Gears Through the Years: A Gears of War Campaign Retrospective

gears of war is one of the most difficult franchises to talk about that i have ever played because there's not much any one person can add to the conversation the games play exactly the way they look like they might they're consistent from title to title they're almost all good and mostly all great in terms of quality they're fun they're just a whole [ __ ] heap of fun end of video thanks for your time of course i could get deep into the development history but somebody already wrote the book on that i mean literally actually the book on it the developer sanctioned gears of war retrospective by arthur guys a beautiful hardcover volume that covers the franchise's history in greater depth than i ever possibly could his was given a trove of internal documentation and the whole book is just a feast of history concept art and developmental context it is amazing so where does that leave me the schmuck who wants to talk about gears of war even when everything of value has mostly been said in a bad way man i've shelved this project multiple times played through the series twice and scrapped the entire first version of the script after putting dozens of hours into it because i just didn't feel like i was saying anything meaningful even now i can sum up the entire franchise in one sentence it is the only franchise i know that's ever done exactly what it wanted to do exactly the way it wanted to do it across its entire life span gears of war 1 feels completely linearly consistent with gears of war 5. even the smallest of the franchise's pieces like the obscure dlc campaign for gears of war 3 ram shadow is lavishly produced and lore critical the easiest kind of games to talk about are games that are amazing but complicated or games that are terrible because no one wants to make a terrible game and identifying where it went wrong is very interesting the hardest kind to talk about are the ones that are good in a straightforward unsurprising way there's no hot take with gears of war there's no secret lens where they're bad games or controversial games or even where they're the greatest games of all time everyone who has ever said to gears of war is hella fun man is just flatly correct and if no one ever has allow me to be the first i love the gears of war games they're some of the best action sci-fi experiences you can possibly have and because of how important the tactile interactive elements of the game are to the experience going out and playing them is honestly a better way of understanding them than listening to a video essay on the subject do you like shooting big angry guys in beautiful settings me too it's so goddamn fun the first time i tried to write this essay i got frustrated with it because i felt defeated by that inherent straightforwardness and simplicity by the irony of trying to use a bunch of words to describe something that really describes itself within 60 seconds of a person sitting down to play it on replaying all the games after reading the arthur gee's retrospective i realized this was the thesis the through line the thing that makes the game so remarkable such universal appeal such obvious identity such consistent tone and standards of production these things aren't the norm game after game after game these things are aberrant especially together gears of war seems fundamentally uncomplicated because it's built on straightforward ideas that doesn't mean that these ideas are simple it means that the mark of craftsmanship is often being unable to perceive how a thing is fit together in the first place i decided to use footage from the ultimate edition remake instead of the original gears war one for a couple reasons one is that it is the likeliest way a person would play the game currently if starting new and the second is that it hues so closely to the original that in discussing the flow the art style the tonality of the game there really isn't much distance between them technically it might not be a very good port it runs very poorly on older equipment artistically though it is an extremely thorough facelift of what feels like a timeless campaign plus gears of war one through three on the xbox 360 look extraordinarily similar i played through gears 2 3 and judgment using the original console so i feel like that style will be well represented later on and the ultimate edition isn't different enough to warrant its own section it is the most visually impressive way to experience the core game the game itself is essentially the same whichever version you choose fundamentals of the mechanics are what's important and those don't change hardly at all gears war one's mechanical experience is based on a simple clear foundation cover based advancement leap frogging from one element of cover to another flanking exposing uprooting your enemies and catching them in the open while minimizing your own vulnerability cover-based shooters are so ubiquitous today that it's hard to imagine a world without them but in looking back on the era of corridor shooters that is the defining feature of them you're always standing straight up and going straight ahead games like call of duty had been bucking the trend in minor ways with stuff like firing stances but it's hard to overstate how experientially unique gears of war one was as a shooting game at the time go back and play another third-person shooting title of the era like grand theft auto 3 and onward before four and the shooting is kind of weightless and awkward there was little that made it meaningfully different than first person shooting which felt better overall in the games that used the first person perspective according to the arthur guy's retrospective which i'm just gonna refer to as the official book from here on out there were two titles that influenced gears of war to try to transform third person perspective into something new one was resident evil 4 a game that an entire global industry would cannibalize her ideas and images and the other was a forgotten title called kill.switch from resident evil 4 we borrowed a close over-the-shoulder camera which was such a wild improvement over just centering the character and we also borrow some influence on the pacing of combat like resonate evil 4 gears of war's enemies don't go down very quickly absorbing tremendous amounts of bullets before dying for re4 this is an element of the horror it's hard to keep these enemies away from you and it's the melee attacks that are dangerous from them for gears of war this is instead an element of tactical advancement being caught in the open is deadly but being mutually entrenched can create a stalemate the player must take risks and make flanking maneuvers or i'll snipe for weak spots at range preventing the game from becoming the kind of thing where you just pick a spot and stay there the large health pools of the players and the enemies allow for a sense of back and forth give and take in a firefight that feels extremely dynamic every time it's what was adapted from kill.switch that is the most impressive though the hardest thing to put a finger on developer lee perry remembers how lead designer cliff bleczynski iterated off the title in this quote from the official book quote cliff really dug kill switch but he had issues with the controls they weren't living up to how cool the idea was so we didn't really invent the idea of having cover but i think we helped put it on the controller in a way that made sense to a lot of people working super close with cliff for 10 years i don't think most people recognize his main talent he's able to pick up a controller for a game and he really gets the small details that make it feel good and interesting what good feedback is he can really nail down specifics you know hey i wish there was a quarter second lag when this happened and the camera should jerk when the player hits a wall we should change the field of view on the camera and tighten this up and we really need to put a particle effect when you slam into cover to solidify that you're hitting it end quote for someone who writes about games from a reactive point of view as a player who experiences and not a developer who creates that's the heart of both the genius of gears of war and what is so utterly elusive about trying to describe what makes the game so good it's why i said earlier that you'll get more from playing the game for 90 seconds than you would from me talking about it for 90 minutes the entire game feels effortlessly correct in the playing of it it feels exactly like what it ought to be as if my brain has any idea what fighting giant monsters with chainsaw guns ought to feel like it communicates this not with context or art but through the special and specific language of pure mechanical game design a quarter seconds hesitation in this animation a minor camera pivot to accompany that animation what seems at first a simple and monolithic design choice is actually a multitude of individual creative choices and tweaks most of them largely imperceptible outside the aggregate experience the barrier to talking about gears of war in any depth as a layman is that i simply don't speak the language in which gears of war is most beautifully articulate trying to get into the specifics of gears of war is like trying to find a gap in the armor to pry open so much of what makes the design outstanding are interwoven elements take just the most iconic enduring object in the