The first time around, I talked a bit about Gears' level structure, its cinematics, and main characters. Now a bit more about some of its unique strengths and weaknesses, compared to Halo, including NPCs and weapons.

I Can't Do It Without My Buddy, Superfly Dominic Santiago
How Gears handles NPCs is it's greatest strength and its biggest weakness, at turns. The general mechanic, in which downed members of your squad don't die, but are disabled until you revive them, works marvelously from a gameplay perspective, even if it does strain credulity. While fallen Locust tempt you into close quarters to deliver the ammunition-conserving curbstomp melee attack, your enemy will remain oblivious to your pleading comrades, unwilling or unable to deliver the killing blow. As a player you can either choose to risk exposing yourself to fire in order to help them, and thus gain yourself some more support in the battle, or simply take out all the enemies yourself; all injured NPCs are restored to health at the end of each battle. If you can get past how "unrealistic" this feels, it works marvelously. Because you spend the entire game fighting with this same group of soldiers, they function as real characters. When they beg for help (even sometimes rib you sarcastically for failing to offer it) you can't help but react, even if you have every intention of leaving them to suffer until you've finished killing everything yourself.

That's a stark contrast to Halo 2, where you are either accompanied by invincible story characters who are never in any peril at all, like Half-Jaw and Sergeant Johnson, or a passel of replaceable and interchangeable marines. The mechanic that allows the Locust to disable NPCs, thus removing them as a factor in a battle, while not eliminating them as characters from the game, is an elegant solution.

Another point in Gears' favor is the ability (gained after Lt. Kim's death at the end of Act One) to give your squad simple orders: attack, cease fire/take cover, and regroup. In theory, it's simple to use and understand, and in some situations it works quite well. In others, it fails miserably and becomes more trouble than it's worth.

The attack command is perhaps the most reliable, but perhaps also the most useless. NPCs seem to always return fire if fired upon, and attacking enemies they can see is their default action. As such, it's only real use is in cancelling a previous order to cease fire.

When you give the cease fire order, Fenix usually yells to take cover, but the NPCs are not always intelligent about the cover they take. They'll often take cover behind an obstacle that shields them from a distant enemy while leaving themselves open to being flanked, and once attacked they seem to go into attack mode without returning to taking cover. Getting the NPCs to stay behind you so that you can control how the battle proceeds is extremely difficult, almost as difficult as it is in Halo when you have no ability to issue orders at all.

Often the only way to handle this is to hang back yourself and issue the regroup order, but this also doesn't work a lot of the time. The safest point may be around the corner from a battle area, and NPCs might refuse to enter it. Conversely, sometimes NPCs have trouble following you into a battle area. Twice now in Act Four I've had to do all the battles between the garden and the outside of the Fenix estate mostly solo because Dom somehow gets lost. Once he seemed intent on hanging back in the L-shaped street corner before that area and only replied "I can't get there" when issued the regroup command. Another time, he managed to get himself lodged behind an open door in a bathroom I investigated to find some ammunition (and a grisly toilet stall scene).

In some cases, where you might want to override the scripted behavior with orders, you can't. When approaching the pumping station at the end of Act Three, during an interactive sequence you order two soldiers to flank right while you and Dom go left. While the pretense is that one of the other two soldiers is carrying an important device, what you really need at this juncture is to be able to concentrate fire. You're facing new enemies with a new, one-shot-kill weapon. No matter what you do, until the battle is nearly over you won't be able to get those other two soldiers to support you. They'll refuse orders to regroup, and you won't be able to see the results of orders to attack or take cover. You can follow them yourself, but the Dom is alone on the left side; there's also less cover on the approach to the right side (which makes it even more senseless that you've sent the soldier carrying the important device to that side). The best tactic in this section is to remain outside the station, under cover, but the NPCs will all rush onto the station after the first wave of enemies is dead. The next wave won't spawn until you approach the station yourself; but there's no way to get your NPCs off the station before that happens. If you're lucky, each of the three torque bow-wielding Theron Guards in that second wave will individually come down off the station to attack you and you can dispatch them. If you wander up the ramp you'll likely be ambushed yourself, and if two come down you'd better take cover, as there's really no fast way of taking them down.

I Can Shoot For Miles
A lot of articles about games boil down to weapons, and normally I wouldn't bother, but there are a few observations worth making about Gears' arsenal and how it compares to Halo's. On the surface, there are a lot of similarities. Gears lets you carry three weapons plus grenades, just like Halo 2, except that none of them dual-wield. One of those weapons must be a sidearm; the other two can be a selection of medium and long range weapons, including machine guns, the shotgun, the sniper rifle, the rocket launcher, the Hammer of Dawn, and finally the torque bow. Everything is pretty standard except for the hammer, the torque bow and the Lancer, which is something between a battle rifle and an SMG in terms of utility, and has a chainsaw bayonet for close quarters combat. The chainsaw animation is bloody and satisfying, but takes an immeasurably long time to dispatch even the weakest enemies, such as Gears' nimble, gunless Grunts, called Wretches.

The torque bow is a nice spin on a long-range, single-shot kill weapon. It differs far more from the standard Longshot sniper than does, say, the Covenant Beam Rifle, and the differences factor in to how the weapon balances not just in multiplayer but also in the single player campaign. Players of Halo 2 on legendary all have sniper jackal stories. These super-accurate avians made memorizing level structures and enemy spawns de rigeur for approaching certain areas. They rarely missed, and a single shot to any body part meant instant death. Both of Halo's main sniping weapons have contrail effects that lead back to the shooter to reveal his position. On legendary, though, that meant that the usual way to discover where a jackal sniper is shooting from is to get killed by him and then start over. The only other downsides to the sniping weapons are the usual ones: low ammo capacity, low rate of fire.

The torque bow works differently. It can kill many enemies with a single shot, even if it is not a headshot. However, firing it requires the weapon to charge itself. This charging produces a characteristic sound as well as a point of glowing light. During this charging procedure, a glowing arc displays in front of the player, gradually increasing in size until it becomes almost a straight line to the target. This effect makes the use of the weapon visible before it is fired. When it is being used against you, this gives you time to take cover. Battles against Therons wielding this weapon are less about memorizing enemy positions, and more about anticipating patterns and executing simple maneuvers, listening for clues to what the enemy is doing and choosing the proper moment to attack.

Halo doesn't really have a single "super" weapon, the way Doom had its BFG and Unreal Tournament had its Redeemer. Gears gives you the Hammer of Dawn, a satellite-based beam weapon with a handheld targeting mechanism. The mechanics of how it works, and the limitations on its use, are well-supported by the fiction. In areas where the Hammer can be used (and even a few where it can't be) the handheld portion is easily available. However, the weapon only works outdoors, and only during times when satellites are overhead and active, allowing the designers to put arbitrary limits on where and for how long the weapon is usable. Targeting enemies with it also requires a good deal of time, but your reward for doing so is a devestating beam of energy you can sweep across a battlefield, eradicating all in its path. Some of the larger Locust, such as Seeders and Berserkers, are immune to all weapons except the hammer.

There's no weapon that stands out as particularly useless; while the pistols are weaker than most, they also have their uses, as weapons of last resort and for other tasks. The shotgun just works, the medium and long-range weapons are varied as well as satisfying.

More on Gears and Halo in a follow-up piece later this week.