Gears 5 (Xbox One)
After The Coalition took the reins from Epic Games when it came to developing the Gears of War series, they put in a fairly safe entry with Gears of War 4 that showed they had a good handle on the franchise’s excellent cover shooter gameplay. Having proven their ability to continue the franchise though, The Coalition seemed to go for a rather experimental approach in their second game in the series, even the game’s title being trimmed down to the simpler Gears 5 to mark this change in approach. Daring to shift away from the series formula was what made the spin-off Gears of War: Judgment so fascinating though, so whether or not the new direction would pay off would all come down to the execution.
While the Gears of War series has often had a surprisingly strong focus on its plot elements despite being a shooting game that revels in gory violence perpetrated by absurdly muscular men, Gears 5 decides to give the plot even more focus than ever before. Following up after the rather inconclusive end of Gears of War 4, the people of the planet Sera are now aware of the Swarm threat, the Locust offshoots producing humanoid monsters that aim to destroy the human civilizations that exist under the rather strict watch of the Coalition of Governments. While they had broken away from the COG in the past, the trio of heroes from the previous game now assist them in protecting people and fighting of the Swarm as the threat they pose continues to grow with new monsters types and strange new abilities. Kait is still haunted what the Swarm did to her mother though and is still seeking answers as to why she held onto a necklace bearing the emblem of the Locusts, and her personal quest soon takes the story away from protecting the COG settlements into learning more about the Locusts, Swarm, and Sera’s history than any Gear game had dug into before. Players revisit the strange testing lab from Gears of War 2, come to understand the hierarchy of their adversary, and learn how the COG’s behavior in the wars before the Locusts emerged from the ground influence the dangers people still face in Gears 5’s present day.
A lot more time is spent simply fleshing out the story, to the point the game will actually build entire portions where you do nothing but walk through an area to absorb its atmosphere and setting, listen to characters speak, or uncover documents that flesh out the world. Gears 5 doesn’t want you distracted by the gunfights during its key plot points, and many elements of the story benefit from it. Kait becomes a more tormented soul, guilt hanging over her that she struggles to deal with in any way other than lashing out. JD and Del, Kait’s close friends, have an early falling out as we learn they were once on opposing sides of controversial events, JD spending the game having to make up for his past actions and Del sticking to Kait’s side as her one consistent source of support and levity as revelations threaten to further drag her down. A new character named Fahz turns the trio into a squad, bringing a more cynical sort of humor than Del’s nerdy goofiness while also being a bit of a jerk who the others can rightfully pick on or make fun of in the same role Baird used to play for the original Gears of War team. The old Gears characters get to shine as well, Baird helping with various technological innovations and know-how, Marcus Fenix tagging along to fill out the team while also using his knowledge of the old threat to contribute to the information you’re uncovering about the Locust and Swarm, and Cole bringing back his high-energy attitude to inject a surge of life into a game that can sometimes be a bit serious even with other comic relief characters injecting their more subdued jokes into the dialogue. Because the story-telling is given a lot more emphasis it forms a more meaningful backbone to the experience, and while some directions it takes might seem to be there to catch you off-guard and some characters like Del could use a bit more fleshing out beyond just being strong in personality, Gears 5 does keep you engrossed with a story packed with details and developments to take in.
Before examining the divergences from the series’s norms though, it feels important to mention that Gears 5 contains much of the expected DNA found in most every entry in the series. Gears 5 is a third person shooter with a focus on aggressive play, the player given the tools to push into gunfights hard but suffering quick deaths if they don’t make good use of cover and allow themselves to regenerate health after taking damage. Options like the roadie run and dodge roll let you quickly get between areas of cover, players can reach over cover to grab people who hunker down behind it too much, and you won’t have to spend too much time unable to fire if you can master the active reload system where a well-timed button press will speed up the process of loading new ammo into your gun. While pillars and waist-high walls make their expected return as forms of cover you can hide behind as you open fire, Gears 5 does have a few ideas of how to mix up places to hide such as large crystalline structures that will collapse on people hiding behind them if the the structure sustains too much damage. Destructable cover isn’t new to the series, but whereas you used to be able to break simple things like wood or shoot the corners off cement blocks, Gears 5 also adds in things like ice blocks that take more effort to shatter, and there’s even a portion of the story where you can shoot the ground to crack open ice and drop foes into chilly water for instant kills. There are always options to work around cover be they weapons or bold play, but reckless charges can still lead to you biting the bullet if you don’t plan them right. Allies can revive you so long as you’re down but not out, and with multiplayer even featuring modes with characters who have diverse stats and abilities, you can strategize team movements around aggression and sacrifice if need be.
