Occasionally I find myself in a situation when an insanely popular game or a franchise in a genre that I tend to like a lot, something that seems to be loved by most who like similar games, is just not working for me. Gears of War has been such a franchise – despite always having a soft spot for third person action titles, with or without adventure or platforming elements, I never cared about it. I did finish the original, on PC, I did try playing 2 and 3 on a friend’s 360 (personally never owned any Xbox consoles and don’t plan to) and got bored pretty quickly. Games had a certain feel to them, their flair of cinematic was really good and some of the ideas in them were absolutely brilliant, but I had no desire to play them.
I suppose, after so many years of not playing this type of TPS, as they going out of fashion at the start of this decade, and perhaps partially because I enjoyed replaying Mass Effect titles a year ago, I found myself wanting to play Gears 5 (they dropped the “of War” part with this one). And so I have, as usual completely ignoring multiplayer, horde mode and all the rest of the online components, though, unfortunately, coop as well. And overall, my experience with the story campaign of Gears 5, played solo, was quite surprising. Not amazing, but surprising and very much not bad.
Just in case you’re not familiar, Gears (of War) is a series of third person shooters with the over the shoulder view, importance of using cover (the original game popularized this concept) and chainsaws attached to guns. Also “active reload”, where you can reload guns faster if you time the reload button press again during the animation, which is still a really cool feature. Events of the games take place on a colonized planet which, for a long time, was ravaged by conflicts and wars between different human colonist factions until a new completely alien species attacked from within the planet somewhat unifying the human race against the new threat. That war and its resolution were the focus of the original trilogy of games (and a side-story Judgement), whereas the 4th and 5th games take place several decades of (mostly) peace later when a new threat arises, except maybe it’s an old threat but evolved. It’s all very militaristic, with the “good guys” being quite openly fascist and somewhat reminiscent of the Starship Troopers and, probably even more obviously, not entirely unlike what you may find in Warhammer 40k lore.
Which has always been part of my issue with the series and why I didn’t really get attached to it. It always had some satirical and dark undertones when talking about the events in this game world, but it placed far more emphasis on the coolness of it all, big explosions, cool one-liners, exciting violence and not much more. And the games’ storylines were incredibly primitive as well, feeling more like seasons of a cool action sci-fi TV show, rather than something that has a definitive arc and an ending. They’re simply not designed to tell a story that can be taken as its own thing but rather are designed as an ongoing franchise from the outset.
Gears 5 doesn’t really change it all that much, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that far more time and effort was spent on building on the “world lore” and characters, with a lot of time spent on the themes, on the dark aspects of military conflicts, on the relatable rather than faux-heroic character moments. And it’s all actually pretty good. Even without the connections that I would have if I would’ve played through all the previous titles in their entirety. In some cases, if I’m being honest, references to the events of the past worked even better in establishing some characters than if I would’ve played through them myself beforehand and so did the jokes.
And the developers smartly played with expectations to emphasize the plot in gameplay as well. As such, only the first and the last Acts of the game play the way Gears usually worked, as very directed linear cover shooter in a war torn city with lots of heroism, one-liners, cool buff dudes doing cool things and such. The middle two Acts work completely differently with “open levels”, let’s call them that, which serve as miniature open world locations you can explore at your own pace, exotic locales and a lot of slower paced excursions into the remnants of old cities and outposts, long abandoned. This “open level” approach, along with better paced action moments, make the game feel far more varied and better paced than it would’ve been with a traditional linear approach and yet lack the potential boredom factor that a true open world could evoke.
As such, during the first Act I felt like Gears 5 will be a nicely made but passable game, at about mid-point I was extremely excited and ready to recommend this game to everyone, due to how refreshing a take on the genre it felt and how invested I was becoming into the story. But by the end… Yeah, for whatever reason Gears 5 becomes outright bloated with non-stop action sequences in it’s last quarter, with locations going on and on, and fights extending way past the point where they were exciting. So by the end of the game, which as before is more of a setup for the next one than an actual ending, I felt pretty tired and ready for the game to just be over. When it was over I lost any desire to play it again or wait till any of my friends decides to coop with me, because I was simply done with it.
It’s worth also talking about the technical aspects of the game, since Gears were always a showcase for Unreal Engine. In this particular instance, Gears 5 aren’t really pushing anything that’s possible with visuals in the same way the original Gears of War did, of course, but what it does is show how to use the UE4 extremely efficiently. As someone who tends to play very graphically intensive games at 1440p at max settings as my (and arguably no one’s) hardware is not optimized to play max settings in 4K, I was shocked to discover that Gears 5 doesn’t just look really good but also manages to maintain an almost solid 60 fps in 4K at max settings on my hardware with rarely any hitches or issues. All that while having a mostly seamless world experience (even in the open levels). I was genuinely impressed.
I’m glad that I’ve played Gears 5. I did enjoy it far more than I ever expected and it felt like a nice evolution of the series, but by the end of the game the series’ legacy core catches up with the game and it becomes boring and predictable again. I suppose, it makes sense to stick with what people love about the game in the first place and not pissing off the fans, but I guess what people love about the series is what makes me not really want to play it. If you, like me, were mildly curious about the series newest entry but the previous ones never clicked for you or you’ve never tried them, Gears 5 is a good spot to try to get into the series. Don’t expect it to blow you away, but it will have a few pleasant surprises that might be worth the play.
UPDATE from 2023: Hivebusters DLC is a cute little expansion. The story is really stupid, but it’s full of fun sequences to experience. It doesn’t have any open levels and allows for three player coop or full solo (unlike the Escape mode this story is a direct prequel to). So if you like Gears 5, this is more of that quality dumb action. If you didn’t care much about it, this won’t capture you either.