Gears of War is one of those popular games that came out for the Xbox 360 during its early days that I’m really interested in playing. Unfortunately, I had no intention of getting the Xbox 360 so I had to wait till the PC version was released.

Even though it was available for a while now, I didn’t buy it immediately because there were other games I was interested in. Also, I had to pay a subscription to Xbox Live just to play it online, so that was a downer. I have no intention of paying a subscription. In the end, I just wanted to play the single-player campaign. I heard good things about it.

It started out great. The graphics were amazing. The musical score was very engaging and inspiring. At first, I had a bit of trouble getting used to the new cover mechanic introduced in Gears of War (and made popular by it) but I soon got used to it, though sometimes annoyed by it.

However, it was only half-way through the game did I recall a very important reason for why this game was so popular. A lot of reviewers said that they enjoyed the game mostly because of the co-operative play. That is, because they were playing through the levels with a buddy.

I was playing by myself. No buddies. I played the game on the easiest difficulty level possible and yet it was still very hard not to get killed multiple times in some areas. Those parts really frustrated me. I died mostly due to those creatures that cause instant kills. And the worse part of it is that whenever my character gets killed, I had to sit idly in front of my PC for more than 10 seconds while the game reloads. What the?!

I could see how the game is a lot easier if I have an actual thinking person as a buddy in the game helping me out instead of the stupid AI buddy I had that only always gets itself taken out of action.

It was very very frustrating that I had to jump out of my chair in rage a few times. But I pressed on. I wanted to beat the stupid game. The end boss was specially difficult but eventually, I was able to kick its stupid butt.

In the end, I wasn’t so happy with the game. It looked gorgeous but there wasn’t much in terms of story. I also felt that the game design could have been a lot better. Now that I’m done, I can finally sell this game on eBay. Good thing I haven’t even used its free one-month subscription to Xbox Live. Maybe that will help sell the game at a higher price.

Now that’s out of the way, I can finally go back to playing the game I really wanted to play for the past week but never had the chance — Assassin’s Creed!