Awesome / Gears of War

"I'm ready to kick some ass..."

Marcus Fenix

• During the Battle of Aspho Fields in the Pendulum Wars, Marcus hijacks a Indie vehicle that had killed several members of his unit, and proceeds to use it to utterly destroy the attacking Indie forces, allowing the rest of his unit to fall back to the extraction point. He even shoots down a Khimera attack helicopter that was about to kill Dom, Hoffman, and a commando team without even realizing it.
• Marcus' face-to-face encounter with the Corpser at the imulsion facility in Gears 1; it's clearly burning alive in the imulsion and thrashes about trying to climb out; it lunges forward with its massive talons right at Marcus as it tries to escape screeching; what does Marcus do? He stands perfectly still and silent as he watches it die a brutal death.
• "That's one! That's two! THAT'S THREE! THAT'S FOUR! THAT'S FIVE, MOTHERFUCKERS!"
  • Made even more awesome if every shot was a headshot and you didn't miss a single shot. (Unlike in the video)
• WHO WANTS TOAST!?
  • This line returns in Gears 3. Marcus will sometimes say it while throwing an incendiary grenade.
• "Control, this is Delta. We've hijacked a Brumak so that we can-" "You what?!" "We're riding a Brumak; we're gonna use it to clear the area faster." "Uh... okay..." Best. Level. EVER.
• Marcus finally getting fed up with Griffin's bullshit and verbally thrashing him.
  I just lost my fucking brother, alright?! My BROTHER! You, your tower, and all this fuckin Immulsion can GO TO HELL!!
• "Feel that? That's from Dom...and everyone else you killed, you bitch."
• Even as an older man 25 years after his "glory days" in the Locust War, the man can still keep up with the best of them, including his son and his friends as they fight the Swarm.

Dom Santiago

• Dom's Heroic Sacrifice is definitely a Tear Jerker, but it is also thoroughly awesome. Just watch the pyrotechnics! And on top of everything, an instrumental of Gary Jules version of Mad World plays in the background, which should just be awesome to any old school Gears fan.

Augustus Cole

• When Augustus Cole "The Cole Train" enters your squad in Gears 2, he does so while the PC(s) are under attack from an ambush above and around them. He chainsaws, shoots and headshots with his Lancer assault rifle those Locust, and sticks a grenade to one of them, killing around 8 enemies by himself.
  • This deserves clarification. Five grubs are gunned down before you even see Cole. When he appears on screen, the first chainsaw kill is combined with a linebacker-class sack that flips the disemboweled Locust grunt clear over Cole's head. After that, Cole attaches the grenade to the back of the next grunt he gets within melee range of, and runs right by. He headshots the remaining Locust by the time the grenade goes off.
• Cole showing us just why he's considered one of the best, if not THE best Thrashball player who has ever lived, only it's Lambent he's plowing through instead of people.
  • "THE COLE TRAIN RUNS ON WHOLE GRAIN BABY! WOOOOO!"
• The whole "Delta Squad is in your house, bitch!" has to be the most awesome verbal beating ever. To elaborate: In the heart of the Locust stronghold in the underground city of Nexus, Delta Squad managed to tap into the Locust Queen's broadcasting channel while looking for information, so Cole takes the opportunity to grab the microphone and deliver a loud combination of Badass Boast and death threat...for the entire Locust army to hear. Given that said announcement includes the claim that the Locust are going down so hard, they won't know which way is up, and that they're going to end up running back to their Queen like crying kids, this is equal parts awesome and hilarious.
• In Gears 5, he ducks out of a fight against a Swarmak, saying he'll be back in a minute. He comes back riding a motorcycle which he has completely covered in frags, and takes it off a ramp sending it flying directly into the Swarmak's mouth, which you then shoot to finish it off in a spectacular fashion.

Damon Baird

• Baird manning the gun on the King Raven in Gears of War: Ultimate Edition.
• Somehow building a bomb with only a few moments notice, and reacting to the request with a cheerful reply about if Marcus wanted it regular or extra strength.
• Baird stealing the guidance system of a Locust Gas Barge for use in getting to Anvil Gate, having it fully programmed by the time they are able to hijack a working craft. Even Marcus is impressed!
• Saving J.D. and his team by remotely hacking a bot-transport craft and crashing it into Jinn's drones when they have J.D. & company cornered.

Adam Fenix

• During his last battle of the Pendulum Wars, Adam snuck across the battlefield with another Gear and tossed molotovs into the vents of a nearly indestructible Indie tank that had been inflicting heavy casualties on his unit.
• Adam's Heroic Sacrifice, which resulted in no less than the extinction of the entire Locust Horde and Lambent and bringing peace to Sera.
• When he executes a Locust when there down, he doesn't use a weapon.He leaps on top of it and begins ''beating on its head until it explodes'.Remember that he isn't even a body builder and was able to take down a full grown alien with his bare hands.