franchise the lancer assault rifle that's the one with the chainsaw bayonet so what makes this gun so iconic harmony of sound design and visual design for one it looks like a raw industrial piece of machinery so it sounds like one too it's rapport is a rapid clanking with a spread you can see with tracer rounds but not so large a spread has to miss the even larger character models running around downrange that thundering clatter becomes a hollow ticking if you run out of ammunition so you reload but reloading is down time in an action game a time when you are vulnerable in a corridor shooter this is a moment of weakness in a third person cover shooter you're protected and if it's neither a moment of strength nor a moment of weakness then it's just a moment of rest which runs hugely counter to the intended mood the intended pressure so gears of war has active reloading taking that moment of downtime and turning it into a mini-game that instead intensifies the tension and the feeling of control given to the player after you hit reload a slider activates below your gun icon hit reload again in the gray strip and you reload quickly usually no more than a second or two after hitting the button the first time especially with the lancer reloads can come quickly enough to feel like you're laying down nearly continuous fire at the edge of the gray is the perfect reload though a sliver of white that instantly finishes the reload and applies extra damage as well as extra weapon impact effects miss it and you reload even slower this is really straightforward with lancer enough time with the lancer and the rhythm of firing and reloading feels automatic and natural there's a sense of mastery there even if it is a small aspect of the overall game other weapons however use the active reload to accentuate their characteristics and give them extra personality like the shotgun the perfect reload comes ahead of the gray line so if you get it right you can fire again really fast which feels amazing when you're in close quarters combat to begin with and an extra second's worth of aggression can mean life or death the bolt hawk pistol a very powerful revolver and sniper rifle which can only fire one round at a time are headshot weapons this is a high risk proposition of the game because you have to use time out of cover to line up the shot or a weapon like the lancer can lay down imprecise cover fire and suppress at the same time that it attacks with a sniper rifle the perfect reload is also the fastest but more it shrinks the zone by which it accepts a perfect input each time you fire so you can pull off impressive and dangerous chain kills that become difficult to maintain for balance purposes with each weapon the shotgun the sniper rifle the assault rifle even the revolver there isn't much about them that's different exactly from the way they would be in a more regular kind of shooter but the active reload gives them each characteristics that are completely unique to gears of war and its interconnected feedback systems every weapon is designed to fit into the game's overall aesthetic of heavy bulky figures fighting among shattered grandeur every weapon feels mean and any weapon an opponent uses you can use against them in turn which feels both thrilling and fair the lancer's most fantastic imaginative leap though is its chainsaw bayonet the sound of it is incredible and it's a one-hit kill if you can actually catch an enemy with it being without cover is the ultimate vulnerability in the game but this one hit kill melee weapon is essentially the ultimate act of aggression on the player's part to counterbalance that vulnerability even the toughest cleverest opponents get chewed up by it the camera really leans into the kill the blood splatters on the screen the whole thing sounds meaty and awful in the most wonderfully campy way it is a gore firework the only exception to the one-hill kill was added in the next game but then retrofitted from the first one the ultimate edition if the opponent also has a lancer it's time for a button-mashing chainsaw duel which is even more dangerous and even more fun than just an immediate kill the sparking grinding saws lean one way or another and then someone comes down with a particularly bad case of getting cut in half so what makes the lancer iconic no one thing many small elements of sound design visual design the clever mini-game of active reloading in aggregate though what you have is a weapon so compelling to use that the struggle is to get the player to use anything else as the franchise goes on another iconic element especially of the early franchise is the fact that this particular apocalypse is a survival of the buffest the dudes are absolutely huge the humans are mountains of corded muscle and then the enemies are even larger interestingly this wasn't an organized and deliberate choice at least according to the official book cliff blezinski is quoted in it as saying quote i never gave an executive order as the designer director to give me the biggest toughest buff [ __ ] who can kevin lanning was an amazing character modeler he started building these characters with gerio flaherty and they just wound up brick [ __ ] houses and i said okay they look cool slamming into a wall let's just go with that end quote the franchise eventually grew out of the look somewhat but only with gears of war 4 which made a generational leap both in the story and onto new hardware the brick [ __ ] house era is specifically emblematic of the xbox 360 era and it works so well there though it'll be much more obvious as we move into titles being played on the older hardware a large part of pushing that older weaker hardware to the limit was stylistic choices in the visual art elements these massive dudes were pitted against each other in even more massive ruins the shattered remnants of a military dictatorship at the height of its power by using the soaring proportions of european neoclassical public architecture and then americanizing that architecture in weird ways it conveys a genuinely broad range of emotions the greatest is the melancholy of lost empire it's like fallen rome or something grand and ancient like that it has elements that suggest more of a fantasy world than a modern one the americanized elements are centered around how industry is incorporated the heights of the coalition of governments reached before the fall was only possible because of a volatile super fuel called emulsion 2006 and 2007 were kind of interesting years in video game subtext because the broader cultural anxieties about the length and cost of the iraq war began to seep into the plots of major aaa titles you'll even see no blood for emulsion as a graffiti in the game a direct echo of the no blood for oil protest slogan that was so common at the time so while european architecture is the template there is a fascinating vibe where the coalition of governments is a kind of realization of a very american brand of fascism driven off fuel and profit it's public face of towering marble driven entirely by resource-hungry conquest and the ruin of other nations this construction of the old world as corrupt having brought about its own destruction it's stronger and more explicit as the franchise goes on gears of war one paints its world with images and symbols more than it does dialogue and does most of its world-building non-verbally this way the way the bulky figures are tied to both the sense of lost grandeur and the growing impression that the fall was deserved is fascinating to me by the standards of the world the cog was trying to create protagonist marcus phoenix and his squad are the ideal citizens models of strength grit getting it done at all costs their entire body and being dedicated to war the fall and failure of the military dictatorship has ironically created a world adhering to its ideals only the strong survive only conflict is true the only thing you can depend on is the chain of command in this irony epic games managed to pull off something quite remarkable they made one of the most brutal goriest shooters of all time and did it in a way that is broadly anti-war in every element of its world and story this is one of the things that i truly love about the franchise that for years gears of war was the absolute poster game for a kind of beer pound and jersey wear and bro gamer image that the xbox 360 era seemed intent for some reason on cultivating and yet so much of its actual design is cleverly multifaceted it is more than what it seems at first while also being exactly what it seems like at first to the utmost of its abilities so much of the game's charisma and tone comes from the way that the characters are portrayed marcus phoenix is one of the most instantly recognizable characters in all of gaming but much of his personality comes from frustration and skepticism of the world around him consider how we meet him days away from death locked in a prison cell in a prison overrun with monsters even before that it was a place of neglect and torture while his crime is left open-ended until a couple sequels down the line a player's sympathy is already directed away from the cog that imprisoned him and left him to die the only reason he doesn't die is dominic santiago his old best friend and squadmate and the character who happens to be player 2 in the co-op so here another idea presented immediately two against the world two friends brothers in battle and blood marcus having