Gears of War 3 Diary: Final Day

I can’t believe it… We’ve finished it… It’s all over…

Yes dear friends! Yesterday evening finally finished Gears of War 3! We were apparently closer to the end than I had previously thought because it didn’t take us much more than an hour (maybe an hour and a half) to finish off the campaign to Gears of War 3 while playing Hardcore difficulty. Again, I would like to point out right now that this article may well contain spoilers (I’m not sure what sort yet) so read on at your own peril!

I have to say, there was a definite feeling of the “end-of-an-era” description when the final cutscene finished and the credits started rolling. It’s actually been a fair while since I’ve had a feeling like that at the end of a game. In fact the last time I remember feeling like this was when I finished Halo 3. Because it’s over now. Gears of War is done. And what a journey it has been! Of course this is all assuming that Epic don’t make some rubbishy RTS based in the Gears world or another Gears set as a prequel (Gears of War: E-Day seems all to likely in my mind).

But yes! What a journey! We’ve fought our way through the emergence holes, the death of the first Carmine, the Kryll and RAAM to detonate the Lightmass bomb (and if you aren’t following any of this I invite you to either buy the original games or check the Gears Wiki). Then we ended up in Jacinto and chainsawed up a Locust base, killed a giant worm, another Carmine died, some “sires” fucked up our shit and we killed Skorge and found Dom’s wife dead. And now we’ve done some more truly outrageous stuff (most of the bigger stuff I mentioned in my diaries over the past few weeks). Ah memories… And now we’ve finally won! It’s kind of a sad moment actually (as was Halo 3) because there is a feeling of “Man… now where do I look if I want to chainsaw some people’s faces?”.

Not that it’s an entirely bad thing it’s over. Judging by mine and Ali’s mixed reaction to the various stages of Gears 3, it was starting to grate. To keep people’s interest it kept adding new things and an unfortunate amount in this final instalment were simply not as good as they should have been. It’s a shame because I do love Gears and I have loved the previous games, so I think this final game was simply not the ending it deserved… Ah well…

Now I’m not going to mention anything about the ending except to say that the story did reveal a fair amount of stuff that had been confusing me and Ali at earlier stages. Despite this though, it still seems like there are unanswered questions and so the twisty storyline hasn’t really paid off unfortunately.

Really I’m not going to mention much more here. I’m going to save most of my rambling for the actual review (and yes I am going to write a review AS WELL AS this whole diary series). I will say the last boss fight was actually disappointingly easy and repetitive and not the final boss Gears deserved. The final cutscene on the other hand was good. It FELT good watching the COG win! We finally beat the bastards! It was what I would describe as a fitting ending to the series and so Epic at least managed to deliver that.

The only other thing I am going to mention IS a MASSIVE spoiler. Don’t read it if you don’t want to know! It’s not really story related, but it is something that is only revealed at the very end!

It is to do with Clayton Carmine, the last of the Carmine brother. A Carmine has died in every Gears game so far and it wasn’t know what would happen to the last one. I’m going to tell you! Just warning you!

Clayton fucking survives! He did it! He fucking lived! I swear, this was one of the best moments in the whole Gears of War 3. Both me and Ali were genuinely pleased and gave little whoops because a Carmine actually survived the war. God… it felt good!

Okay anyway, if you’ve read this far, I haven’t really got any more to say until I actually review the game, so you’ll have to wait for that for an overview of the game (including the other parts I haven’t mentioned in my diaries). Coming soon to a web browser near you!