No matter how many members you have with you, these guys will provide back up and support throughout the entire campaign. You'll spend the majority of Gears of War in a group with three other soldiers, and occasionally you'll split up into groups of two. The roadie run is useful because you are less susceptible to fire, but it is also impossible to fire your weapons while doing it. You can also do an evasive roll as well as the "roadie run" which uses spectacular camera work as well as a slight speed increase to instill a feeling of intensity. There are a few options available to you outside of cover, you can fire your weapons without aiming properly but they are highly inaccurate, and there is no aiming reticle whatsoever. The fuller it gets, the closer you are to death, so putting your head down and hiding back behind cover after taking a few shots is essential to let your health recharge if you've taken damage. The more damage you take, the more visible a red omen sign will appear in the center of your screen. Gears of War includes the now industry standard regenerating health system, but you actually don't even have a health bar that is actually visible. The cover system in Gears of War is absolutely essential due to the little amount of damage that you can take. It strikes a nice balance between ease of use and providing you with enough options to get the job done while staying alive. While under the protection of cover you can do several things, you can pop out to take some shots you can blind fire around a corner and you can even do an evasive maneuver to shift to another nearby slab of cover. You can then use the left analog stick to move left and right so long as the cover permits. You simply press the A button when you're near cover and your character will automatically attach himself to it. Fortunately the cover system in Gears of War is deceptively simple, but at the same time has quite a few different options available. The cover system in Gears of War is highly essential to your survival, and If you don't have something like a slab of concrete slapped between you and the enemy, then you're doing something wrong. While most of the core game mechanics featured in Gears of War are nothing new, they have never before been executed to this level of perfection.
Taking design cues from highly successful games from the last generation, Gears of War implements an over the shoulder camera angle as well as a highly intuitive cover system. While Gears of War's story remains relatively simple and low-key for most of the game, it's designed well enough to give you enough of a reason to fight wave after wave of the Locust menace. The Locust are an alien race that has managed to take over nearly the entire world after their appearance on Emergence Day - the day in which the Locust had risen from the ground to inflict a mass-scale war on the entirety of humanity. Gears of War is a third-person over the shoulder shooter, that follows four absolutely hulking badass dudes through a completely destroyed world as they fight off the Locust Horde. Gears of War was the first game that truly let everyone know that the next generation was here, and it was here to stay. Released shortly before the PlayStation 3 and Wii, Gears of War took the gaming industry by storm and anyone with an Xbox 360 knew that there was no other place to be at the time. Sony once claimed that the next generation wouldn't begin until they said so they couldn't have been more wrong.