been absent from the world for years knows as little about it as the players do but dom as a character is in a position to explain the side-by-side co-op you can assume is being played by friends or at least acquaintances so the in-game camaraderie underlines and intensifies the fun of playing the game as an actual in-person friend activity later on you meet two other members of the team barrett and cole these two have a prior friendship that is actually its own spin-off game 2013's gears of war judgment baird is the tech guy the sarcastic guy and the punchline guy his domains of guyhood his role is partly comedic relief but more significantly his role is to meter the progress of players 1 and 2 and make sure they stay together in a level lock doors require baird's narratively important touch to progress so it's not up to any one player to move the level forward both of them need to be present around a beard for the level to progress as such beard spouts a lot of gleefully ridiculous technobabble for the purpose mostly of mechanical pacing augustus cole on the other hand is pure comedy relief a former thrash ball player voiced by real world footballer and wrestler lester spate spate actually literally has the same physique and presence as coal in the game and brings some of the most infectious possible enthusiasm to the role cole's ego his bragging his unforgettable boob it is the perfect foil for the world's melancholy to coal on some level this [ __ ] is just a game and to the player on a more literal level this is also true it counterbalances any kind of larger message and meaning to have cole around to ground things out again and the fact that song your enemies in half with a chainsaw is actually an act of joy and play in this particular digital context the game is perfectly accessible on kohl's level of murder as touchdown alone which is what allowed it to be a bro culture lightning rod but it has a lot of deeper more complex themes and emotions which other characters articulate well lester spade as coal is an example of perfect casting but john dimaggio as marcus phoenix turned out to be equally perfect in a more consequential way dimaggio if you have never connected the dots is the same voice behind bender on futurama and jake the dog on adventure time dimaggio is incredibly skilled at being both flippant and emotional crass and deep and he does it with a lot of non-verbal stuff like sighs or snarls for put upon world weary wall of meat marcus phoenix dimaggio was beyond perfect he was the only voice actor out there i think could have made the character so utterly real and sympathetic dominic is okay but more in line with the kind of serviceable voice acting games were known for at the time dimaggio and spate were ambitious considered casting choices and together with baird voice actor fred tatasciori these characters create the structure in which the consistency of the future titles are really built consider the way the game leaned away from the traditional trappings of bro oriented marketing and its initial public pitch the marketing campaign for gears of war 1 is one of the few marketing campaigns really worth talking about and one of the even fewer that affected me personally i am old enough to remember before they had product commercials at the movie theater having to go through the process of having ads invade a space previously reserved only for classier trailers i was in high school and i had been struggling to get my parents to take game seriously as a creative medium they were to a lot of people a lesser art form enter the gears of war mad world trailer artist gary jules does this sad slow piano driven cover of an already sad tears for fear song and gears of war pairs this song with footage of marcus running from monsters through darkened shattered streets failing to run only falling deeper into their lair it had the exact tonality and mood of a movie trailer a classy one even and here i was seeing it on the big screen sure it was alongside the ads for geico and coca-cola not among the bonafide trailers for movies but this was the moment that i realized games had crossed a cultural threshold that they were not a niche thing anymore gaming had arrived not just as an object of geek subculture but the broader unified culture in which warner brothers or black and decker apply their wares i didn't have an opportunity to actually play gears of war until literally years later when gears of war won and only gears of war won during the 360 air of the franchise was ported to the pc the trailer stayed with me though it lingered on the edges of my imagination for such a long time it fascinated me and then after playing the pc port of the first game i was even more hooked i wanted so badly to see how it ended i wouldn't actually find out for over a decade until i finally played them all on the 360 for this video the trailer was such a hit that it made not only gears of war but also that particular gary jules cover song inescapable for years it is impressive in the way that the rest of the game is also impressive it seems like a completely unified seamless production when the actual details of the game are anything but according to the official book the story was the very last element of the game to meaningfully come together lee perry recalls quote we had maybe 14 or so of these levels that were sort of roughed in you know hey we want this train level maybe we want a haunted factory level etcetera we didn't know how they would interact with each other necessarily because none of us were big on the narrative side end quote rod ferguson further remembers quote we brought in susan o'connor susan came in to do the actual dialogue and stuff but it was also asking how do we take these set pieces that epic had already spent three years on how do we take these environments how do we logically connect to them in a way that can actually tell the story end quote when i read that i was honestly kind of shocked well the various acts and chapters feel distinct from one another i don't think i ever would have guessed that the environments were determined long before any kind of context for them the way gears of war 1 progresses does such a fantastic job with its world building by teasing questions and then answering them relatively quickly by going from above to below by moving from the present to the past and back again so that the storytelling hits all four corners of the setting that it invented let's just briefly run through the sequencing they did come up with at the beginning the game does a fantastic cold open in the prison where dom comes to save marcus beyond the basic tutorializing they also run from a giant creature called the corpser the same guy from the madworld promo after the escape you meet the squad and some of the background characters in the middle of a shattered but beautiful city immediately going deep into the ruins the scale of the conflict therefore is explored thematically and literally this is just about the end of the world for the humans and the armies arrayed against you are vast and varied you fight artillery creatures unkillable brutish creatures called berserkers swarms of loping little dudes with big teeth but no guns as act 1 escalates through its enemies it ends by introducing the game's end boss who kills the official squad leader of delta to establish his own credentials as the big bad guy this is all during the day act 2 plunges the city into nightfall where bird piranha creatures called the krill blot out the skies and swarm anyone caught in the dark pitch black style you encounter a small outpost of the stranded who hate your squad for representing the cog it is small and slight but here their culture does get explored you might be the strongest contingent of soldiers left on the planet but you are also among the most hated rightfully blamed for the fall of this world most of the act is a battle to find a vehicle to get out of town with a beautifully memorable fight at a neon lit gas station closing it out and sending you on to a vehicle sequence as you try to flee the dead city so now you've got two questions one can this world be redeemed and now two should this world be redeemed having brought up fuel issues act 3 descends into enemy territory down the dusty metal corridors of an emulsion refinery this is the volatile substance which powered both the planet's golden age and its collapse the deeper the player goes the nastier the creatures the larger the rivers and lakes of neon fuel it establishes emulsion as something sickly strange dangerous clearly corrupt in some key capacity act 4 moves from the global past to the personal past with marcus revisiting a scientist father's old estate to get some deep mapping data that will let the cog know where to attack the locust with an emulsion-based weapon called a light-ass bomb marcus's relationship to his father and later on the ways in which that mirrors marcus's relationship with his own future son is just as important to the franchise as any other lore or world building detail and it's given equal priority even here back in the first years act five jumps immediately to the climactic train sequence and that has always been the one transition that felt truly disjointed when the first gears of war was ported to pc it was released with an exclusive new run of chapters later included here in the ultimate edition that helped flesh act 5 out quite a bit part of that is boss fight with brumack