Critique: Gears of War 3

*Spoilers ahead!* Since I am talking about how the story works, I obviously have to talk about specific things that happen. Also keep in mind that I am only talking about the story as it is presented in game, outside fiction beyond the previous games does not apply here.

 

Much like when I sat down to write a critique of Vanquish’s storyline I find myself wondering if it is even reasonable to critique the story of Gears of War 3. After all it’s a game based around being super violent and hacking people in half with your gun’s chainsaw. Then again, the folks at Epic clearly spent a pretty penny hiring all those voice actors (many of whom are high profile) and somebody had to be staying late to put together all the cut scenes. So now that I feel justified let’s get this thing started.

 

Character Rundown:

–          Marcus Fenix: The leader, always kind of angry and troubled about his missing dad.

–          Dom: Marcus’s buddy. Has mellowed out since the last game and has grown a wise beard. Initially acts like a druid/hermit and talks about growing food and plants, but quickly goes back to being in anguish over his wife and generically violent. Dies.

–          Cole: Resident crazy person. As long as you don’t take him seriously at all he’s amusing in a cartoonish way. Seems to be the only person who enjoys their work.

–          Baird: Tech guy, sarcastic, hates poor people.

–          Anya: Former boss lady, she now fights on the front lines. Marcus’s love interest, according to the Gears of War gearspeida page.

–          Sam: A chick with a gun. Does nothing of interest other than be a playable character.

–          Queen Myrrah: Antagonist. Queen of the Locust hordes and looks like a human, but isn’t one. Hates you.

 

Gears of War 3 is the final chapter in the Gears of War saga. Everything comes together in this game; the Humans are fighting the Locust monster people who are fighting the Lambent mutated Locust who are fighting everybody. Yet now the world is dying due to the Lambent infection and it’s up to Marcus and his crew to find Marcus’s dad and set off a big weapon he was developing that will save all the humans while killing off everybody else. It’s pretty straight forward so I wanted to just focus on two specific critiques, the constantly shifting tone of the story and the subject of Queen Myrrah herself.

Much like Vanquish, Gears of War 3 suffers from the problem of having its tone be all over the place. In previous games it seemed like Gears of War was heading toward more campy and less serious storylines what with the Locust sinking cities with a giant worm who had to be killed by jumping inside it and killing it from within. Or having a final level where you ride around on a 3 story tall monster smashing enemies with your fists and blasting the rest with the car sized machine guns strapped to its arms. Yet Gears of War 3 is going in a different direction and wants to be a violent masterpiece during gameplay but also have drama and characters regretting their actions.

Dom’s death cutscene is a good example of this. The scene itself is actually pretty well put together, but in the context of Gears of War3 gameplay it feels very out of place. The entire reason Dom dies is due to your group being overrun by Locust and Lambent enemies, so he decides to grab a big truck, drive it down a tunnel, pull a u-turn, then drive back down the same tunnel and finally crash into a fuel container. It explodes and consumes both Dom and just about all of the enemies that were attacking the player while leaving the rest of Dom’s buddies alive. This comes off as very strange because at no point during the game does the player ever feel overwhelmed by enemies. Even on hard mode, you never really fight more than 10-15 enemies at once due to the game being built around the concept of high hitpoint enemies and lots of cover. So Dom killing himself over a large number of enemies seems pointless to the player at best and absurd at worst because we never experience the desperation that the character was supposed to feel during the cutscene. In addition the whole scene is supposed to feel very dramatic and perhaps even emotional. A soft acoustic version of Mad World by Tears for Fears plays in the background while the player is treated to panning camera shots showing the action happen in slow motion. But just prior to this the player was chainsawing monster men in half (spraying blood all over the screen of course) and using their rifle as a golf club and Locust heads as the ball. All the while the human characters are yelling things like “Eat shit and die!” or “Can’t stop the Cole Train baby! Whooo!” It just doesn’t mesh together as the shift in tone is just too sudden.

While on the topic of enemies, I think that the head enemy should always be the most interesting one. Myrrah is not interesting. From the start to the end of the game we learn almost nothing about Myrrah, we never learn why she looks like a human (when other Locust females look like this) we never learn why she’s the queen, we never even learn anything about her personally except that she’s mad at you. We do know why she’s mad at you. Marcus’s dad was helping her out with the Lambent problem when he realized that fixing it would take a really long time. So he sort of stopped helping and Myrrah decided to invade the surface and go to war with the Humans in order to escape the Lambent. Which seems like a terrible plan to me but I’m not a monster lady. Other than that, Myrrah is also angry with you because the big weapon Marcus’s dad is working on in Gears of War 3 will kill all Locust on the planet if activated and Myrrah doesn’t want her people to be extinguished. A legitimate motivation. Yet, despite her neat motivation the game goes to great lengths to depict her as a standard evil villain. Most cutscenes involving her can be summed up with ‘Myrrah looks angry, tells more Locust to kill Marcus’ or ‘Myrrah incinerates some human civilians for no real reason’. Those that don’t follow this formula usually have Myrrah yell at Marcus directly. I was not even mad at Myrrah for most of the game as she’s characterized like a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Her plans always fail in game, and all she can do is give orders and get frustrated at the results.

