Walking through the ship, you’re introduced to your fellow soldiers in Delta Squad - Dominic Santiago, Jace Stratton, and Anya Stroud. Marcus Fenix, the protagonist, wakes from a nightmare to find the Sovereign put on high alert as they enter lambent-controlled waters. Humanity is nearing extinction the Coalition of Ordered Governments is broken, and what remains of its army struggling to survive on a lone ship, the Sovereign. The underground lizard creatures, the locust, have been driven from their holes by their infected and highly explosive brethren, the lambent. Gears of War 3 opens up shortly after the events of Gears of War 2. Gears of War 3 works so well because it maintains its momentum while avoiding predictability. Mad Max: Fury Road is constructed with perfect economy the film never loses its forward momentum to double beats. In storytelling, this would be called a double or triple beat, and that’s a huge no-no, because audiences tend to tune out when narrative information is repeated. The idea is that players want or need to learn how to perform a task to have fun doing, which seems like a great idea if you don’t stop to think about it. Change it up a little bit, but not too much. Developers are fond of something called “The Rule of Threes”: give the players the same objective three times. Repetitive encounters are easy to set up: place three barrels here, spawn some sirens there, wait for the player to sail up, attack them, let the player loot the barrels. Clearing out an open world map is about as satisfying as popping zits there’s a strange sense of calm to it, and it’s satisfying as heck, to be sure, but if you asked me whether I’d rather pop a zit or watch Mad Max: Fury Road, I’d pick the latter every time. In practice, open-world games tend to recycle the same encounters over and over the jokes about Fallout 4’s Preston Garvey tasking players to do the same things over and over have such staying power because we all know exactly what we’re getting into when another settlement needs our help. I’ve been playing the Gears of War games in preparation for Gears of War 4 this fall, and I think Gears of War 3 might be one of the best games ever made, thanks to its linear design. Last year was great for non-linear games, from the incredible The Witcher 3 to the definitive release of Grand Theft Auto V, but let’s not count the linear narrative out just yet.

Conventional wisdom says that non-linear game s offer players more bang for their buck, letting players play how they want and never providing the same experience twice. Somewhere along the way, ‘linear’ became a dirty word.

Uncharted 3 cog puzzle