one of the largest enemies in the entire franchise it is odd that despite being such an iconic element of years of war this brumack fight was not actually an original component of the game act 5 in its expanded form is now a two-part climax wanna climax of size and spectacle with the brumack boss fight and won a climax of endurance with general ram the most difficult boss fight in the entire series the guy has a health pool the size of texas and he's only vulnerable when attacking you with his krill swarm which is one hit kill the reason that ram is so difficult beyond just the length of the fight is how the krill prevent you from using cover the way you would at any other point in the game and the way they allow him not to have to use cover at all it is rhythmically very alien to the experience so far making him a tough and frustrating nut to crack it's the ending cinematic that's most important though it establishes that you've won the battle but misunderstood the war and reveals the mysterious narrator as the villain for the next two games it feels consistent and complete in every way as it narratively and mechanically escalates through all five of these acts susan o'connor succeeded at what is essentially one of gaming's most impressive acts of storytelling taxidermy from a disconnected pile of scraps she wove together a fabric strong enough to support not only this game but over a decade of equally impressive sequels to come none of this touches on what's most meaningful to people when they look back on their gears of war 1 experience though which is the co-op aspect not only is the game an interactive participatory action movie that is better than a lot of action movies that actually get made but you can play it sitting with your best friend as co-star i did play one of the later games entirely in split screen local co-op so we'll see what that looks like later on but the ultimate edition allows for online play so i went through the first half of the game or so with a friend of mine everything that's enjoyable about the game is more enjoyable with a second person the mechanical design is even tighter if you have a thinking human player in both marcus and dom's boots while i played most of the games on regular difficulty if you're playing co-op i really recommend bumping it up to veteran regular difficulty is i feel the balance that's correct for single player one active protagonist with some minor backup from the friendly ai is enough to squash the opposition so factor in player 2 in equally aggressive killing machine is player 1 and suddenly the tables are swung too far in the player's favor on veteran difficulty you need someone looking out for you splitting off some of the enemies defending left while you defend right doing a double plank together there is so much more gameplay that can be effectuated between two people especially over a chat service or person to person with local co-op where you can coordinate seamlessly upping the difficulty to veteran or hire makes this kind of planned tactical action necessary makes it even more satisfying when you pull it off what's especially interesting to me is how i didn't even realize what i was missing in the single player unlike other games i've played design from the ground up for co-op play like resonate evil 5 and 6 or dead space 3 there's not a sense of compromise doing the single player no impression of the game functioning more poorly without a player 2. i wonder if a lot of that is because of coal and baird the ai driven players three and four even when marcus and dom split up they often get an ai partner and the banter is so constant between the four of the characters that there's a sense of social interaction even when playing alone in other coop games the simple verbs of interaction aren't quite so satisfying as they are here in gears of war 1. that simple pleasure of slamming into a wall the amazing sound design that gives weapon fire its personality the pacing of the encounter design the heaviness of everything none of these things are diminished by playing single player and all of these things are enhanced by being able to share in the experience with the co-op mode especially at the time of its release most games that you could sit down and play with a friend locally in the same room where competitive fighting games racing games sports games shooters being able to experience a rough equivalent of a hollywood blockbuster together as friends and not rivals was a rare thing for the digital medium there's a lot of people out there with gears of war tattoos and such for whom the games are deeply important on a personal level but it's not always just the game for which people get these tributes often there are also tributes to the memory of time spent within the game connecting with someone else siblings friends lovers all sorts of pairs of people could sit down and make a memory that was part gears of war and part something more personal the first gears of war is an all-time classic no matter which version it's a design that's harmonious and engaging in almost every mechanical aspect it has a world that's intriguing without being withholding and best of all it has the potential to be a fond memory with a chosen friend another challenging thing about talking about the gears of war franchise is that they stay extraordinarily consistent as they move into later sequels sure the scope enlarges the graphics get better they're new gimmicks and weapons and enemies but from the very beginning to the very latest dlc the core feel of shooting taking cover and navigating the world feels relatively unchanged from title to title it's a game that got so much right the first time that the new danger is to overload it to the point of being unbalanced the next two games came out relatively quickly too a two-year wait for gears of war ii followed by another three-year wait for gears of war iii all on the same hardware of the xbox 360. they had short development cycles with the same hardware limitations guiding what is and isn't possible this gives all the initial trilogy a striking visual consistency ultimate edition aside where this initial trilogy feels extremely tight compared to many other franchises all of a kind and extremely sequential each builds off of the storytelling seeds planted by the previous games creating another layer of consistency by using a world that remembers its mysteries and refers back to them when moving the narrative forward this seems straightforward but it's not necessarily common if enough time goes by between video game releases the pressure to be new and different intensifies the fundamental nature of a sequel shifts to tackle the new novelty gears of war 5 hasn't even greatly changed the user interface by the time we get around to it i wonder if this is a result of having so much of the first game come together from elements constructed without any kind of unifying story the game part of the game was too tightly constructed to be expanded the same way that the narrative could so it was in the narrative in world building that they had to put their focus when it came to crafting a sequel gears of war ii goes absolutely hog wild almost from the get-go and delivering what people liked about the last game in bigger more bombastic ways as ridiculous as it gets the bombast is tied to pushing the boundaries that the first game had already established answering questions that it had already provoked and so it seems like a natural escalation and not just the cynical generalized demand the sequels be exponentially more action-packed at the same time that the action becomes more outrageous the character arcs become more personal when it works these elements balance each other out and it does work most of the time in the official book several different developers all cite a 1998 film saving private ryan as influencing the design and tone of the world of gears of war its industrial brutality and its melancholy they mostly reference the first game but the second game has by far the biggest world war ii movie kind of vibes in my opinion gears war ii is a story of desperation misunderstanding and ultimately grand mistakes the frame is much different for the tutorial level instead of a prison marcus has returned to the fold of the cog in the city of isinto one of the last human strongholds to withstand the fall the tutorial is not for marcus it's for a green recruit named carmine who marcus grudgingly walks through what you learned the last game it isn't as exciting as an opener as the prison was but does establish a new tone in the passing of time dom has given story attention with a return to a hanging thread from the previous game his missing wife maria their hints that she may be alive following that thread so early and so prominently helps keep an objective in reserve as the game moves through its simpler first couple of acts two years have passed and all that time marcus has remained loyal to the cog although the last game casts the coalition of governments in a dark skeptical light and this game will move back that direction a sense of wartime camaraderie is critical to landing the game's first two acts the first game wasn't much of a war the world felt too far gone to ever be recovered the plot was a last desperate hail mary the second game is an actual war one of the last major actions that either the locust or the humans have the resources to commit to the opening cutscene has chairman prescott