Gears 5

 

 

 

Gears 5 is an improvement over Gears 4. In gears 4, most of the campaign was centered around fighting robots using high tech robot weapons, in bright sunny overly saturated cheery enviorments, and with horribly drab and boring soaop opera story

In gears 5 this is improved, as for most of the campaign youre fighting the Locust in a variety of interesting locations, which i'll go over now

In act 1 you fight in city street type enviorments, close quarters inside buildings and its pretty enjoyable. It gives a good first impression.

In act 2 you are in an outdoors snow enviorment in between some industrial complexes, as well as some 'open world' places where you drive a vehicle around to the next objective, with some realy nice looking vistas.  This is probably the highlight of the campaign, with many memorable fights such as the giant ice boss where you can trap him under the ice, as well as unique gameplay moments where you are attacked by waves of monsters and you can shoot the ice to drown them.

In act 3 it's a barren red desert type enviorment and this is actually the most boring and generic act. It's just a bunch of desert in between some ruins and its not much to look at. Then you go inside some industrial complexes where you swing around on some platforms while taking cover, and fighting waves of monsters. Then you have to do more 'open world' segments where you drive to the next objective, with some stupid lightning storm moments where you instantly die on your vechile.

Act 4 is the conlcusion and its a return to more of the city streets with some forested ruins areas, this act is pretty enjoyable and challenging with many intense fights.

So the acts are varied, but I think the pacing could have been done better. Because each act has multiple chapters, and even one chapter can take over 2 hours. So its hard to find moments to start and stop playing because the pacing is so drawn out.


The gameplay is largley the same as previous gears, with some different tuning on the weapon handling.

The most notable thing is that this game is very challenging, moreso than previous gears game. We played co-op on difficulty 3/5  and almost every single checkpoint we had to replay atleast 3-5 times until we finished it, sometimes many more.  There are tons of instant death "wtf" moments such as grenades, exploding crossbows, snipers, enemies grabbing you/eating you, rocket launchers, ETC.

90% of the deaths in this game are INSTANT and without warning, and it can be very frustrating and feel cheap. I couldn't believe how difficult the game was, in respect to our relatively tame difficulty selection.  Sometimes the difficulty is rewarding and feels good, such as the ice boss fight where you had to master the mechanics, or some of the intense wave based survival 'arenas'  but for the most part it felt kind of like a slog and almost dreaded the next checkpoint beause of
 "oh boy, time to die 10 times in a row for 20 minutes from one shot instant deaths"

In addition to this, the enemies are very bullet sponge, almost moreso than ever. A regular grunt can take two entire assault rifle magazines, and every fight becomes this drawn out battle of attrition.
But don't get me wrong, the gameplay can be very fun and at its core its the solid Gears foundation that I find to be very enjoyable.

There is this robot on your team that has special abilites that you can upgrade to do things for you, but we mostly just used him for his revive ability and I honestly ignored everything else, it wasnt that interesting to me.

A good positive is this game has a ton of enemy variety, theres so many different types of enemies you will encounter that I would write paragraphs just talking about them, but it is just notable the huge variety of enemies, which keeps the gameplay fresh.

I can't comment much about the story, it's not that strong or great. It's some contrived thing about the female progatonist's mother being infected with the locust virus and some journey to also rid herself of it? I don't know, I didn't find it that compelling or authentic. Some of the dialogue and characters can be funny and interesting, but for the most part it was 'just there' for me.  If you asked me to remember some notable cutscenes or one liners or something, I probably couldn't do it.

The campaign at times felt very boring, as the Multiplayer was where it's at. We would play campaign and then wonder "why am i not playing multiplayer versus right now?"  And I already have 50 hours into the multiplayer side of Gears 5 because the core gameplay is really fun and addicting, but challenging. On multiplayer its this intense fast paced war of timing about mostly who places their shotgun shots just right.  The vast majority of gameplay that happens on mutliplayer is people running around with the shotgun, snapping back and forth to walls, sneaking up behind eachother, and instantly gibbing them with one shot. Its a simple, but addictive cycle that I'm getting ito, but it can be extremely frustrating so thats to note.

For the campaign, act 1 & 2 was the highlight, 3 and 4 dragged felt a bit dull. Atleast its better than gears 4.

6/10

Multiplayer side probably a higher rating, not sure.