A generation-appropriate Gears game! Woo! Despite my one mission for 2019 being to replay the Halo series, I have instead finished up the Gears series. Luckily a new Gears is coming out literal days after I have finished the fourth game and an actual day as I type this, so its nice to be on top of things for a little while.
To the game - it is now more than 20 years post the ending of Gears 3, and the world has settled into something like an uneasy peace. The game starts with a rally thanking the Gears for their service during the E-day wars, and we get a neat flashback of E-day itself and Gears freaking the fuck out as monsters emerge from the ground to destroy the ground plus a short intro with Dom during the pre-E wars as a faceless Gear. Was actually a pretty neat way to start things (and introduce the premise to new players) but I thought we'd get a little more actual relevance to the main plot for this but... no dice. Dom is basically never mentioned as far as I could tell for the entire rest of the game, which is a bit disappointing.
So anyway, we meet some new, younger folks JD, Kait and That One Other Guy (his name is Del, I looked him up) who are 'invading' a COG outpost for a fabricator for their outlaw village. We get to know this new crew for a whole chapter of fighting robots, which in a way was pretty cool - we get some world and character building, new guns (which I actually liked!! No more Hammerburst/Shotgun combo the ENTIRE GAME) neat environments, new enemies... Unfortunately it definitely goes on a bit too long, and the stakes for this heist are never really spelled out or shown in any effective way so it just sort of feels "Calm Before the storm" which got a bit tiring.
At the end of the chapter you get to do a new defensive mini-game that pops up a few times in the campaign, which frankly kind of sucked a bit? The controls for this TPS are not made to place defensive structures. It needed to pop out to an RTS map or something to make it better. Also the actual things you build are kind of useless, you do all the heavy lifting anyway. After this, your village gets kidnapped by some kind of monsters that are deliberately hidden (is it the locust? But I thought they were all dead!) and we find out that our main character JD is actually Marcus's son!! They head to get him and we get even more of that old surly bastard.
There's a long chase sequence after that of trying to get Marcus back after he's abducted, which also goes on way too long, but at least it is plot relevant and gives our new characters a chance to show their stuff so overall I liked it. There's some decent character stuff with Marcus and JD, but not enough with everyone else. Like, we learn that Del and Marcus are actually super close (Del had Marcus's doorag!) but we don't really know what they bonded over or hear any stories. Marcus and Kait bond over trauma, and there's a LOT unspoken between Marcus and JD but we never actually get to hear it, or even get to see it healed between them. Sadly the story ends on a bit of a cliffhanger of sorts with our main threat left more or less entirely un-dealt-with. But that's kind of Gears in a nutshell I guess right?
There's a very nice ending sequence for the last chapter where a lot of the old cast shows up for One Last Hurrah (and some fucking sweet giant mechs to play around in) which is great, I just wanted a bit more development from the new folks. The new enemies meanwhile... not sure how I feel about them. The locust definitely needed to get gone, they're too boring of an enemy now after 3 games and the lambent frankly sucked the whole time. The new guys being 50/50 monsters v. men is neat, but the monster enemies never felt super interesting to fight. I'm interested to see where things go gameplay/enemy wise from here.
Definitely not up to par with the previous entries, it does feel a bit more cohesive in narrative and character however and provides a good stepping stone for the rest of the series going forward. Looking forward to putting my Gears 5 review in here soon!
To the game - it is now more than 20 years post the ending of Gears 3, and the world has settled into something like an uneasy peace. The game starts with a rally thanking the Gears for their service during the E-day wars, and we get a neat flashback of E-day itself and Gears freaking the fuck out as monsters emerge from the ground to destroy the ground plus a short intro with Dom during the pre-E wars as a faceless Gear. Was actually a pretty neat way to start things (and introduce the premise to new players) but I thought we'd get a little more actual relevance to the main plot for this but... no dice. Dom is basically never mentioned as far as I could tell for the entire rest of the game, which is a bit disappointing.
So anyway, we meet some new, younger folks JD, Kait and That One Other Guy (his name is Del, I looked him up) who are 'invading' a COG outpost for a fabricator for their outlaw village. We get to know this new crew for a whole chapter of fighting robots, which in a way was pretty cool - we get some world and character building, new guns (which I actually liked!! No more Hammerburst/Shotgun combo the ENTIRE GAME) neat environments, new enemies... Unfortunately it definitely goes on a bit too long, and the stakes for this heist are never really spelled out or shown in any effective way so it just sort of feels "Calm Before the storm" which got a bit tiring.
At the end of the chapter you get to do a new defensive mini-game that pops up a few times in the campaign, which frankly kind of sucked a bit? The controls for this TPS are not made to place defensive structures. It needed to pop out to an RTS map or something to make it better. Also the actual things you build are kind of useless, you do all the heavy lifting anyway. After this, your village gets kidnapped by some kind of monsters that are deliberately hidden (is it the locust? But I thought they were all dead!) and we find out that our main character JD is actually Marcus's son!! They head to get him and we get even more of that old surly bastard.
There's a long chase sequence after that of trying to get Marcus back after he's abducted, which also goes on way too long, but at least it is plot relevant and gives our new characters a chance to show their stuff so overall I liked it. There's some decent character stuff with Marcus and JD, but not enough with everyone else. Like, we learn that Del and Marcus are actually super close (Del had Marcus's doorag!) but we don't really know what they bonded over or hear any stories. Marcus and Kait bond over trauma, and there's a LOT unspoken between Marcus and JD but we never actually get to hear it, or even get to see it healed between them. Sadly the story ends on a bit of a cliffhanger of sorts with our main threat left more or less entirely un-dealt-with. But that's kind of Gears in a nutshell I guess right?
There's a very nice ending sequence for the last chapter where a lot of the old cast shows up for One Last Hurrah (and some fucking sweet giant mechs to play around in) which is great, I just wanted a bit more development from the new folks. The new enemies meanwhile... not sure how I feel about them. The locust definitely needed to get gone, they're too boring of an enemy now after 3 games and the lambent frankly sucked the whole time. The new guys being 50/50 monsters v. men is neat, but the monster enemies never felt super interesting to fight. I'm interested to see where things go gameplay/enemy wise from here.
Definitely not up to par with the previous entries, it does feel a bit more cohesive in narrative and character however and provides a good stepping stone for the rest of the series going forward. Looking forward to putting my Gears 5 review in here soon!