leader of the cog and a recurring villain throughout several of the games giving a rousing speech and summoning up the last few drops of military might to launch an invasion of the underground it's like d d-day big monsters and bigger caves replacing the normandy coast because of changes to the unreal engine 3 that powered it the game was able to display many many more character models on the screen at once and the overland troop transport rigs that you ride in on the way to the real meat of the game take advantage of that by letting you mow down platoon after platoon after platoon of the bad guys the action is larger but emptier at first it's a bit more of a tech demo than a satisfying action sequence overstaying its welcome in the modern era by taking a lot of time to show off things that we now take for granted i still like it tonally however it builds anticipation of the actual game ahead while setting up a kind of martial hubris that it can pick apart at leisure for the coming chapters this action is obviously doomed this is the same organization who oversaw the world's initial destruction after all when you finally arrive at the town down through which you can tunnel into the locust empire the normandy field continues it's a very european looking town caught early in the invasion from below the fighting starts off at a pitch and pace way beyond how the previous game just kind of eased you into things this is war so in playing gears 1 and moving immediately to gears 2 there's not a lot of slippage in the pace the train level at the climax there and the invasion site at the beginning here feel equal in the fierceness of your opposition action games with rpg skill trees have to make up a reason for taking your powers away from game to game gears of war doesn't have powers it has habits that's part of why mechanical consistency is so core to the franchise's identity you pick right back up at the exact level of power and competency that you left off at before even the same escalated encounter design allowing the games not just to build off each other but blend it together into a truly linear experience this game's first act is deft at flipping some key dynamics from cog up against the ropes to cog on the offense from prisoner to veteran from isolation to group identity almost nothing has mechanically changed yet the emotions from one game to another are cumulative and complementary thanks to the unexpected skill with which the games tell their over-the-top stories over the top is probably underselling it actually yet gears of war makes it work in a way that feels so casual it's impossible to call this ridiculousness a bad thing it is instead a tremendous asset the second game's most famous line is probably control there's a giant worm sinking the cities and surely this is ridiculous but the thing had actually been part of the level architecture for a while before the worm gets called out in the dialogue you can see the massive far away walls of the level flexing or shifting on occasion instead of this being a step too far this is actually a treat of spectacle that the game has been teasing for a while and finally delivers on there is another consistency in these games that i really appreciate if you see a big monster you're gonna fight a big monster and how are you gonna fight a goddamn worm like that well the official book generally refers to killzone as the sony playstation franchise with which gears was primarily competing i strongly feel like gears of war and god of war are opposite sides of the angry beef bro versus gargantuan boss monster coin god of war ultimately has i think better monsters but both of them are operating on a similar wavelength of gory excess god of war wallows in its cruelty and crassness though in a way that can be stylistically compelling or divisive depending on who you ask gears of war by contrast is much more deliberately and straightforwardly cinematic it uses cutscene and narrative in a much more consistent familiar way god of war is single player design from top to bottom so kratos can be a creature of the moment an agent of pure aggression but the co-op designing gears couldn't shine show brightly the way it does with that rhythm of mechanical engagement it needs players on the defensive to work together it needs that cover so the players can have a moment to think about or even talk about their next move and to be more visually legible to both players doing split screen local co-op a giant monster in god of war is generally a mechanical challenge only in gears of war it's all sorts of opportunities to be playful with the setting and draw the player into its world with the more conventional cinematic trappings that it uses instead of puzzles to slow a player's progression through the level the giant worm once revealed is used to explain the whole setup of the main plot arc this is how the cities that are disappearing have disappeared this is how yosinto will fall too once the worm is done eroding the supporting rock that has made the city a sanctuary all apocalypse long so the stakes have immediately become reversed the offensive has already widely underestimated the opposition and something much more drastic will have to be done it isn't just for spectacle it's a key element of the whole synopsis on top the giant worm is an object of jokes and banter it is absurd and these even more absurd characters are doing back and forth bit comedy about the worm every bit as rapid fire as the lancer itself it brings the characters together and it includes the player in on the joke the absurdism creates a bonding atmosphere which is a major aspect of the co-op's appeal especially in this game the sense of being able to high-five a friend and ask so are we going to blow up shyhalud or what and then you actually do just that it is so over the top that there's a thrill to it now like if you were on a swing and at the top of the chain you just decided to let go and see what happens the first game did such a thorough job setting the scale of the monsters in the tone of the world that it doesn't feel like it's too far of an escalation either it is just exactly the correct amount of outrages not to feel like a plea for attention i am already sold from the moment marcus starts yelling about it i am now also yelling about it i'm ready for a worm ranklin another thing that's admirable about almost all the gears of war games is their commitment to the bit whatever kind of monster or set piece or whatever they choose to focus on i have never once felt that something was over too quick or given up on with a deus ex machina so here we are with the whole squad getting eaten alive with tearing the worm apart from the inside as our only option there's no way to make such a massive creature a satisfying thing to fight with piddly little assault rifles so now we go deep into the worm where the player can see first hand the massive smashing teeth that turn rock and cities into what i assume is some really gravelly poop it's a real novelty even if they are borrowing a little level design from system shock too the heart of the worm is your target and this is one of my favorite moments in the whole franchise for its gleeful absurdity you have to cut the artery leading to its heart not just one artery not just one heart a whole bundle but each time you do the room begins filling up with blood so you have to do it really quickly or else literally drown in the destruction that you're inflicting jokes and banter to accompany throughout this game was released in 2008 the same year as fallout 3 and gta 4. it was pushing the boundaries of what was possible with the hardware of the 360 just as hard as either of those titles but in a more linear and focused way so as to allow moments of incredible cinematic spectacle where the open world titles had their spectacle all wrapped up in the map design it doesn't have a 60 hour campaign but neither does it have a single wasted minute and i might appreciate that a little bit more in the end gears of war 2 is probably my least favorite of the original trilogy and i blame it all on act 3. actually half of act 3. actually pretty much just one vehicle sequence that is so god-awfully long irritating and utilitarian that i honestly can't believe they didn't just entirely cut it act 3 is hugely frustrating because it's also got some of the most interesting set pieces and big reveals in the game and then they cap it off with this miserable slog that serves no purpose besides to flatly show how the cast gets from point a to point b consider the actual strengths of gears of war this is a cover shooter with a killer back and forth rhythm the vehicle segment gives you no cover pits you against stupid amounts of enemies and demands that you redo long chains of actions over and over again because of poor and inconsistent checkpointing throughout the overlong experience and i know the standard answer to complaints about this sort of thing is have you tried not sucking so much but the point i'm trying to make about it is that if you're being tested on a rhythm and style of action combat that has no relation to the rest of the game that can be infuriatingly punishing depending on your difficulty choice the tactical slower heavier third-person shooting that makes gears of war so special is only special because of the way it's moved away from the kind of shooting this vehicle sequence really represents floaty low feedback corridor shooting