Gears 5
For the Xbox faithful, Gears of War has been a constant – a port in a storm. After more than a decade and four games – not including spin-offs Gears of War: Judgment and Pop! – it provided top-flight visuals and predictably fun roadie running and chainsaw-gunning for everyone. It’s never wavered, and rarely changed much. Gears 5 – Developer Coalition has cut down the title – is mixing things up a little bit. There are open-world style hubs, an upgrade system, and other nods to larger trends that have found their way into the biggest game franchises. Despite its overtures towards evolution, Gears 5 persists in the tradition of its predecessors: filling arenas and corridors with gunfight after thrilling, hectic gunfight. I went into Gears 5 craving change, but was surprised to find that the parts I enjoyed most were tried and true – every fight constantly challenged me and consistently drew me in. Classic Gears still feels good, even five games later.
Gears 5 is a classic middle chapter. It picks up where Gears of War 4 left off: the new Delta squad bracing for war with the Swarm A.K.A. the new Locust, and the game’s new hero, Kait Diaz, is still reeling from unresolved issues around her mother’s death and some lingering questions about her family tree. As those problems come to a head, she and her friends go rogue and head out to get answers and possibly find a way to help keep the Locust at bay.
Gears 5 has settled nicely into its role as a character “hang out” game: you get more out of spending time with characters you know and love than what they actually do during the campaign. The plot is, frankly, a riff on the boiler-plate “chosen one” story and not much more to speak of. It feels self-contained, but won’t feel particularly compelling if you haven’t played the rest of the series. For Gears of War veterans, the story features a few major twists, but most of them fail to make a huge impact, as they mostly confirm things fans have already known for some time.
And yet I’m never bored by it, because the story is buoyed by its characters. After four games and multiple generations of characters, every person in the Gears universe has a strong voice and grows in some way over the course of the story. Obviously, it’s clearest in Kait, who you come to know and understand much better as she makes the transition from supporting cast member to the player’s perspective. Across the board, though, there’s enough nuance and history in even the most cliche-dependent characters to make every exchange – barking orders, sharing stories, or generally shooting the shit – feel warm and inviting.
While so much of Gears 5 seems designed to get you “back in the groove” of the series, structurally there are some big changes in the Gears 5 campaign. Rather than placing you linear levels that flow from one mission to the next, its middle chapters put you in sprawling open-world hubs, where you drive from one mission to another using a paragliding land skiff -- Picture a snowmobile powered by a giant sail instead of a motor. Like the open hub areas of Uncharted 4 and its spinoff, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, they act more as visual showpieces and palette cleansers than anything else. There isn’t much going on in these spaces, which makes them feel somewhat superfluous. At the same time, they let you control the pace of your experience. Rather than having one chapter flow directly into the next, you can glide around, enjoy the game’s beautiful scenery, and choose whether to advance the story or play an optional sidequest.
Gears 5 doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it changes enough to keep its signature style of cover-based shooting from feeling monotonous. Going into this review, I was convinced Gears of War needed to change drastically or risk obsolescence. But the Coalition has found a different way forward, using new mechanics to polish the old, making the whole game shine.