Halo’s Elites and the Locust in Gears of War are similar. They’re big and tough and speak in growls and grunts. They’re also — at least in Multiplayer — cast as equal in ability to the heroes. But there’s a key difference between the two, and when you realize it, Gears of War’s single player seems kind of cheap.
The Locust’s shields do not regenerate. I know, this seems like a little thing to complain about, but think about what it says about your odds for survival and what you have to do to win. Even on Insane, the game’s highest difficulty, the you only have to find good enough cover to sneak the occasional potshot at the Locust in the distance. Even if they duck and cover, eventually you can wear them down. It just takes a little longer because they’re more accurate and their shots hurt more. This is lame.
In the Halo series, the Elites have the same abilities — and the same instincts — as you. They’ll fire at will when they see you, but they’ll look for a place to hide if they know they’re beat. This means that you really must outsmart them. You have to deliberately focus on taking out one Elite at a time, otherwise they’re back in a safe zone and you’re out another round of ammo. When you take down a pack of five elites, especially on Legendary difficulty, it’s a big deal.
On a related note, a lot of people complained that the multiplayer in Gears was poorly balanced. Critics didn’t like the frantic up-close combat, and they wanted more machine guns. In other words, they wanted the multiplayer to be more like the single player, where they could do their fighting from afar. With regenerating health, this simply would not work. Even if the long-range guns were stronger, no one would would ever stay up long enough to go down. You’d have a stalemate — two sides firing at each other until their clips are empty.
On one hand, maybe Gears should have done away with regenerating health altogether. First of all, there’s no logical explanation for it to begin with. Second, would even the odds in single player and make players more cautious. Instead of having players keep an eye on that red patch that indicates damage, their focus would simply be to not get shot. However, I don’t think this is the kind of game that Epic wanted to make. Some tactics are fine, but leave the overly cautious stuff to Ghost Recon and Counter Strike.
On the other hand, the current strategy in multiplayer works. You use the machine gun to keep people from wandering into the open, or to keep them pinned while your buddy sneaks up with the shotgun. This would have worked for the single player as well, had the teammate AI been a little smarter. In other words, if the single-player had been more like the multiplayer, perhaps there would have been less griping overall.
The bottom line is that Halo’s regenerating health system changed the way we think about shoot-em-ups. I’m not saying that any time it’s used, the enemies should have the same abilities — that’s certainly not the case for all of Halo’s foes. But when players can simply hide for a second or two and face no reprecussions for their cowardice, the entire experience is weakened.
