Maybe some spoilers.
Gears of War 3 can be described as, at best, ham-fisted. It's a fun enough game, but it really falls apart when it tries to be emotional (ie the hilarious ending) or say something other than shooting aliens is good (ie the hilarious energy crisis message.) No one is playing Gears of War to be told that we are being destroyed by the very fuel we use to survive. Gasp. However, there is something in this game I found interesting, which I'm sure they never intended to be in the game. All of the enemies in the game are organic. Of course, the humans in the game are technically organic in that they probably have organs, but the Locust and especially the Lambent are all inextricably linked to living tissue and a world outside of technology. The Gears of War franchise seems to be making a statement against organic life, in some ways, or at least makes it a point to cast it in a bad light. Sound a bit far-fetched? Don't worry, baby, I brought proof.
Let's start with the Locust, as the are the main villains of the series no matter what the last game says. The Locust, at first glance, are just like the humans. Well, ok, they look very different, but they use guns, are bipedal and even speak English so in the grand scheme of things they are very much like us. Yes, the ordinary Locust Grunt is very humanoid, but what about their heavy weapons. Where as humans use ships and artillery and all manner of technological achievements, the Locust fly around on Reavers and use giant plant-like creatures as AA guns. This is even more obvious as the series progresses, with the introduction of Blood Mounts and Gas Barges, both of which utilize organic life in their operation. It could be argued that The Locust then are subjugating these life forms, making them the real threat to organisms everywhere. However, it never seems that these creatures aren't choosing to help their overlords. The Reavers alone could easily turn on their masters and free themselves. Why not? They're huge, they fly and they're deadly. Nothing is stopping them except, perhaps, loyalty.
Even if you don't buy the Locust being a symbol of organic life, the Lambent have to be seen that way. Everything about them except for their guns is a twisting, writhing mass of tissue. The Stalks from which they are born are organic and die, the monsters themselves are these weird mutating pinnacles of evolution and even the Emulsion from which they are born is alive. Epic decided that the Emulsion, a fuel source, was actually a parasitic organism which was turning Locust and humans into Lambent. It seems to me that this is an unnecessary comment on the energy crisis, but it also would make Emulsion the single largest organism, or perhaps more appropriately the colony of organisms, of which humanity could know. The player alone has seen vast pools of Emulsion throughout the series. Emulsion and the Lambent kind of personify the idea of organic life. It is evolution sped up and given form. Of course it's parasitic and destructive, but organic life can be that way sometimes. It's just how the cards fall. The fact that everything about the Lambent expect the guns are organic makes it kind of difficult to ignore.
None of this would matter, however, if the humans in the game were...well...particularly human. If they showed more signs of being alive, it could be easy to see this as just a battle between two life forms. It almost seems as if Epic has tried their hardest to make them look engineered, though. Most of what you see of them are their suits because of the weirdly round back and the third-person camera that the game employs. Even when you can see their body, the proportions are so wrong that it's hard to identify with them as human. No human save the man who's arms exploded has ever looked like the characters in this game. Add on a robotic disposition and dialogue and you've got the makings of an automaton, even if they are technically human. It doesn't help that they are always employing tech. The Hammer of Dawn, the ships they live on, the lifeless cities they build; none of it seems very human. In the third game, you even climb into mechs despite the fact that The Matrix Revolutions proved that introducing mech battles into the third installment of a series is a bad idea. Of course, I've only focused on the Gears, I've neglected to talk about the Stranded. Stranded are civilians in the game who live in little communes. They have no technology, making them the most organic humans in the game, and they are total dickwads. They're always mean to the Gears for no reason; they're unhelpful, ungrateful and generally shifty. They are the worst characters in the game, and yet they're the only humans without a gun and who look like humans. It's a weird standard. The protagonists are murderous robots who barely count as people and the enemy are the almost too organic life forms who actually use their tissues as weapons.
Gears is not the first game to employ this strange motif, of course. The Necromorphs in Dead Space are like this as are the Zerg in Starcraft and zombies in the multitudes of zombie games. It's also appeared in movies like The Thing and most notably Starship Troopers. I don't know exactly why this is, but I'm not sure I like it. I get that it's easy to scale up enemies when you can make them small monsters or big monsters without having to worry about the difficulties of fighting advanced technology or something, but it's still a little Skynet-y to have a game tell me that living things are bad. Not all games are this way, obviously, and Mass Effect is actively opposed to this idea by making an inorganic life form the enemy. It's just a trend I'm noticing that seems odd.
As a side note, I love video games, but I will never be a traitor to organic life. Just wanted to make sure everyone knows that. Sorry Gears.
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