Racing toward the train station in its APC, the COG squad comes to a screeching halt when confronted by a raised drawbridge. The controls for the bridge are nearby, but after activating them, it quickly becomes clear that the bridge's power is out and that this is certainly a trap. Locust grunts scale the side of the bridge and waste no time calling for reinforcements once the battle starts going your way. It took us several attempts to get past the sequence on the medium "hardcore" difficulty, after which, we were led down into a slumlike area beneath the bridge and tasked with bringing the power back online. Wretches crawling along the underside of the bridge from both directions posed a significant challenge, and before we were able to overcome it, we were asked to quit out of the game to take part in a multiplayer session.

The fact that we proceeded to play for well over an hour using the same gameplay mode on the same map over and over again, says a lot about Gears of War's great multiplayer content. The mode was King of the Hill, the map was Courtyard, and both are new. If you're familiar with the Xbox 360 version of Gears of War, King of the Hill is a lot like the Annex mode. The only real difference is that in the new mode you need to remain inside capture points to score off them, which actually makes the game very different. If none of that made any sense to you whatsoever, King of the Hill is a mode in which a small area of the map is designated as the "hill" and two teams attempt to occupy it. You score a point for every second or so that you outnumber the enemy inside the capture point, and the first team to score 120 points is the winner. Like the Annex mode, King of the Kill lets you respawn as many times as necessary before the end of the game, though you'll be taken out of action for up to 15 seconds each time you die.