The Fenix Rising DLC will hit Xbox Live on January 17 for 800 Microsoft Points, however it also comes as part of the Gears of War 3 Season Pass, this is still available now for 2400 Microsoft Points and will allow you to download the game’s first four add-ons, which means that you’ll save yourself 33% overall – you can find out more about the season pass and perhaps add it to your 360′s download queue here.

Once you’ve got the content you will be able to play Versus Multiplayer, Horde and Beast Mode on five new maps, these are Academy, Anvil, Depths, Escalation and The Slab, you can see a full overview of these maps over at GearsOfWar.com, also if you head over to GameRevolution you can see a screenshot from each map, we have embedded one of them below. Also if your scroll down to the bottom of this page you can see a flythrough of ‘The Slab’ map.

It’s not just new maps which you will get, dedicated players can also choose whether to “Re-Up” so they can rank up through level 100 multiple times, this allows players to reset experience and rank but keep other progression such as their TrueSkill rating. You will be able to “Re-Up” three times and each time you’ll earn a new rank color each time. Re-upping will also allow gamers to unlock exclusive emblems and weapon skins, these weapon skins are said to be Re-Up Plasma, Re-Up Omen and Re-Up Electric – there’s no other way to get these skins!

Will you buy this DLC when it hits Xbox Live?

That Battlefield 3 promotion we spoke about offered players some free dog tags simply by watching the Act of Valor movie trailer, but now Gears of Wars 3 players can participate in a similar promotion. The movie associated with this giveaway though is Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol and as you may have guessed, you’re going to have to take part in a mission impossible of your own if you want to win the swag.

The swag on offer is the Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol Weapon Skin Pack for Gears of War 3 and it consists of five weapon skins for the Lancer, Hammerburst, Retro Lancer, Gnasher Shotgun, and Sawed-off Shotgun. To win, you have to watch the Mission Impossible: Ghost Procotol movie trailer on Xbox Live and then complete Horde mode or the Gears of War 3 campaign on ‘insane’ difficulty. Those of you that have the game will agree that this is no easy task, but you will have until December 25th to complete your mission.

If you try and fail to complete Horde mode, you’ll still be put into a prize draw to win some pretty tasty goodies, including a 50-inch TV, Xbox 360 console with Kinect and much more. If you’re simply a beast and have already completed the game or Horde mode on Insane, you’ll receive this pack for free on December 31st, as reported from GameRant.

As for the movie itself, Tom Cruise will be donning his M.I attire again on December 21st. If you’re interested, look out for the trailer on Xbox Live soon to begin your mission. If you do own Gears 3 and haven’t beat the game on Insane yet, this is well worth a shot as there’s some great prizes up for grabs. On a side note, we’re loving the creativity of this movie-game DLC offer – we hope there are much more promotions like this in 2012 – an Avengers one for example would be fantastic.

Have you beat the game on Insane yet? If so, what tips would you give players who are going to attempt this mission?

There is now the new spectator mode option that has been added to private versus matches for broadcasting by gaming leagues. Now one player from each team can choose the spectator mode during the setting up of a match. Now matches will be four versus four with two spectators, and now you have the option of disabling the HUD during multiplayer games for machinima and video creators.

There is also a number of Exploit fixes that include the Onyx Field Engineer medal can no longer be prestige among others. The update is bringing with it a big number of general fixes as well that include during Horde if there is a host migration the match will resume at the same wave. There are potential fixes for the rare lost progress issue and the rare profile freezing issue.

Now the Beast leader board screen will no longer refresh while sending challenges and the game will still pause in the Beast, Campaign, and Horde. Epic have said they will launch the Versus Booster Map Pack for the game on November 24th. This will come with two maps that have been refreshed from Gears of War 1, Clocktower and Swamp, as well as Azura, Rustlung and Blood Drive.

For all the new content head over to Epic and let us know if you have already downloaded the update and how it went.

A tweet posted a few hours again can be seen here, it reads “The scheduled Horde Command Pack release for Gears 3 is temporarily delayed due to a tech issue. Updates here! http://epic.gm/dlcupdate”. The link in the tweet takes you to a forum post which was written by Epic Games’ community manager, Will Kinsler, here’s what he said:

The scheduled Horde Command Pack release for Gears of War 3 is temporarily delayed due to a technical issue. We apologize to those of you who are anxiously awaiting to play. We know this is disappointing news as we’ve seen a lot of posts today showing excitement for this content. We have folks working around the clock to resolve this issue ASAP so you can all play and enjoy the Command Pack.

The Epic Games Community team will stick around and keep you posted with any further information. Stay tuned for updates!

If you check out the forum post for yourself you will see that there have been 85 pages of replies (at the time of this post), which just goes to show how much of a stir this news is causing. Obviously some people will be frustrated, but let’s face it, it’s better to delay something like this rather than rushing out content which is not up to scratch.

We looked into things a little further and it looks like the delay is due to a “backend issue and not with the game code” (see here), some people are suggesting that this is a posh way of saying that this means some of the DLC was already on the game’s disc, also people think that the content will now arrive within a couple of days – however this has not yet been officially confirmed.

Do you mind that this content has been delayed?

Update: This DLC is now available on Xbox Live, you can add it to your 360′s download queue for just 800 Microsoft Points here.

So what do you get for your money? Well to start with you get a new campaign experience which should last well over three hours, the plot is said to take place after the events of the original Gears of War game and we are told that you should expect new characters, some of which are “eerily familiar to the series”.

