and framerate drops with V-Sync enabled). The concept of the game is relatively simple, and it forces you to change your thinking from "run-and-gun" to "duck-and-cover": everything you do requires you to hide behind cover, move to other cover, and blast the living hell out of anything that gets in your way. Blood fountains, bullets fly by the thousands, and the enemies die splattingly. There are decision paths along the way that provide slightly different experiences, depending which direction you choose. There is some small amount of strategy: close the hole in the ground, lure the monster out into the open, etc. Everything is tied together into a larger story that is told through cinematics. Sadly, most of these gorgeous cinematics contain little dialog or plot development beyond military grunts sniping at each other, and hints that no one else really likes your character.

If you want to take a chance that you'll be one of the lucky few who have a minimum of problems, Gears of War for the PC may offer you the same experience enjoyed by the X-Box crowd. I still wouldn't recommend paying full price for the PC version, if only because of the many headaches you'll most likely be in for.

Im wondering how these companies can justify charging 60 dollars for Gears of War PC when it was only 50 dollars new to begin with.

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All in all, don't pay 60 for a game that was never 60 to start with.

Gears of war for xbox 360 was overall a good game. The campaign was great and lots of fun and the co-op was even better. My only complaints were the online gameplay was full of problems which made it virturally un-playable. (basically unless you were the host of the game you didnt stand a chance). This PC version is genuinely awefull. For starters I wanted to load my current LIVE account into the game but it simply does not work. First the game prompts you to enter your CD key. This process crashed the game twice before it went through. Then the game prompts you to download an update. This update crashes the game almost every time and it took me about 6 attempts to get it to work. Then the game needs to download your LIVE profile. This process fails attempt after attempt and if you are lucky and have lots of time on your hands you can get it to work. These problems are not isolated to just the one computer. I have tried it on several different systems both running Vista and XP and they all have similar crashing/problems loading user accounts. Once you get over the user account problems the game itself is good and mostly problems free but that is only IF you manage to get there. I would only recommend this to people desperate to play this game and have absolutely no access to an xbox 360. You should play co-op on a friends system and just stay away from this PC version. If you own an xbox 360, don't even think about this game.

Hello,I've tried to get this software to run and only get about 50seconds of play each time. The games runs then crashes. I've tried every thing and still the game crashes. If I find the solution I'll post it. I've been informed that the KAV interferes with the Gears of war. I'll look in to it.UPDATE I did find the patch and all is well. Best of luck to you...