I feel it. Deep. In my bones. 2007 was a long time ago and I was a little baby, barely 37 years old, and Epic and Microsoft released Gears of War. It was the first cover based shooter I had played and it was a ton of fun.
Then Microsoft decided not to release Gears 2 and 3 on PC because of "piracy" resulting in poor sales on Windows. That the PC port was broken and that selling Xbox was a higher priority had nothing to do with it. Same crap they pulled with Halo 2. Digression alert!
So when I had the hardware to run Gears 4 and 5, of course I was going to play it.
And boy oh boy is this game fun. Mostly, er largely - well actually except for one tiny irritant - a complete joyride from start to finish.
A deplorable thing that most shooters fall prey to is wanting to be like "that game" which could be anything outselling "this game" currently.
Okay, so I was playing it seven years after release. So what?
No silly customizations, no skill tree, no collectibles, no side missions, no pausing the game to fiddle with idiotic inputs that add nothing to the game proper, no branching paths, no irrelevant choices. Just a simple, straight out, linear, old fashioned point A to point B, shoot everything in between with a few environmental hurdles. God, I miss my baby days when games were just games and not a convoluted mission statement that left you wondering what the hell did you just do for 10+ hours and what does it all mean, why are you here, what is the point, why are you expected to care.
Point A to point B, shoot everything in between. Sweet.
It is a testament to good mission design that a linear shooter with zero distractions can actually be more fun and engaging than a mishmash of multiple ideas where the game has to pause every few minutes to ask you "and what would you like to do next?"
Real life is full of those imbecilic situations of what I want to do next. Stop doing it in games. Very annoying.
Okay, let's get that tiny irritant out of the way. Snatcher. This enemy uh puts you in its body without eating you. Like evolution had decided, for some reason, to create a predator that specializes in kidnapping its victims instead of killing them. Once you are "inside", sometimes you come out and sometimes you reload last checkpoint. Not sure what gameplay mechanic is at work here. Your AI companions cannot directly help you. They are shooting the thing, so supposedly with enough hits you get ejected from the zip-up pouch but otherwise there is no player agency left. Except hope.
Happened to me only twice, thankfully, but it took me right out of the game flow. Like you are in the pool and humming to yourself "just keep swimming, just keep swimming" and you realize the other presence in the pool in not a friend or a loved one but a darned shark. Nasty jar that, what?
Apart from that one thing, this game should be on the must-have list for anyone who likes shooters.
If you missed out on the first three parts then just watch a quick video to get the backstory and go from there. You are not missing anything. I also recently bought Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and the updated visuals did nothing. If you are going to play the older games then play them first. The gameplay has evolved a lot (imagine that, evolution in a linear shooter) and going back will not be a nice experience.
For anyone who likes third person shooters and/or cover based shooters, play this game. 'Tis wonderful, 'tis wondrous wonderful.
I tell you, man, dialects are tough.
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