And that's variation. After nightfall, you have to approach your encounters differently. And after that you'll drive a SF jeep. And then the enemies will change. You do different things, in different settings.

The only place where the gameflow breaks is exactly where the PC version brings something new: 5 additional singleplayer chapters, designed to fill in the obvious blanks from the 360 version. Quite honestly, it doesn't fill in anything, but at least you get to fight a pretty damn cool boss. Also, I understand leaving story elements out for the sequel, but Epic takes this a bit too far, the most obvious example being Fenix's background, hinted in a quite a number of events, which remains unknown until the game ends, and you're none the wiser.

Moving on, the main campaign was clearly thought out with cooperative play in mind. And, as we all know, coop is the best thing in the universe, ever, which makes the package even more attractive. Mediocre games can be saved by coop; Gears of War is a good game, with great coop, so it's even better.

Speaking of the full experience, if you want to tackle the multiplayer aspect of the game, together with coop, you need Windows Live (the Xbox counterpart of Live for the PC), which is basically an unified system for matchmaking, friends lists, text and voice messaging, all in one. Live is great on the Xbox, but on the PC it's trying to do something which might not be appreciated by many people: pay to get all the options. You can play online for free, but if you want multiplayer achievements, ranked matches and more host options you need the Live Gold membership. And that costs money. If I can understand some sort of subscription for the 360, having this on the PC is a bit exaggerated. Also, LAN play isn't present.

There are a few multiplayer modes, which allow up to 8 players in the same game. I suppose the online mode isn't for everyone. It's not exactly a FPS, and it's not exactly a 3rd person shooter, either. Still, it's worth giving it a shot.

Finally, the tech.
I think it's safe to say that if Crysis didn't exist, Gears would have been the best looking game to date, on any platform. This feat is even more impressing when you realise this game is already a year old, too.

Gears of War looks great because of the excellent art design, the beautiful vistas, the insanely detailed characters, and simply because you had a year to drool over the 360 screenshots; there's nothing new I can say about it.
Putting both versions side to side, it's hard to declare a winner. The PC has the higher resolutions, and you can apply anisotropic filtering, which makes quite a difference. The 360 has _slightly_ better lighting and character models, plus the self shadows, which seem to be more detailed on the console. All in all, both versions look absolutely gorgeous. Obviously, all the prettiness comes at a cost, but I suppose that's nothing new. If you want smooth framerates at the level of quality shown in the screenshots, nothing less than a dual core CPU, 2 gigs of Ram and 8800 or HD2900 will do.

Steep, but then again, it's worth it.
Graphics related, Gears can run in DirectX10. The lame thing about this that the game will look exactly the same on both APIs, but the performance drop will be huge. Not to mention that you can't enable FSAA unless you're running DX10, which seems like a cheap marketing decision for upgrading to Vista.
Fortunately, the sound is also equally good. The music is great, the voice acting is brutal, and convincing.

So, this is it. The drooling is over, everyone can play Gears of War. If you like action games, and your computer can handle it, there's no excuse not to play it, and most importantly, play it in coop. It's worth every single penny.

Hmm, a bit more enthusiastic than I expected.