Victor Hoffman

• Defeating the UIR Siege of Anvil Gate. Sure, he faked a surrender and felt terrible about it, but it was a brilliant plan to turn the tide of the UIR's invasion of Kashkur.
• During the climax of Gears of War II, he joins Delta Squad to help drive back the Locust assault long enough for them to put their last-ditch plan into effect, his advanced years notwithstanding. Not bad for a guy who was practically General Ripper towards Marcus in the first game.
  Hoffman: (As Marcus and his team are leaving to engage the Locust horde) "Not without me, you aren't! If this is Jacinto's last stand, I'm not sittin' it out."

Anya Stroud

• Going from a Voice with an Internet Connection to a hardened, badass soldier between GOW 2 and GOW 3.

Tai Kaliso

• Inspiring the creation of the chainsaw bayonet by using a power-saw on a Locust drone.
• His Heroic Sacrifice where he battles Skorge in a one-on-one chainsaw duel, saving Dizzy and the rest of his allies.

Richard Prescott

• Chairman Prescott's entire speech at the beginning of Act 1 of Gears of War 2. Coupled with scenes of cheering Gears and Stranded loading up for war and some of the best damn music ever, it comes out as a scene that leaves fists pumping.
  • "Soon we will have nothing left to defend, and that means we have only one option: attack."

Jace Stratton

• Taking up arms against the Locust who are about to overrun the orphanage in Ilima, even though he's just a kid and half the size of the Gears coming to his rescue.
• When the King Raven Jace and Delta are flying in in the Hollow arc is hit by a Nemacyst and the pilot is killed, Jace takes over, having only flown once before but having never landed. To make matters worse, they are still under fire, and the landing gear is shot off. Jace spots several Drones coming out of an Emergance Hole, so he aims for it, crashing down and sliding across the Locust, killing all of them, and impressing all the experienced badasses in the squad.

Michael Barrick

• Barrick charging into a few dozen Locust with some Bloodmounts backing them up, fighting (and killing) them hand to hand to allow the rest of Delta Squad to escape.

Dizzy

• Going head-to-head against Skorge and living to sing about it, not too mention his impressive driving of both a massive armored transport in GOW 2 and a giant submarine in GOW 3.

Clayton Carmine

• Clayton Carmine surviving all of Gears of War 3. We see the crashed helicopter, a gear's body lying on the ground, and a helmet. Then someone else picks up the helmet and puts it on, revealing GRUB KILLER on his chest plate. That is all.
  • Plus Clay's Big Damn Heroes moment in the final battle against Myrrah, followed by him surviving the helicopter crash.
  Clay: EAT DIRT AND DIE, MOTHERFUCKER!
  • Cole and Carbine taking the lower level in Hangover.
  Clay: That's for Anthony! And Benjamin!

Minh Young Kim

• At the end of RAAM's Shadow, Kim goes hunting for RAAM to get revenge for Valera. He finds him injured and prepares to kill him, but RAAM summons a ring of Kryll to protect him. Kim won't let this stop him, and he begins walking through the Kryll to try and reach RAAM, receiving several cuts from the man eating terrors. He likely would have been torn apart, and was only stopped when Barrick pulled him back, but damn, that took guts to try and do.

RAAM

• His entry in the original Gears of War, the sudden change in music foreshadowing that this is not a guy to mess with, emerging from the smoke of battle as a giant figure clad in black who is instantly different from all the Drones you've been killing so far. His badassery increases as he slowly strides through a pitched firefight between the COG and Locust, barely even acknowledging all the chaos around him, as he nears Minh Young Kim, sucker punches him, and then finally and slowly executes him by impalement.
  • The Ultimate Edition adds something that makes RAAM 1000x more badass when Kim attempts to chainsaw bayonet the Locust General, RAAM simply barehand blocks it, the revving blade actually grinding to a halt in his grip, rips the Lancer from Kim's hands, kicks him to the ground and then swiftly kills him via impalement.
• His return as That One Boss where he summons the Kryll as shields, grabs one of the turrets you've been using through the game as a rifle, and speaks his first and only line in the entie series. "Serve. The Queen. DIE!!" The music accompanying this is equally badass.

Skorge

• He may not have been as hard as RAAM in-game, but when he cut that Centaur tank in half he made damn sure the players knew he wasn't just a replacement for the last game's Big Bad.

