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After putting some serious hours into Gears 5 early access this weekend, here’s our verdict following Monday’s commercial release.
Xbox buffs rejoice, the fifth instalment of Mirosoft’s chef d’oeuvre is finally here. Gears – formerly known as Gears of War – was the sole influence for my switch from PlayStation to Xbox back in the mid noughties, and sat here over ten years later I can wholeheartedly say I haven’t made a better decision in my life, tragic as that may sound.
That revelation will probably upset a lot of close family members and friends, but that’s how it be. We’re talking about Gears people.
~ I’ll try my best to be impartial here, promise ~
Multiplayer
With any game review you’d typically start with the campaign first, but let’s be honest, no one’s bought a Gears game for the single player since Judgement.
Gears just offers a multiplayer experience like no other. Its unrelenting pace, close quarter combat, and gorgeously visceral executions have kept gamers returning to the franchise for over a decade, and the fundamentals of the original are still very much in play two console gens later.
If you’re familiar with the franchise, you won’t find many radical differences with the mechanics. What you will find is that they’ve been refined and polished enough to eradicate long spanning issues, opening the game up to a whole new audience.
If you were an avid player of previous games, you’ll recall you could pretty much walk through enemies at will. There were nuances and patterns to win gnasher battles 99 percent of the time, and while several of them still work in the new game, previous blind spots in damage output and bullet registration have been largely cleared up.
Now even novice players have a good chance of defeating the lobby’s table toppers, provided they land their shots. Movement and shooting just flow better in general – it’s less clunky and feels next gen. As an avid ‘wallbouncer’ (yuck, apologies) no one’s more chuffed than I with Coalition’s emphasis on movement.
As expected, we have a new assortment of OP power weapons to spoil our adversaries’ killstreaks, and though there aren’t too many maps at launch, they’re fun and entertaining enough to keep us coming back. My personal favourite is Icebound, which features a melee weapon similar to Halo’s gravity hammer, and destructive ice, which damages those who run over the cracks.
Campaign
~ This is entirely spoiler free ~
The single player in Gears of War 4 served as a decent change of pace from the multiplayer, but for most of us it was somewhat of a chore – something to do when our pals weren’t online, or to grind out achievements we needed to max the game. I confess I’ve yet to finish this new campaign, but so far it already feels like an improvement on its predecessor.
The Coalition tries to dig further into the ‘human’ element this time around: the politics behind the carnage, the controversial decisions of the COG, and their impact on the world around them. The only drawback is that we haven’t formed affinities with the new bunch like we did with the flawed heroes of Delta-Squad.
There’s still time for them to build meaningful stories and flesh out the current crop, but it doesn’t feel like they’re on the right track. There’s a little too much levity in place of the morbid and affecting stories that endeared us to Marcus & Co in the past. Gears 5 churns out comic moments aplenty, but for me it just feels a little ill-placed in this universe; the vision of the original stories have been skewed.
That being said a super strong narrative isn’t Gears’ selling point. The series has never tried to be something it isn’t, and it knows where its strengths lie: backs to the wall combat, huge bosses, and littering battlefields with hundreds of thousands of bullet casings. Thankfully, these have returned in abundance. Oh yeh, and there’s COG tags again… shock!
Structurally, the game bears similarities to Metro Exodus, using open-ended maps to enhance the sense of adventure rather than offering true freedom.
Each map has a handful of side-activities, all of which revolve around combat. Whether you’re plundering an abandoned mine or helping a group of desert nomads get their water pumps, the missions are fun and provide some stand out moments. It’s a refreshing addition to the old formula.
