What do you get when you put a bunch of eagerly waiting gamers in a room with a Gears of War screen displayed on all the monitors? Probably drool. But what do you get when you tell them they get to play the multiplayer that they haven’t even really talked about til now? Sheer utter joy!

The multiplayer is a team based combat that plays just like the normal game does during single player. Though it is team based, you are still free to run around and put your own plan into action…which is of course how I play. I beat to the sound of my own drummer.

Ideally though, you’ll want to play as a team so that way you can plan together and flush the opposing team into corners so you can easily gun them down…or chainsaw…but enough about the love of my life for now. We didn’t do voice chat, but we basically knew, “Don’t shoot friend…kill others.” So we always started out the same…running straight for the first cover, but then one guy would go this way, one guy would go there, and I’d be jumping from cover to cover like a mad fool.

The A-button is a joy in this game, as it does several different functions and it worked every time. The A-button will make you run when you hold it down (doing an even more awesome job of the shaky cam run last seen in GRAW), make you dive for cover, and it also places you behind cover…you can also jump from cover to cover if they are close enough.

True story…when we started playing I was the first to die. Yeah, frown face me. I can’t believe I was first. I got into the groove though and it wasn’t long before everyone was “ooohing” and “aaaahing” me as I did but the first of many lovely and brutal chainsaw kills. But you will have to wait for that tid bit a bit more.

It was so thrilling to move about these environments as it really felt like a war between me and my evil spawn against the humans. It was basically a city street scenario where one group started on one side, the other on the other, and chaos and blood ran well in the middle. There were two buildings and stairwells that provided great lookout positions for snipers…too bad we all sucked at that job. There were also a ton of turned over cars that we liked to run around and hide behind. The real fun was when one player hid behind one, didn’t see the other sneak up the other side, and then it was a chainsaw to the face…just a little longer I promise.

The gameplay was smooth and I didn’t see a single instance of slowdown or choppiness. We only got to play for about 20 minutes, but it was already the most fun I’ve ever had on Live. It was just so thrilling and fast paced, but yet there was strategy involved too as you had to plan your moves, hide behind cover, and other such plans of action.

The weapons involved a regular machine gun type weapon, these hurling grenades you spun around, and a rocket launcher. As for the chainsaw…NOW!

Easily the most fun and rewarding scenario involved charging down the B-button to rev that chainsaw up, but unlike the guy charging it up you were actually afraid whenever you were on the other end. When you use the chainsaw attached to your machine gun, you get this really gory and up close cinema of your character just cutting the heck out of the other player, and beautiful red blood spurts wonderfully. I loved killing people this way! My favorite moment was when an opponent was shooting at one of my teammates, I was hid behind the cover right to his side, and I ran up to him and sliced and diced him to pieces. Yes, dear readers, that is a tear of joy.

Oh yeah, the sound was amazing and the graphics the best yet I’ve seen on the Xbox 360…but come on! Chainsaw baby!