Gameplay and Story

• The debut gameplay at E3 2005 brought down the house.
• A big moment of awesome goes to Megadeth for writing a song entitled "Gears of War" simply for the release of the first game. Sadly, there were no lyrics (As Adam Fenix might say, "there simply wasn't enough time.") since the game was too close to completion for them to be put in, but how fuckin' awesome would it have been for this to be an iconic Gears theme along with Mad World?
• The Lancer Assault Rifle, signature weapon of the Gears. When the weapons that would become the Retro Lancers couldn't quite kill Locusts in melee-range with their bayonets failing against the hardened skin, the Coalition opted to standardize their entire military with rifles that have chainsaw bayonets instead. It's nonsensically over-the-top and impractical, and it's one of the most iconic weapons in all of gaming for it. There's a reason why several chainsaw entries are on this page.
• Multiple players in Gears of War 2 can chainsaw the same enemy at the same time, because There Is No Kill Like Overkill.
• When you first enter a chainsaw duel. It's only attempting to mash a button more than someone else in a couple of seconds, but it looks... YOUTUBE IT.
• Just getting a chainsaw kill. It does not get old.
  • Nor do the headshot lines. "Look ma, no face!"
    • The most awesome, and hilarious, headshot one-liner goes to Dom in Gears 2: "Damn, how could a mother love a face like that?!" Sadly, not continued into Gears 3.
• In the second game, Delta Squad end up swallowed whole by the Riftworm, a kilometers-long behemoth that's been sinking entire cities by eating the ground out from under them. Marcus decides that they need to kill this thing before it destroys anything else. How? "We rip its goddamn heart out". They proceed to fight their way through the beast's innards, surviving numerous deadly hazards and swarms of vicious parasites (which had already messily killed the team's rookie earlier), finding each of the Riftworm's three hearts and giving it a "chainsaw bypass" by chainsawing through the main arteries & veins, causing the previously-unstoppable mega-monster to bleed to death from the inside. And when the beast breaches to the surface in its death throes, the team cuts their way out of it.
• Delta squad decapitating a Brumak with razor wire.
• The final round of Beast Mode. You fight Prescott and a hell of a lot of Onyx Guards in your final effort to wipe out the Gears. You'd think that it's awesome enough that you've killed some of the best COG members ever (well, since you're playing the villain this time), but what does Prescott say right before you start the round?
  Prescott: Unity! Survival! BROTHERHOOD TO THE END!
• Getting through all 50 waves of Horde mode, especially so if you defeated all the waves in one sitting, never had a single player quit the match early and never suffered a Total Party Kill. The fact that 5 soldiers who refused to succumb to these beasts defeated the entire Locust Horde through sheer determination is one of the most awesome feats one can accomplish in the series. You beat the Locust back after 10 waves, so they think they can stop you if they thicken their skin to absorb twice as much damage. Not good enough. You slaughter them for the next 10 waves, so they practice aiming down the sights and double their accuracy because they think it'll help. Still not good enough. You kill even more grubs on the next set of waves. The Locust are getting desperate now, so they modify their weapons to deal twice as much damage because they're nervous they can't kill you otherwise. They'll have to do better than that! You still butcher them for 10 more waves and the end is in sight! Now, these genocidal monsters are down to their last throes and are scared shitless that you're about to drive them to extinction, so they re-double their training and throw every last unit they have at you while taking 2.5 times the damage, being 2.5 times as accurate and dealing 2.5 times the normal rate of damage. They're dreaming if they think that's gonna stop the COG! So, with your fellow Gears at your side, you make the final push, defeat the final Boss Wave and end the Locust War for good through your blood, sweat and tears. You're treated to a lovely banner displaying Queen Myrrah Defeated and Prescott's above quote to let you know that you and your squad carried the hope of humanity and earned your tomorrow. Brothers To The End, forever!
• Razor hail. The world of Sera further proves its Death World certification with hail in the form of high-velocity razor-sharp shards of ice plummeting from the sky, capable of ripping people into bloody shreds in seconds and damaging tank armor.
• The COG teaming up with their enemies from the the Pendulum Wars, the UIR, in the final battle against the Locust and Lambent.
• Gears 4, the gang's escape from the Locust burial site: the lift gears are about to crush everyone. Marcus just tells the others to "take 'em out!" And they pull it off right before the gears chew them up at high speed.
• For the finale of Gears 4, the old members of Delta Squad bring J.D. and Kait a pair of Humongous Mecha to pilot into the Swarm stronghold, complete with nigh-impenetrable armor, enormous guns that rapid-fire superheated staples, and the ability to call in precision missile strikes from the King Raven helicopter accompanying you. The mission ends with a fight against the single biggest enemy yet fought in a Gears of War game (discounting the Riftworm) and bringing it down. The fight culminates when J.D. rips the main rotor assembly from the now-downed helicopter and uses it as a brutal melee weapon to chop off the attacking Swarm Beast's main limbs and then buzzsaw its head in half down the middle.
• Playing as Sarah Conner or Emile-A239 in Horde mode in Gears 5.

---