With Gears of War 3 hitting the stores several weeks ago, we’ve finally been able to get our hands on this new shooter video game ourselves. But before we could try the game, we had a chance to inspect the sweet Gears of War 3 Xbox 360 Limited Edition console bundle.

Priced at $399.99, it’s everything the GoW3 gamer could want, including a painted console that’s exclusively loaded with game sounds that play when you press the power or eject buttons. It comes with a huge 320GB detachable hard-drive plus two Gears of War 3-themed wireless controllers. As a final bonus, the bundle includes downloadable content vouchers for weapon skins.

If you’re not in the market for a new console, you can buy the GoW3 console skin for $14.99 on Amazon, and a matching controller for $59.99 to get the same effect.

But what about the game? To be honest, we found the first version a little clunky, particularly the main character’s movement. However, GoW3 is far more polished, making it considerably more playable in our opinion.

As a third-person shooter, you’re more aware of the character’s movement and this time it’s more natural, more fluid. There’s still a weight to his movements to reflect the gear he’s carrying, but the motion feels more instinctive and frankly less frustrating.

Just as appealing are the lush, detailed surroundings that still include many interactive elements to open doors, collect weapons, etc. Again, it looks completely realistic, if we can imagine what a war-torn planet in the future might look like. Elements in the game appear to have solidity, so you want to vault boxes and ledges, or seek cover behind walls.

All this fancy programming would mean nothing if the action was sloppy. Fortunately, the improvements are spread across the entire game, so the storyline unfolds at a natural pace that has a degree of problem-solving as you’re led from one fight to the next, rescuing one hopeless situation after another.

The weapons, as always, have lots of scope for death and destruction. They deliver with great sounds and the impact feels right. The ability to switch weapons is still there, with lots of specialized armaments to get the job done.

While you can sometimes feel restricted by a game’s interrupting storyline that restricts your movement to certain tasks and areas, Gears of War 3 seems to strike a nice balance between the ability to wreak havoc wherever you go while still completing missions.

We’d like to see the locust enemy fall more easily with some one-shot head kills, but GoW is more about blasting away to get the job done than using finesse.

Although we’re only partway through the game, the comfortable pace has kept us coming back for repeat performances.

We’ve not yet tried the four-player co-op mode but enjoy the online multiplayer, particularly in deathmatch, which actually seems to encourage a degree of teamwork to succeed – something other FPS could perhaps learn from…