Friday, December 2, 2011

Gatling Gears

Gatling guns have been cool ever since Jesse "The Body" Ventura carried one around the jungle in Predator. Give a Gatling gun legs, and apparently you've got yourself a great video game. Gatling Gears treads familiar territory that may remind you of classics like Robotron and Ikari Warriors, but it hits all its marks and manages to stand out as one of the best arcade shooters around.

Gatling Gears is related to another excellent downloadable game called Greed Corp. They're both set in the world of Mistbound, a once beautiful, green land now literally torn apart by excessive harvesting and mining of natural resources. While roaming through the varied environments you'll see tracks of land crumble away and fall into the void below -- a fantastic visual that was also a cornerstone of Greed Corp. You control a grizzled war vet that long ago defected from the evil Empire responsible for destroying this world. When the Empire starts doing its dirty work in your back yard, it's time to jump back into the cockpit of your heavily armed war machine.

There is a five chapter campaign to shoot through complete with a playable prologue that sets up the story. Gatling Gears also offers a Survival mode where you protect targets from waves of enemies for as long as you can. All of this can be played with a friend locally or online, and adding or removing players from the action at any time is a breeze. I also appreciate how easy it is to check the leaderboards at any time and see how you compare to other players.

Gatling Gears is gorgeous. Your mission will take you through lush forests to snow covered mountain tops to dank caves, and each scene is filled with lots of detail to admire.

It's also one of those games that just feels really good to play. The controls are perfect, allowing you to move and fire independently with your two analog sticks and launch more powerful weapons with the triggers.

Although the final chapter gets pretty insane, Gatling Gears isn't a terribly difficult game on its medium setting. It is thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, though. Each chapter culminates in an epic boss battle against a giant machine with several stages of transformation (props to the developers for giving one later boss a Godzilla roar). Performing well on the battlefield will earn you cash and experience points that can be used to upgrade and customize your mech. You'll earn more powerful rockets and grenades, and even gain pets that will follow you around the battlefield. More customization options would have been nice, though, because you'll have your mech fully upgraded long before you've found all the hidden cash in each level, leaving you with money you can't spend.

System Requirement
OS: Windows XP/ Windows Vista/ Windows 7
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 1.86GHz / AMD Athlon 4050e Dual Core
Memory RAM: 1 GB
HD Space: 3.5 GB
Video: Nvidia GeForce GT 320 / ATI Radeon X850 Series
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9

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