When it comes to new ideas Gears 5 bring to the franchise, one of its most impactful is technically one that’s been upgraded from something outright negligible before. A little floating robot followed the Gears teams in previous titles, mostly there to relay messages from commands and interact with technology and staying invisible and uninvolved until it was needed. This time around, Baird has made a new little robot named Jack who can assist in combat as well, and while the regular campaign has two players be gun-wielding humans, a third can join in to harness Jack’s special abilities as well. If you don’t have a human as him though, the other players can give commands to Jack, and his skills add a surprising amount of variety to combat beyond just him adding his little electrical zapper to the damage total. He can activate a flash to briefly blind enemies, hack robotic foes to turn them to your side, turn you invisible so you can snag some stealth kills, and other little benefits that mean you have an entirely new way to engage with combat. Foes far off or hunkering behind cover can be caught off guard by a well used Jack ability, and knowing which one to use at which moment can give you a powerful edge in a gunfight. He can be damaged, although it never seemed to impede play much when he was controlled by the game AI, but he’s also not the smartest when doing his own thing and needs those commands to really contribute to the fight, making him more of a nifty utility belt that gets better as you find more upgrades for him and unlock his special powers.
Besides scattering parts for Jack’s upgrades all over the Gears 5 game world, the story also has a few side quests that let you get some incredible additions to his repertoire such as being able to completely freeze enemies so they’re easy targets, a godsend for some of the game’s toughest opponents. These subquests pop up in the game’s two new open world segments. While Gears 5 has linear portions for a good chunk of the adventure, be they story-focused or sequences of gun battles, two chapters lean heavily into exploring wide open areas, an icy tundra and Mars-like desert allowing you explore on a wind-propelled skiff. There’s nothing keeping you from going right for the objective markers to skip these portions, but their rewards are certainly worth the effort to find the side areas and complete the optional objectives as well. While the linear chapters do have interesting set pieces like the underground lab where people were flash frozen in time and areas within a COG settlement like a theater, these open areas are the longest portions and lead to the game being defined by your time with them. Windflares return in a much better capacity than in Gears of War 4, appearing less frequently and having new aspects like giant icicles slamming into the battlefield or tornados and lightning ripping across the desert plain you need to avoid, but for all the variety they add to progressing through the campaign, they also come with a caveat. Gears 5 doesn’t build its skirmishes quite as excellently as previous titles, many optional battles being fairly plain and less emphasis being given in general on the role the environment plays in the conflict. Areas can look outright beautiful or have some interesting gimmick to them, but the cover placement and enemy entry points don’t feel as intelligently designed as they should be to draw out the most from the game’s gameplay systems.
Luckily, weapons and enemies do a lot to make sure the action is still exciting and varied, and their now visible health bars help the player visualize their progress against their tougher foes. Deebee robots are fairly simple opponents who use similar weapons to the player, but the Swarm altered versions of the machines take more abuse and can make more lethal use of their special weaponry, with the Bastion drone putting shields around tougher Swarm enemies as they zip around dodging your shots and Stumps working like walking turrets with their heavy durability and strong weaponry. The basic Swarm soldier comes with the same weapon variety as the player to keep gun fights relatively balanced, but Swarm monsters can really change how the battle unfolds. Juvies and their explosive Popper variant try to overwhelm you with numbers and speed, Pouncers hop from cover to cover until they can pin you down, and Snatchers use their durability to easily knock out players and ferry them away inside them before allies can revive them. The new Warden brings with them a hefty melee club you can use to almost instantly wipe out anything nearby, but when the Warden wields it they’re a deadly threat as well and have armor that makes hurting them very difficult. Some boss monsters have decent arena focused fights where it’s less about cover and aggressive pushes and instead learning the boss’s weakness, but the game does introduce the poorly conceived Flock who fly around, take way too much damage to defeat, and rarely pose a danger for how long you spend dealing with them. Perhaps one of the main issues with constructing battles in Gears 5 is leaning a bit hard on the stronger Swarm monsters rather than the environment playing as important of a part, and while you still get interesting ideas like riding around a free-moving lift as enemies fire from nearby floors, the balance is definitely in favor of enemies mixing up how fights feel rather than setting and foe diversity going hand in hand.
Weapons have less of a problem with variety since if you do find something like the Cryo Cannon that slowly freezes foes but doesn’t kill them too weak to invest time in, you don’t need to pick it up when you find it. Buttons have shifted around a bit to allow for the player to use a combat knife any time for melee damage, meaning that if you want to use the chainsaw on your Lancer assault rifle for a satisfying and bloody instant kill, you need to avoid any muscle memory older Gears games might have nailed into you. A new grenade launching variant of the Lancer exists with a tiny airstrike inspired firing method, but you can still find the Boomshot for straightforward explosive shots and throw a variety of grenades to flush out foes. With the Longshot for sniping, Gnasher for up-close shotgun kills, and pistols for if your better weapons run low on ammo, you’ve got a few options for reliable normal damage output, but you can also pick up things like the Dropshot that send an explosive through the air before slamming down to hit enemies behind cover. Deebee weapons bring some tools to the table like the EMBAR railgun for a scope-less sniping option and the rapid fire Overkill shotgun, and the Swarm even improvise the unusual but powerful Claw automatic machine gun that gets more accurate the longer you maintain its hectic spray. The player can pick up certain weapons like the buzzsaw launching Buzzkill, Mulcher minigun, and Salvo Rocket Launcher that prevent other weapon use until you drop them, but Gears 5 actually lets you carry these between areas whereas previous games always forced you to drop these incredibly strong but limited options at certain checkpoints. An interesting but sadly poorly utilized new idea comes in the form of Relic Weapons, where you can find hidden variants of weapons such as a Torque Bow that swaps out its slow-loading explosive arrows for fast-firing strong shots and a version of the Enforcer submachine gun that is easier to control but fires more slowly as a result. The problem with Relic Weapons is they don’t carry between chapters and you already can only carry two normal weapons besides your pistol and grenades, so holding onto a nifty relic weapon when you need something with enough ammo for skirmishes can sometimes limit your options as punishment for trying to keep this interesting variant.
