Home Gaming Feature: Massive In-Depth Gears of War 3 Beta Hands-On Impressions

Feature: Massive In-Depth Gears of War 3 Beta Hands-On Impressions

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Gun doesn’t rhyme with fun for no reason

So yes, the Lancers are still handy, the shotgun is as dangerous as all hell again and the pace is feeling good. So what about the other weapons, old and new?

In Gears of War 3, you are now able to change your characters load out between respawns with a few quick button presses. You now have the ability to chose either the usual Lancer, the new Hammerburst or a freshly introduced Retro-Lancer as your assault rifle and then have a choice between the original shotgun (Gnasher) and a new Sawed-Off shotgun.

The Lancer is same-old same old although it seems like the chainsaw takes a moment to rev-up compared to the past, the new Hammerburst actually has a real function now, as it allows you (and is the only weapons that allows you) to aim down the iron-sights like a first-person shooter, which can be very, very handy for larger maps where covering fire or assisted downing is necessary.

The Retro-Lancer is a different story altogether though. The weapon has powerful automatic fire, but it’s about as much about accuracy as Geoff is about driving sims. For this reason you will need to use the weapon over short to medium range and it will definitely take some time to get a hang of controlling the very tricky amount of burst-fire shots needed to keep the gun accurate and dangerous. Instead of the new and improved chainsaw-bayonet, the Retro-Lancer has an old-school ginormous blade in front used for impaling. When holding down ‘B’, your character will roadie-run just like if you hold in ‘A’, the exception being that if anything gets in your way, you get a one-hit-kill that instantly dispatches the opponent but leaves the impaler exposed for quite some time.

The Gnasher shotgun was already explained above, and its pretty much back to what you have always known it to be, which means that it’s awesome and able to get off a one shot kill if used properly, however, not in the same way that the new sawed off shotgun can.

The Sawed-Off will pretty much hit anything that is visible on your screen, with the crosshair nearly stretching from one side of the television to the other. It is however, the epitome of high-risk-high-reward in terms of weapon choice. It may hit just about anything, but is only lethal at a very close range. This poses a very specific problem, as the shotgun is only able to fire off one shot before needing to reload, and to make matters worse, the reload (and even active reload time) is painfully slow, so when you pull the trigger, you had better hope that whatever is in front of you, dies. The good news is that if you do it right, it can be more than one opponent, so as I said before, high risk and high reward.

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Just like with mathematics, addition can be fun!

That’s as far as it goes where your standard weapons are concerned, as you are kitted out with a normal pistol and smoke grenades at the beginning of every round but are able, as usual, to find and swap them out with other weapons around the map.

As far as other weapons are concerned, they are all mostly there as well as a few notable additions, so expect to find your flamethrowers, frag grenades, poison grenades, mulchers, mortars etc, sniper rifles, torque bows etc. etc. available. The news ones are quite a bit of fun though, so let’s take a quick look.

The One-shot is a new addition and is pretty much a massive heavy-weapon sniper rifle that is only suited to long ranges thanks to its zoom, but will decimate any opponent in its path with a single shot. Rounds are limited though, so don’t expect to keep this one for long, however, its visible red laser-sight scanning moving around the map can be a very powerful intimidation tool, and for good reason.

Last Updated: April 19, 2011

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