let's go back a couple steps and consider how good the level encounter design is in the chapters leading up to the sequence for contrast as part of its commitment to tearing down all the emotions and assumptions of its opening act delta squad is diverted to a secret facility for an important lore dump what's interesting is how the game takes what i feel like is one of the longest breaks from combat of the whole franchise here rhythmically this is an excellent choice the game opened with an invasion continued through a war and ended up in the guts of a gigantic city-destroying worm non-stop escalation well here's a long breather where the game decides to answer some major open-ended questions from the last game engaging the players in a completely different way the slowness seems kind of irritating at first and it as if the areas that you're going through are larger than they have to be but there is a point to it you'll come back exactly this way as razor hail falls from the sky and the locust attacks the facility knowing where to go among the hostile enemies and even more deadly weather is important in the interval in between you explore the depths of the facility where the mood turns to light horror with an untrustworthy old host in his muldering old laboratory here's where the key lore on which much of the rest of the franchise is introduced the origin of the locust all the emulsion refining was causing a disease called rust lung however some of the children of these miners who developed rustlong also developed mutations which the government wanted to harness for war according to the official book there isn't a lot more to how mira the locust queen got her look in style and voice besides the fact that lord of the rings came out during development and the team all thought kate blanchett was such a badass in her role which is you know fine whatever cate blanchett is cool the backstory that they give her here in the second game though creates an interesting real world parallel for queen mira there's a famous case of a woman henrietta lacks who went to a hospital in 1951 and changed medical science for decades without acknowledgement or credit or consent the cells of a cancer that the doctors discovered that she had were doing something that they thought impossible they created infinite perfect copies without breaking down henry de lax changed cancer research proxima research an entire medical industry in the arc of history in small ways with something taken from her without her consent mira is a henrietta-esque figure the locusts were engineered from her cells without her consent and this is why she's their vengeful leader without looking quite the same way as they do the ai ghost of the scientists responsible for all of this lures marcus deep into the facility where he tries to kill delta squad and then once the tension of waiting for combat is shattered you fight hordes of these proto-locusts who break out of their tanks after years of fitful slumber it is a great narrative beat a fun deviation in rhythm a knowing wink to classic horror storytelling structures he also learned that these proto-locusts were dumped in a nearby mountain you'll have to drive there so you see the contrast the frustration the development team are playful creative people with an eye for style and a nose for blending genres well and they still decided to throw in 20 minutes of gimmicky vehicle content out of what i have to therefore assume is spite while the development team brought a lot of talent to bear on the game one explanation for inconsistencies like that is that for every one thing they knew how to do and how to do it well there was another thing that they were making up as they went especially when it comes to the storytelling moments out of all the original cast dominic is probably the weakest link his presence in the banter is dwarfed by the other character's excess of personality the one thing keeping him distinct and holding him together was his basic decency his basic basic-ness he's a regular guy in an irregular world his search for his wife maria was a relatable straightforward thread that further supports his character as one yearning for what's lost the potential for domesticity and normalcy that seems completely impossible now it was a certainty that this plot thread would eventually be resolved but the the how of it now that's a trickier question the game had handled delicate emotions before but in a much broader kind of way like with the suggestion of melancholy from the environment or the way it weaves in its anti-war messages not so much with the direct character work which has generally provided a more comedic counterpoint to the bleakness of the setting in the official book rod ferguson remembers how the scene where dom and maria are for better or worse reunited goes like this quote we had this moment i'd wanted to have but every review we had people left laughing there were always snickers it was so frustrating because we'd never done it before and didn't know what to expect i still remember that first review when greg put in the music there's this moment where maria changes and the choir kicks in and it was so perfect nobody made any jokes nobody snickered it was just stunned silence from the raw emotion of the scene it still sticks with me and reminds me as a creative that you have to keep faith in what it is you're doing end quote part of me feels a little bad kicking the scene around after reading that but i don't personally agree much about the choir kicking in and it being so perfect like everything else in the game they've gone big big emotion big choir swell a big bait and switch as we see maria as dom would have liked to have seen her followed by the cut to what she looks like actually that is the element that i can't stand the cynical dithering between the happy resolution and the one they've quite obviously been foreshadowing because of the foreshadowing work that they already put in i think the way to apply the scene would be to confront it head-on not as a moment of shock but as a moment of pitiful disillusionment confirmation that this world is too far gone to be saved either instead i wonder how much of the way this scene was constructed was to counter the laughter to cue the music swell and make the emotion so overwhelming that a player would feel like a jerk for being unmoved but it's that same insistence that takes me out of the moment instead the best thing that you can do with a delicate scene a scene of real emotional exposure and fragility is to trust it i don't feel it's necessary to remind people of the maria that dom had hoped to see the players had hoped for that too we're already on the same page here the emotional excess of the scene feels to me like a hedged bed against the memory of those early snickers when you look towards the future of the franchise each game gets better and better with these delicate moments while judgment aside i think maria's death is a particularly interesting moment in gaming history because it shows the ways in which games had to learn the lessons of cinematic storytelling in a kind of uneven progression with actual cinema having to relearn from scratch what the other discipline had known for years this is a real learning moment for games the cool thing is that they really did learn from it too another thing i appreciate about the gears war games is how they often spend the climactic chapters of one game setting up the beginning chapters of the next weaving the prologue of what's to come into the resolution of what's happening now is a kind of twist it's another aspect of what keeps the games feeling so completely consistent and linear as a campaign from title to title like the previous game gears of war ii takes place over a very short time period just a couple of days the focus of the main plot is localized beginning and ending with jacinto the threat to the last great city is so severe that it triggers the last great mobilization which fails of course except for delta squad being able to breach the locust's capital city and go after queen mira the queen calls them fools the anime this whole time the corruption at the root of the world is the emulsion itself back in the first game the act 3 refinery you fought lambent wretches exploding variants just saturated with the strange super fuel the lambent it turns out are a blight throughout the entire underground and have been since the very beginning the locusts are down to what's just about their own last city one very nearby jacinto in using the last of their respective strengths to continue fighting each other to destroy each other's last strongholds the real threat to the planet was allowed to grow unchecked marcus's own father had been one of the very few to know to try to plan and even then all he could come up with were ways to kill as a last-ditch back-up plan the elder phoenix thought the entire city of jacinto could be dropped on top of the locust tunnels flooding their capital and destroying their nascent civilization so that's just what you do it's exciting but also very much in keeping with the anti-war themes this is a mistake this is a failure for both sides of the war the fighting will now continue until everything is consumed and nothing is left without appreciating that there are even worse things lurking in the deep waiting to accelerate the march to oblivion the only thing that would have helped is peace which is the only thing the world