The part that pushed me over from being bored with Myrrah to actually wanting to devote a few hundred words talking about her was her death scene. At the end of Gears of War 3 you have a showdown against Myrrah as she rides around on a huge beetle monster trying to destroy the weapon that Marcus’s dad built. As the weapon powers up she yells at you about how committing genocide on her race makes you as bad as her Locust and that her people have a right to live. At this point I actually started to sympathize with her. Sure it took the entire game to show a different side of Myrrah, but this is something I could get behind. However, my sympathy came later when I was thinking about critiquing this game as at the time she was busy commanding her flying beetle monster to incinerate me. Not really the best time for sympathy.

Back on track, you eventually shoot her down and the device activates giving you an ending cutscene where all the Lambent and Locust monsters die off, Marcus’s dad also dies from the device and Marcus is sad. Everything seems to be wrapping up when Marcus notices something stirring under the burnt carcass of Myrrah’s beetle monster. Why it’s Myrrah! She survived and starts to taunt Marcus about his dead dad, which is odd. Her people are all dead at this point; she is literally the only Locust to have survived. She was supposed to be leading her people to safety, but all she managed to do was get them destroyed. That strikes me as a tragic tale, even if she was evil. But Gears of War 3 plays her as a straight villain. In game she is fairly calm and collected, pointing out (correctly I might add) that all Marcus’s dad did was create “clever ways to kill” all his life and this last one killed him, all while walking toward Marcus. When she gets to Marcus, he grabs her and shoves a knife through her ribs while swearing at her and blaming her for Dom’s death. What. Then the camera pans away and heroic music starts playing while Lambent and some Locust keel over dead, then everybody congratulates Marcus and company. What? Hey! Was killing Myrrah supposed to be some epic thing? Because knifing an unarmed lady while she points out your flaws isn’t very heroic, especially if the one doing the knifing is a human meat tank.

 

My Changes

Gears of War 3 has to decide if it wants to be a violent action story or a gritty dramatic one. Should Myrrah be someone we love to hate or hate to love? From my view, the gameplay would mesh much better with an campy action story. Here Myrrah should be someone the player loves to hate. Instead of just giving out orders, she should be in the thick of action messing people up and scaring small children. Rather than have Dom kill himself in a suicide run, this task should fall to Myrrah. A scene like this for example:

The player controlling Dom gets separated from the other 3 characters. As his allies fight off hordes of locust Dom finds an elevator/stairs leading up to a large control tower that overlooks the battlefield. From here he is able to control auto turrets or robots (both of which exist in game) and uses these to help cover his friends as they head into a nearby bunker. Once they reach safety the players in the bunker start holding off the Locust while Marcus tells Dom to come down and regroup with them. As the player controlling Dom switches off their weapon systems they should notice that Myrrah’s flying beetle mount has appeared and is heading right toward them. Before they can react properly the beetle smashes into the control tower and rips the roof off. There is nowhere for the player controlling Dom to run so they take cover behind some computer desks and start firing at the massive monster. As the beetle’s fire breath starts melting Dom’s cover, Myrrah leaps off its back and lands right behind Dom. The player loses control of Dom as Myrrah levels her pistol at his head. The screen goes black for all players. A single shot is heard. As the game fades from black into a cutscene we see Marcus radioing Dom, but instead its Myrrah’s voice that responds.

This would cause the player to hate Myrrah while still staying true to Gear’s action oriented style. It’s her fault that Dom died and more importantly it’s her fault that a player died.

On the other hand it might be interesting to cast Myrrah as a tragic villain. At the end of the game she’s a character who has lost everything. She’s lost more than everything really because she is the last survivor in a world that is now under the control of a species that has nothing but seething hatred for her. That has to be an incredibly heavy burden, especially since she caused most of it by calling for war with the humans. Instead of just being generically angry at Marcus at the end she should be equal parts furious and emotionally devastated. You could even have Myrrah console one of her loyal guards as he struggles to get up and defend her even while he dissolves from the device Marcus’s dad built. If done at roughly the same time as when Marcus’s dad gets dissolved you could create a very interesting scene where both Myrrah and Marcus realize how much each of them lost to their war. It could be touching and awkward for the characters at the same time. Would there even be any reason to kill Myrrah at that point? She has no special powers, no army and no future.

The game often gives Myrrah dialogue stating that she cares about ‘her people’ and everything she does was to keep them safe from the Lambent. I want to see her act on this and really sell this aspect of her character. It might sound strange, but it could be touching to see her interact benevolently with her monster people. Currently all she does is bark orders at them. That’s fine if you want a basic evil queen, but it doesn’t explain why the Locust are so loyal. Why not have a few scenes where she favors a particularly brave but injured Locust warrior with a smile or have a scene where she rides to the aid of some of her soldiers. She could put her beetle between your team and a group of Locust that you were about to exterminate whereupon she drives you back. It would serve as both a neat set piece as well as establish her protective nature of her people. It could even help the player build up animosity toward her as she denied the player from racking up more kills, which is something never denied to a player in Gears of War 3.