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For over a year now, PC gamers have sat on the sidelines of the Gears of War freight train, waiting patiently, knowing that at some point, it was an inevitability the game would come to their platform. Epic was coy about it for the longest time, but when push came to shove, the game came to the PC and after eight hours of play, it was worth the extended wait period.

Gears of War takes place on the war-torn world of Sera, formerly a planet full of people and prosperity, but now overrun by the Locust Horde, and their leader General RAAM. In response to the Horde invasion, the humans burn the entire surface of the planet to keep the Horde from enjoying the successes of their warfare. Now thirteen years after the first Horde invasion, the Human forces (COG) need all available forces, which bring our character, Marcus Fenix into the fray. He is a prisoner in a military prison after leaving his post to save his father, but has been released and conscripted back into action in a last ditch effort to beat the Horde.

The story is a little stretched as some points to make it dramatic, but the story is not the allure to Gears of War, it is about the heat of the battle. Combat in Gears is fast and furious, pounding you with waves of Locust soldiers, which emerge from holes in the ground just about any place, due to their subterranean nature. Cover becomes the key component of the game as you will need to use the cover spots provided if you want to make a stand against the enemy. Hiding behind a block wall or a pillar, occasionally peeking out to take shots at the enemy, or blind-firing to keep the enemy off balance is the key strategy to defeat the enemy.

As you play the game, you start to notice all the details that are brought out into the world with the Unreal Engine 3.0 in Gears. Unlike other UE3.0 games, the character models look to have more detail and less of that shine that the engine has become known for at times. Environments have a brown tinge, which adds to the bleak desolation that the planet has become through the war. The game has been modified for Windows, and now allows high resolutions up to 1920×1200 in full 32 bit color. DirectX 10 is supported as well and adds some cool lighting and smoke effects to the game. All of this comes at a price, and that price is steep hardware needs. My game started to stutter at the beginning of each section after a load. The stutter would last about five to ten seconds, not enough to affect me, unless I was walking right into a fire fight. Definitely look into having a 7800GT or higher video card along with a Core 2 CPU. I was running this on my Athlon 4800+ X2 Dual Core with 2GB of Corsair XMS RAM and an 8800GT video card with 512MB of RAM and still got this stutter.

The main attraction to most players that owned this game on the 360 is the addition of several new chapters that culminate with the battle between you and the tank-like Brumak. For the uninitiated, the Brumak was shown in a trailer and a cut-scene for the 360 version of the game, but the mission was cut from the final product due to time constraints. The content has been added as a bonus for PC gamers exclusively according to Cliffy B and it plays out rather well. The chase of the Brumak is well done, as you always feel the pressure of this juggernaut chasing you, as you move towards your objective to boost power to a train. The content fits well in the overall story and just fleshes out the events that lead up to the end of the game, but it is a tossup as to whether 360 gamers should buy this game again, for the extra content, but if anything, it will give them another 1000 achievement points.

Reading that last sentence, you are correct in taking the assumption that the game supports achievements and all the other Live for Windows features that have been touted by Microsoft, but MIA for quite some time. Multiplayer matches, including co-op and deathmatch are run through the Live for Windows service. Gold players get custom matchmaking and ranked and player matches, while Silver members get List play, which is basically a list of servers that will not have any rankings associated with them. The multiplayer support is a mixed bag. It was easy to find games and people to play against, but sometimes lag reared its ugly head, which should not happen in a 4 on 4 game. A lot of this has to do with the peer to peer nature of the Live for Windows service which cannot be avoided. Multiplayer does have a lot of legs to it as the game ships with a full map editor, and custom content does not have to go through the Microsoft certification process, which makes it a lot easier to implement.

As it stands, the game is a solid game for the PC players, if you have the machine to support it. Gaining achievements is a bonus, and having the Brumak battle exclusively is a feather in the PC gamers cap. Fifty dollars for a game that has been out now for over a year is a bit steep, but for everything it does right, it is a good deal. However, if you are a 360 gamer, the only added benefit is the extra content and Brumak battle, so it will be up to you to decide if the price tag is worth it. Gears of War offers a lot to the PC gamer and gets 4.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.