If you're someone who enjoys both the gameplay and story of Epic's Gears of War series, you might want to avoid any Gears-tagged YouTube videos for the next little while, as the single-player portion of the forthcoming Gears of War 3 was reportedly leaked, which has lead to a number of spoiler-laden vids hitting the Tubes over the weekend.

"We have seen the reports of Gears of War 3 content being propped on the Web and working closely with our security teams and law enforcement to address the situation," Microsoft told IGN. "This content is not from a final build and is not representative of what fans will enjoy when the game launches."

According to reports, the release doing the torrent rounds is an early developer build intended specifically to work on Xbox 360 debugs and its not known if this came from within Microsoft Game Studios, or Epic themselves, though Microsoft does have a track record of leaks like this plaguing them.

Gears of War 3 is due to arrive exclusively on Xbox 360 this September.