I'm sorry to tell you, you've been eliminated from The Race.

Massive spoilers below. I've never really given spoiler warnings before, and perhaps I should have. Sorry about that. 

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Gears of War 3 is a game that seems like it was made for 12 year old boys. It’s loud, it’s dumb, and it’s fun. You control a bunch of grizzled soldiers on a mission to find the hero’s dad and stop a plague of alien something or others. On the way you’ll use a bunch of different cool weapons to blow up aliens in various gruesome ways.

Would I have liked GOW 3 when I was 12? Sure, I would have loved it. Would I have loved the plotting, dialogue, and humour of the game as a 12 year old? No, because it’s awful. This game suffers from idiotic plot beats, and one terrible dialogue cliché after another.

You play as Marcus Fenix, a fat man in a doo-rag who’s clearly modelled after the legendary Bolo from The Amazing Race season 6:

As you and your motley crew race across the planet to get to Phil at the next Pit Stop rescue Marcus’s dad, you constantly wonder what planet you’re even supposed to be on. It’s impossible to work out if you’re on an Earth of the future, or a planet populated by space-faring earthlings, or just some random alien planet of humans who just happen to have a city called Hanover. It’s very confusing. I played the first two games and I couldn’t even work it out.

The game designers litter this half-destroyed world with enough earth-like familiarity to keep you guessing, but not really caring. At one point you raid a supermarket looking for supplies. This is despite the fact that down the street 100 yards earlier you were denied entry to a dilapidated human survivor encampment, an encampment which one would logically assume would have raided said supermarket for beans and bullets a hell of a long time ago. 

But apparently not, as no sooner had I entered the market than I stumbled upon a massive cache of weapons, big enough to need a massive mechanical powerloader and a helicopter to move. And lo and behold, the stupid survivors hadn’t even found the powerloader either, even though it was just sitting there in the corner and worked without a hitch as soon as I jumped in.

Such laziness in the plotting is customary in a lot of action games of this ilk. Similarly the dialogue was so terrible that I groaned audibly numerous times. While blasting aliens in the supermarket one of my AI teammates would fire off such hilarious one-liners as, “Clean up on aisle 5!” After hijacking a blimp that then subsequently crashed they'd quip about, “That’s the last time I fly with a budget airline!” After crashing a truck through a barricade, one of my comedian compatriots stated, “I just lost my good driver discount!” Like I said, awful.

How’s this for shitty plotting. You spend all of Act Three of the five act game searching for fuel for a submarine. Eventually you find the fuel, so you head to the docks. What’s the first thing the bloke who knows how to drive the submarine says? “We need to find some fuel.” I thought we just spent the last hour or so getting the fuel? So off we trot to get more fuel, without anyone asking what happened to all the fuel we'd previously scavenged.

But despite all this the game remains fun, only it’s dumb fun. For 12 year olds, remember. One of its biggest problems is that it’s so easy. It’s essentially a shooting gallery with no need for skill or tactics. The series’ famed cover mechanic can be almost completely ignored, and you’ll hardly ever die. You’ll find that the main reason you need to move about is because your teammates keep blocking your line of fire. But you won’t have to worry about accidentally killing them because they also needlessly commit suicide.

Halfway through the game the beardy moody one, Dom, decides to kill himself by driving a truck into a fuel tank in order to kill a horde of enemies that have your team surrounded. Even though at about ten different points up until then simply shooting such fuel tanks was a perfectly feasible option to destroy large groups of enemies. Your best friend sacrifices himself merely for drama’s sake, leaving you with all the ones that make the annoying jokes.

So, as your enemies get fried in slow motion to the haunting piano notes of that Mad World song from Donnie Darko, Bolo looks on, crushed. “Dom,” he moans.

Or maybe he says “Dumb”.

29 down, 21 to go.