Packaged alongside the entertaining gameplay is an impressive feature set, particularly the option for online co-operative play. To make full use of it, however, you'll need a Live gold account, which costs money. Though Gears is entertaining, we can't say it's worth signing up for yet another service when so many other titles out there offer full access to their online features with no additional cost. If you sign up for a Live Silver account, which is free, you can still play in non-ranked multiplayer games, though your experience is feature-limited. Assuming you already have an account, don't care about the additional cost, or are content with having limited access to the online functions, then there's plenty here to enjoy. You get five multiplayer modes and 19 maps, which should provide for lots of entertainment. For Achievement junkies, Gears PC gives you points on top of what you may have already earned with the Xbox 360 version. So even if you've beaten the game on Microsoft's console, you get credit for all the same Achievements again on PC.

Fans of the game are sure to be curious about the new single-player content, which consists of five new chapters stuffed into the beginning of Gears' fifth act. It adds an hour or two of extra gameplay, depending on how many times you're killed and forced to restart from checkpoints, and offers much of the same gameplay as you've already had before. Throughout the entirety of the five new chapters you're tailed by a Brumak, the heavily-armed monster Xbox 360 gamers never got to actually battle at Act 4's conclusion. You do get to fire bullets at the guy in this version, and it's a challenging fight playing solo on the either hardcore or insane difficulty settings. When playing co-operatively you'll notice a significant drop in challenge level, mostly because Gears' friendly AI just isn't that good.

Then there's the question of performance. Gears is still a gorgeous game, but in both DX9 and DX10 we noticed it would stutter on a regular basis. Things would run smoothly otherwise, but the regular occurrences of dropped frames were distracting. As for our system, we're running 32-bit Vista on a rig with an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU 2.40GHz, a 768 MB GeForce 8800 GTX, and 2 GB of high-end RAM. Granted, that's not exactly the best kind of rig to determine a game's performance, but that's all we've tried it on so far.