Gears 5’s multiplayer modes, on the other hand, feel like win after win as the series perhaps reaches its best point multiplayer-wise yet. Arcade has its focus on character abilities, Arms Race is a competition between teams to get kills with every normal weapon in the game’s arsenal, updates add new modes and maps like the football inspired twist to capture the flag known as Gridiron, and traditional multiplayer ideas like Team Deathmatch are a contest to kill the opposing team a certain amount of times while King of the Hill and Escalation focus on territory control as the main objective. The oddly named Dodgeball allows you to revive allies when ever an opponent is killed, Warzone is a survival competition where every player on the two teams has only one life, and Guardian focuses on protecting a VIP teammate while other players can die as much as they like until that special player dies and you’re restricted to one last life. The competitive modes have a good mix of maps that keeps expanding due to the game’s constant updates meaning the weaker designs can be pushed aside in favor of ones more conducive to the action, and there are cooperative modes as well such as Horde and Escape. Horde involves repelling waves of Swarm troops using weapons, special character abilities, and resources to build a strong defense. There are skill cards that sort of complicate playing it well but they aren’t tied to microtransactions thankfully, and while the Hivestormers campaign that elaborates on Escape mode’s characters and concept is purchasable DLC, that mode is free of pay-to-succeed ideas as well. Instead, Escape takes a more mobile approach to Horde’s concept as you seek to escape a location before the bomb you dropped can catch up with you, utilizing character skills to play different roles in the process. Escape can seem to deemphasize actual combat at times and its maps can be a little confusing to complicate your egress, but like many other modes the variables will line up for some exciting action that makes good use of Gear 5’s combat systems. With all of the content and variety found here, it’s safe to say that any new ideas like Escape or unusual modes like Gridiron definitely don’t hurt the experience as you can still fall back on the incredibly fun action found in the plethora of other modes. Not only does Gears 5 still succeed at constructing exciting campaign missions, but those excellent shooting mechanics still flourish in competitive and cooperative multiplayer contexts.
THE VERDICT: Gears 5 undeniably has a superb selection of multiplayer modes that allow it to showcase the game’s strong and aggressive gunplay very well, but while experimentation in this half of the game just means more options for play, the campaign ends up uneven from how the title chooses to split its focus. New mechanics like Jack’s powers add a new layer of depth to enemy skirmishes and enemy and weapon variety is mostly good for making for exciting firefights, but the environment’s focus more on looks than being conducive to the cover shooting crops up a bit too often and the balance isn’t as tight for it. Having a strong story focus does a lot to flesh out the characters and Gears universe and the open world segments have good rewards despite mostly shallow sidequests, so while Gears 5 definitely brings a lot new and interesting to the experience, its attempts to innovate within the series and explore concepts comes with the caveat that the tight aggressive gunplay sometimes takes the backseat to other ideas.
And so, I give Gears 5 for Xbox One…
A GREAT rating. Taking risks and trying to leave a new mark on the series definitely pays off in many ways with The Coalition’s concepts for what a Gears of War game can be, and additions like Escape mode add a fun twist to the multiplayer options while Jack adds an extra layer of depth to single-player gun fights. Weapons, control, and small shifts in environmental design all make sure the game has plenty of places for exciting combat encounters, and while it has some weak ideas like the Flock and more attention should probably have been paid to making enemy groupings gel with the cover set-up in the area, there are still tense battles to be found, some memorable setpieces, and proper boss fights to shake up the way you approach battle. Innovating with the open skiff sections was sadly not supported as well as it could have been due to the side quests being rather plain in concept and featuring small fights without much punch to them, but areas that ask the player to absorb the story do so well surprisingly well even if they’re not cooking up some reason to whip out your gun for a while. Mostly the game feels like it could have benefited from putting more time into its creation and conceptualization, most ideas having potential and providing interesting shake-ups but not quite reaching their highest potential because of the need to focus on so many different types of action across the entire Gears 5 experience.
Creativity and daring are definitely on offer in Gears 5 and help keep the series from falling into a rut, and while many ideas would benefit from greater elaboration, Gears 5 does carve out a strong identity within its series while providing the excellence in cover shooting action the franchise always seems to be able to fall back on. Multiplayer is almost unquestionably at its best gameplay-wise with so many diverse options to choose from, and the campaign’s risk taking and story depth makes it easier to forgive some of the so-so skirmishes. Gears 5 is an exciting and enjoyable shake-up that doesn’t lose what makes a Gears of War game’s gameplay great even as it experiments with how it designs its campaign.