I spent the great majority of yesterday playing Gears of War 3. Now, Gears is not the highest-minded game series ever made, it’s true, but it also highlights why not every game has to aspire to being meaningful and special in that sense. Because this is gaming at its absolute finest, it is sheer, unadulterated fun.

Gears of War is a game where people are made of muscles the size of oak trees. Pretty much everyone can take a stupid amount of punishment before dying, they’re as strong as oxen, and the whole game is basically Violence Is Fun Part 3: Electric Boogal…ee? Whatever. The point is you shoot a lot of stuff. And it’s great. Now I’m doing Gears a bit of a disservice because it does actually have some rather good characters and does some heavy stuff story-wise (Both far better in this than either predecessor), but really, the main point of the game is killing lots of Locust.

Everything here has been polished to an impressive degree. Absolutely everything about the game shows attention to detail and refinement, everything works brilliantly, the whole system just feels like it’s put together properly out of a lot of solid and well-tested parts.

I’m being a very poor blog person here because I’m not really conveying what it is that is good about Gears 3. It just… it just works, really really well, and is stupidly fun to play. I’ve not even touched the improved Horde mode yet, though I messed around in Beast mode (Where you play the Locust side in a Horde game, basically) a bit and it was just glorious. Epic Games seem to have held nothing back here. You fight the most ridiculous, over the top enemies, all sorts of insane things happen, and the game includes one of the best siege defenses I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing through in any action game.

In short, if you like FUN, get GoW 3. I guess it won’t convert you if you’re not a fan, but if you’re on the fence I would wholly endorse joining in now and getting into some multiplayer with friends, because few games do multiplayer as well as this one does.