will not allow so yes the climax is very exciting the cog technically win and you defeat a gigantic glowing monster but it is a pyrrhic victory at best the game never fails to articulate the boundaries between the extremely likable main characters and the flawed foolish system that they live in honestly the only things negative about the climax are the boss fights they seem an overreaction to general ram's difficulty scourge the weird priest-like enemy with the fleshy dreadlocks is almost just a waiting game of a boss fight with a very simple rhythm it doesn't allow him to come across as half as aggressive as he had been in the cinematics and then finally this lamb into brumack as a monster he's certainly cool but as a boss fight it's just a shooting gallery no real risk no real strategy it seems to me another instance of the developers learning as they go trying to make the end a spectacle instead of a struggle it's these creases in the otherwise taut fabric of the franchise that prevent gears of war ii from being among the better games in the franchise for me anyway it's a transitional piece yet look at the thing it blossoms into gears of war 3 starts with a significant time skip and a cascade of major aesthetic changes leading some to feel that it's too disconnected from the previous games i disagree every single change was foreshadowed long in advance all we skip is the build-up which has always been the style for gears of war after the collapse of vicinto the cog collapsed as well no more governments and no more time as the lambent grow unchecked beneath the planet's surface the opening chapter has these two plot elements colliding as chairman prescott disliked and dishonored comes crawling back at the same moment that the lambent attacked the ship that everyone lives on now part of what makes this feel like such an abrupt change is that it's the first game transition that actually shakes up the mechanics of combat instead of just being explodey versions of the locust the new lambent horde is composed of similar varieties of threat but with much more volatile qualities they mutate become stronger as they get hurt and even the way reinforcements are brought in has shifted instead of tunneling up through the famous grub holes twisting vine-like stalks burst upward and pop them out of tumorous little nodules grub holes traditionally only closed if you kill alter reinforcements or use a grenade to close the hole these new stocks can be closed just by regular weapons fire the consequence for not closing them is more severe though to balance that out they spawn new enemies much faster than grub holes which is thematically supportive of the new threat being more dangerous and overwhelming than the locust within the setting the weapons have also been adjusted slightly the active reload points have shifted to tighten up the feel of some of the less popular choices of weapon like the hammer burst in particular it feels like a lot of change at once when you start playing the game so much of this change is about details though and not the fundamentals the fundamentals both of the mechanics and the story threads being followed are completely consistent and it makes for a fun start all around a novel start by raising so many questions so quickly the world is immediately more intriguing than it is stale these finally are the last days everyone's just looking for a quiet way to spend them i especially like how the game portrayed dom having had time after maria's death to get really into tomato gardening a joke that comes back around to even more hilarious effect in gears of war 4. this is what makes it feel like such a grand climax there's been a sense in the last two games that everything was going downhill towards a terminal extinction point and now it's actually here old assumptions and roles are being abandoned in the face of it if the world ends people are ready for it but if they can somehow pull themselves out of the fire now then the world is balanced on the edge of overwhelming change and that i think is a hell of a hook getting to go deep into the unknown landscapes of gears war is part of how the game establishes this feeling of a world on a knife's edge how it uses globetrotting to establish the new global stakes it's further able to do this by wildly expanding the active cast adding four new characters well new ish one major addition is anya no longer a voice in your ear but another pair of boots on the ground the brand new editions like sam or characters who were brought over from the comic books like jace struggle to find breathing room among the established characters but make up for it by being cleverly voice casted sam is voiced by claudia black jace is voiced by michael b jordan the voice actors for all the characters in gears of war carry so much of the mood of the franchise it was wise for gears 3 to invest heavily in big name voice actors there's a mechanical necessity behind the larger cast too the co-op has been expanded in this title to four-player concurrent co-op and the party split into two on several occasions two separate squads of four just a huge cast compared to other games in the franchise and the party splitting occurs almost right away just a couple chapters deep into act one where the player's perspective shifts from marcus and dom on the ship to baird and cole visiting cole's hometown on a supply run bearden cole as player characters feels right they've been trilogy long companions but rarely got a chance to outgrow their roles as banter machines cole particularly has never much been taken seriously by the script his role has been comedy relief the hype man until now kohl's in the player 1 seat it's his show for a while and what a show his hometown of hanover answers a lot of lingering questions about those outside the cog shadow the stranded who didn't appear much in gears 2. the cog is gone but the stranded hate what its old soldiers represented just the same yet they love coal coal was a hero from the time before a symbol of resilience for the interminable present and now that he's back again people look at him like a hope for the future cole doesn't quite feel that way about it though coming back to hanover provokes in him what i think is probably gears of war's first crack at writing an existential crisis into the script they do it in a typically wildly over-the-top fashion but since that's where cole already was it just meets him there at the limits of plausible absurdity in a long emptied old mega store cole comes across a cardboard cutout of his old thrash ball himself advertising breakfast cereal rather than being proud it kind of stops him cold and he says you ever feel like you're dead but nobody told you i love this moment and i think it's representative of how daft gears of war generally is at weaving human relatable moments with high octane excess there's only one thing that can slow down the cold train baby and apparently that thing is the inexorable march of time away from the people that we once were putting coal in the spotlight this way with this essentially existential struggle is the best possible thematic fit for what the game is doing with the broader world building coal is a character uniquely suited to bridge the gap between the world that was and never will be again and this bitter dire end of the world scenario coal even goes deep into memory and delusion with a boss fight kind of thing that gets twisted into a thrash ball match in the middle of the stadium cole used to play in long ago it's over the top and the same look maria is fine just kidding thing was but they let that you ever feel like your deadline stand alone they let the player chew on that for a minute and then past and present collide in this silly but fun thrash ball delusion cole is possibly my favorite character in the franchise and a large part of that is that each game gives him more depth from an unexpected angle the dude's got layers but he's also still exactly the hype man he was in the first game in cole's ability to be straightforward and uncomplicated at the same time that he's quietly abiding his deeper more nuanced self cole is rather like the gears of war franchise as a whole it takes quite a while before the player encounters the locust again but when you do they've been transformed not by mutation but by desperation this time in spending all of gears of war ii fighting each other destroying both of their last remaining strongholds at the same time both humanity and the locust are dispossessed and scattered there's a sense in hanover where you eventually do encounter the locust that both sides had gotten used to the old war humans fight the locust vice versa there are losses on both sides but it's not genocide anymore like it was on e-day or what the land didn't represent everyone is barely hanging on as evidenced by the new look which incorporates much more scrap and wear into the armor designs of both the stranded and the locust even the new turrets are just four lancers welded together the factories that produce the old locust turrets long underwater by now by making the locust more desperate they're also made more fierce which contributes to the mechanical balance for four-player co-op the lambent according to the official book were designed primarily as a way to adequately challenge four human players at once with the ability to attack from multiple directions and multiple players at once the locusts by contrast are more familiar