This DLC will also bring six new multiplayer characters, the Chocolate Weapon Set and 250 Gamerscore points for you to achieve, we don’t have a full breakdown of the achievements which you must aim for just yet, but we expect plenty of blood and guts along the way. The reaction on Twitter suggests that you may be able to play as RAAM in the DLC, we cannot confirm this just yet, but it sounds very likely.

Currently these are all the details we have for the DLC, but at least we know when it arrives, how much it will cost and exactly what it consists of – we are sure that as it gets closer to the launch date we will find out more about RAAM’s Shadow, perhaps we will get some trailers and screenshots – we hope so!

Will you buy RAAM’s shadow?

Lee Perry, the man behind designing GoW 3 has been sharing details with OXM, and seems to have a thing for the shotgun, having used them in many games they can do a job well, but would you want to go around using the same weapon – talk about boring? We do worry that Gears of War 3 (here’s list of mutators) is a game about Gnashers, but this is a personal opinion, will be interesting to see what weapon you will prefer.

Fans of the game fear that there is not a balance between rifles and shotguns, but one thing is certain, you will need to change your tactics when playing. However, this has raised a question that those who are so used to using a Gnasher will be able to wipe the floor with a player with hardly no skill at all, as this would become boring in multiplayer – isn’t this the same with every game like this?

However, what Gears of War 3 will do is make you better as a player, as you are forced too. No longer can you run around and kill a person that is much better than you, you need to earn that right. However, a one-weapon game does not sound that interesting to me, how about you?

Quite often when people try to play a splitscreen horde mode game with two profiles loaded the freeze occurs, but this video also shows a similar thing happening when a gamer tries to run any versus mode quick match – as you can imagine the problem is very annoying.

The Epic Games developers have been busy on the forums trying to get to the bottom of the problem, however haven’t yet given an indication as to when such issues will be rolled-out over Xbox Live, here is what one Epic representative had to say on the matter:

“Getting this resolved is a priority for Epic. We are collecting information internally, sourcing as much as possible from the community and exploring potential fixes. We do not have any recommendations to share with players just yet”

To help Epic Games diagnose the problem you should head over to the forums and answer the questionnaire, there have been 101 pages of replies so far, so it looks like the problem is quite common. The topic was originally addressed on September 27, therefore Epic’s dev team has had roughly two weeks to pinpoint and resolve the problem, hopefully we will hear something useful regarding the matter soon.

For now we would like to hear from you regarding the matter, has GoW 3 freezed for you? If so, have you noticed any pattern as to when it freezes? Let us know in the comments section. Here’s some reactions we spotted on Twitter:

Ythelastmatt – Dear Gears of War 3, please stop freezing and being so fucking buggy, I just want to enjoy and beat you before arkham city comes out. Thnx

kcirtaPDelgado – Bad News: My Gears of War 3 disc froze during a pivotal moment in the game. Good News: I was angry enough to finally turn Super Saiyan.

These easter eggs come to us thanks to a guide in this article, although not all of them involve chickens. We’ve embedded a couple of the videos below this article that show you how to find the easter eggs.

The first video lets you battle a golden chicken in act one on chapter one, which is found after you raise the lift for the incoming chopper. Clear out the enemies on the ship’s deck and then look for the circular vents, walk up to each of the four and wait for Marcus to call out each time, and then a chicken will pop out after you done the last one. After hitting him you’ll see him turn into a man-sized chicken that breathes fire, now battle this scary fella.

Something a little less bizarre can be found in act one on chapter one, during the cutscene with Jace. When you walk up to a vending machine and click X to kick the machine and you’ll get some mints, leave these in the tray when Marcus asks for his turn, and then you’ll get infinity mints.

You can see all the videos and what each one does here, or just watch a sample of videos below this article. Do you notice any Gears of War 3 easter eggs missing, if so please share?

There will be a campaign DLC that much is true, but from what Cliff Bleszisnki from the Gears franchise has been saying, the story could disappoint. It seems that there will be no Delta Squad, so do not expect to see Marcus and Dom. However, Bleszinski did tell The Telegraph that the story will be unique – this could be a positive for the game.

Take the Call of Duty franchise; what has zombies got to do with the standard campaign – yet that still works? We just hope that the first DLC for Gears of War 3 will not feature zombies when released in November – that idea has been done to death now? Having said that, Bleszinski did say unique, so will be something very different to what we have seen done in the past.

The first batch of Gears of War 3 reviews have already started to show up, and from what we can see has been very positive. However, we cannot get away from the feeling that this game will be treated as a stop gap just until next month comes, which is when Battlefield 3 sees its release – oh, and let’s not forget Modern Warfare 3 in November. That’s the same month as the first GoW 3 DLC.

Some people still want to compare the stories and graphics of Gears of War 3 (a release date of September 20), and Uncharted 3 (release of November 2). Without getting into the graphics, let’s look at the stories for both of these franchises.

One author on Velocity Gamer feels that GoW has a lot better story lines, and explains, in their blog post here, that the shooting mechanics are better in Gears while the graphics are better in Uncharted, but how did they get to the story conclusion?

They found that the games are pretty even when it comes to acting, even though Gears has a lot of cursing, which is seen as justified when you’re battling a monstrous enemy. We’ll have to agree that “less” can be a lot more, and that the Gears of War 3 trailer said more in the quiet moments like when Dom lays back with his eyes closed ready to give up, and then Marcus saves him as if to say get up and fight, all without a word being said. If the full game continues with this approach it will mean a lot with how the feelings of the game are passed on. Most players will already prefer the stories of their favorite game, and as such will have a favorite in Gears of War or Uncharted.

Other opinions we’ve heard include feelings that Uncharted 3 mainly has just graphics going for it, and the franchise is one of the most overrated. Which game do you think will have the better story, Gears of War 3 or Uncharted 3?