I finally started playing the PC version of Gears of War in earnest tonight, having only done the tutorial before. It took a bit of getting used to the third-person view and how the screen rocks around a bit when you’re walking and running, but it’s not too bad.

They seem to have overdone it a bit on the grim-n-gritty, macho, manly-men atmosphere, but I can still appreciate it on the campiness level. It at least takes itself more seriously than Hellgate: London, which had a similar post-apocalyptic humanity-fights-back setting, but had NPCs that seemed to be trying out for Monty Python auditions…

The highly-touted cover system works fairly well, except for a couple minor problems. The first is that it seems to be slow to take cover again, which can cause problems when doing things like rescuing teammates. Numerous times I was right next to a downed teammate, behind cover, but actually rescuing him required me to pop out of cover, trigger him, and then get back under cover again, and I’d sometimes die just from being out of cover too long doing that.

The other problem is that since there’s really only one ‘action’ button, it doesn’t alway interpret what you meant to do properly. I died a few times at one spot because I held down Space to run across an open area, except that at one point it suddenly decided that my holding Space meant ‘take cover here’ instead. Except that the cover at that point was on the wrong side, leaving me open to the turret rapidly firing at me.

And oh have I died a ton… I’m playing it on the “hardcore” difficulty, since “casual” would probably be too easy (the text describes it as being for people who only occasionally play shooters), and some achievements are only given out if you’re in hardcore or higher. Fortunately, there are plenty of checkpoints, so I’ve always been able to slowly progress with enough persistence, even if I had to die a lot.

I made it to the end of Act 1 tonight, and with only five acts, it shouldn’t take too long to finish off the single-player game. I doubt I’ll do much multiplayer though, especially since the PC version can’t play together with the 360 version anyway. Which probably also means no co-op, alas.