Gears of War 2 Lancer Assault Rifle Replica

Gears of War 2 is a very hot current video game from Epic Games, playable on the Xbox 360. It's a third-person shooter (meaning you see the world from a camera behind the back of your character) and shoot things up while traveling through the story of a military conflict on a human-inhabited planet infested with the Locust Horde, a collection of aliens who have emerged onto the surface of the planet and begun their genocide of the human population. You can play solo or, connected to the internet, with up to 10 people at a time. Using various advanced weapons, the soldiers of Delta Squad take on these menaces and try to save humanity. But this is not a review of the game.

NECA has produced an Amazon.com-exclusive 36-inch 1:1 scale replica of one of the best-known weapons in the game, the Lancer chainsaw assaut rifle. This rifle has the ability to rapid-fire rounds, but it also comes with a chainsaw bayonet.

The replica is not terribly heavy, for its size—it weighs in at about 13 pounds but doesn't feel so heavy. Made from high-impact plastics, it's mostly hollow, with few workings to give it heft.

The rifle can be bundled with a copy of the game and was originally made available on Amazon.com for $139.99 plus the cost of the regular or the limited edition of the game.

This weapon is molded mostly in silver plastic to mimic metal, and for that purpose the silver plastic looks good. Some parts are painted in a flat black. Some blue represents parts that I believe light up in-game.

The rifle takes three C batteries and has several moving parts, not to mention clear plastic sights and hand-painted details, including a heck of a lot of blood around the chainsaw in particular.

A side-handle hinges outward and can be used to hold the weapon. This slides back almost like a bolt-action.

Underneath the weapon, a hinged section flips forward, allowing the removal of the large clip. The clip is empty, and no real rounds are represented. Underneath the clip is another double-hinged lever piece that seems to serve no purpose other than to hold the clip in place.

Bloody great gear

There are several problems with this Lancer replica, especially if you read the user reviews at Amazon.com. The first is a universal issue with the battery connections. NECA has issued a report that a small plastic piece in the battery compartment was inadvertently reversed in production, meaning that three C batteries, once in place, never reach the metal contact point at one end. A simple solution many reviewers reported was a piece of tin foil to force the connection. NECA has an offer to mail out replacement parts designed to fix this issue, caused, apparently, by the fact that C batteries in Asia have longer leads and fit the original design without problems.

But for those who paid $139.99 for this, this is a glaring problem with the design.

The hinged pieces are fine, but I'm not sure how strong the side bolt is. While it flips out to allow you to hold the weapon, I'm not sure how much stress this joint will take, and I'm not recommending people swing this thing around much by that part.

To me, one of the main drawbacks to the design is the lack of sufficient space between the handgrip and the chainsaw blade housing. A normal-sized male adult hand has a hard time fitting in if gripping the gun normally. The chainsaw housing bites into the backs of the holder's fingers. For those with thicker fingers, this must be worse.

The clip action is quite nice. Pushing forward the larger clip housing, then pulling the clip, works fine. The seemingly useless clip lever, however, seems to be just a design element that probably works well in-game but has no real purpose on the real replica.

The blood paint is nice, but one of the first things I noticed was that when the clip is removed to reveal the inner portion of the (immovable) blade chain, it is pristine and shiny. There certainly needs to be blood in there, as the whole chain would be covered in blood if it were a real chainsaw.

Pulling the trigger rotates a motor that vibrates loudly but does not sound overly like a rusty metal chainsaw, as it does in-game. This could have been done far better by using an electronic sample of the in-game sound effect, along with the vibrating motor.

The barrel is also far shorter on this model than in the game models, from which this item was modeled.

It seems a shame that such a good idea was executed so poorly. Fans of Gears of War 2 will really want this weapon, but at this or any reasonable price, it should just be better. Design flaws should have been fixed before release, and it should fit the hand better.

As a visual piece it still is quite nice, but let's get serious here. No one's buying it to nail it to a wall. People are going to be playing with it, and that's where it falls down.