and easier to defeat in that four player context by making the fighting fiercer the encounter design more aggressive the locusts are rebalanced for a better challenge in a way that feels thematically perfect act one is mostly about introducing the lambent and refocusing the world building but the next couple acts are locust focused in a cool way back when the locusts were strong it was a block by block fight slow going in urban environments now that they're weak scavengers like everybody else they're spread out over miles of terrain the plot takes you from the hanover coast where your ship's wreckage washes up to a far away settlement called anvil's gate the only way to make that journey is to steal one of those living gas barges that were introduced in the previous game the scale of your journey is huge compared to anything that's come before in the franchise there's just a ton of characters all moving together over insane distances the fighting with the locust has a brisker pace too you're not attacking them to destroy them you're attacking them to pass through the whole mood is different than the first gears of war more adventurous lighter a journey like this mirrors some of the emotions of the mobilization from the beginning of gears 2 a final push with a heightened camaraderie what's missing is the cog the characters now are doing this for each other they're doing it because it's the last thing they can do after cole's moment of introspection there's a pivot to a more optimistic note in the game this too is deliberate because the end of the world wouldn't matter so much to a player if they didn't feel like there was anything to lose gears of war is also a major exception to what's usually a pretty big pet peeve of mine dynastic storytelling centering the whole goings-on of the world on just a handful of repeating characters whose dynamic just renews across the generations there's moments where the franchise absolutely does fall into that trap in a predictable way but for the most part gears of war understands the danger of centering a vast world around a small cast the dynastic elements are handled therefore in a kind of diagonal way shifting with the generations from an expected character to an unexpected one gears of war 3 opens with something that the games had not clarified yet the crime that landed marcus in the prison that we meet him in he abandoned his post to go save his father famed scientist adam phoenix marcus always thought he failed but the message you receive at the very beginning of the game is a plea from adam alive and well to come liberate the panic room laboratory where he and the rest of humanity's top scientists have been sequestered ordinarily i'd feel like this was just a serviceable twist but taken as a trilogy adam fenix's presence grows larger and stronger throughout delta squad returning to his old mansion and breaking into his dusty old personal lab is the only thing that allowed the superweapon they used at the climax to work in gears of war one the thing that buys humanity the two years until the next game adam phoenix loomed in the background from the prison to the climax of gears of war one and in gears 2 his willingness to work with mira and try to avoid the bloodshed of emergence day was the major climactic revelation only learned at the heart of mira's castle adam failed but each time he failed he did it in a similar way in hoping for peace he planned for war and his plans for war made the war worse he developed the hammer of dawn a satellite weapon which the cog used on its own cities to try and defeat the locust greatly accelerating the apocalyptic aspects of the situation adam didn't intend that but he facilitated it the hedge bed of dropping one capital city on top of another he didn't choose to pull the trigger but marcus did destroying the capacity of either civilization to fight the lambent and now one final weapon to finish the war for good the legacy of violence that's passed down in the games from character to character is one where good intentions are invariably corrupted by corrupt systems the cogs expansionist wars for emulsion fueled callous dehumanization the dehumanization took the literal form of the locust the locust might have been the only chance to stop the lambent if they had worked together with the humans but violence begets violence and so the locust rose up to consume humanity humanity retaliated with mutual destruction and now the lambent will eat everyone who's left according to the lore what the land are puts an even more ironic spin on it they are the emulsion itself the fuel was a living organism of sorts and now it's a sickness that spread everywhere not exactly subtle sure but what in gears of war is the laminate plague is the consequence for the cogs expansionist hubris all the neon explosive chickens coming home to roost at once out of all the themes of gears of war this might be the most relatable that this world of ours was destroyed by the greed of people who lived and died before we were even born and their poisonous legacy will one day waft up from the sewers and dead places to finish the job no matter how we strive to escape it the axis of that nihilism set against a slight but scrappy optimism is a lot of what makes the games compelling for me artistically take colonel hoffman a career soldier whose gruff voice prominently features in both of the previous games he was as cog as they come but now the cog is gone so he now helps defend the town of anvil's gate made up of all sorts of cog and stranded exiles living together now who set out after the fall of yasinto he's got a wife now cog veteran bernadette mataki who has a huge role in the comics and the karen travis novels but more of a cameo role here in the games hoffman accepted the death of his world and the end of his role in it with dignity and found something new on which to build hoffman's a champ and not everyone is so lucky my favorite set of levels in gears 3 takes place in the city of char so-called because it was one of the first to be destroyed by the hammer of dawn of the danger close retaliatory strike so many years ago on emergence day a lot of people were still living in the city at the time and they're still there turn to ash like a kind of fusion of pompeii and hiroshima it's evocative and helps contextualize the hammer of dawn as something terrible in its nature and not just as a toy to kill the big guys with after the long overland journey through rural areas and across the countryside this dense urban section feels much closer in spirit and aesthetic to the first game the damage though is worse than you've seen in the cities in those previous games and the resentments of it stranded deeper ice tea plays a refinery owner who kept on refining even after the end of the world he's no better than the cog really but ice-t does a great job at selling the depth of this character's resentment the ways in which people refuse to forgive or forget their betrayal and abandonment by their government as a set of levels it's also just extremely well structured and balanced the introduction to char is long slow combat free it's about setting up the tone of apprehension and regret then this climax is in a wave defense fight outside of the survivor's compound at the top of a skyscraper this and another skeletal skyscraper sit on opposite ends of a gigantic crater there's a skytran between the two of them but it's stuck at the other compound which has gone radio silent the crater allows a player to see their progress across the cityscape in real time to contextualize their advancement by being able to use both tall buildings as constant reference points it sets up clear expectations and then delivers on them skillfully methodically when you've cleared the main objective to investigate the other tower queen mira shows up on her war beetle and creates a double climax making the return trip much more difficult and exciting despite having the travel portion massively shortened i love a post-apocalyptic cityscape and char is one of the best i've ever seen the colors red on grey the mood melancholy them threatening and even just the layout being able to understand the scale of your journey through these reference landmarks all these things are done so skillfully is it original a brand new creative idea no is it a very beautiful very well articulated version of those common tropes hell yes gears of war games seldom tread absolutely brand new ground but even in the ways in which they're recognizable they have a style all their own gear zebora 3 does a tremendously impressive job of wrapping up all the major themes and threads of the trilogy connecting them together in an arc that is consistent across all three titles consider the multimedia meta-textual way that they set up the game's sentimental centerpiece the death of dom before char delta squad rolls out in search of fuel to what used to be maria's hometown it's a difficult return for dom he seems pretty empty bereft in a vulnerable and relatable way sure there's an over-the-top scene of him laying his cog tags on a grave and doing the big capital letter emotions so no one misses the point but the cracks are there in his character from the very beginning of the game he's a man who can't escape his past so he doesn't dom's eventual sacrifice is telegraphed far far in advance but that's part of what makes it feel right years three in a broad way is about whether these characters deserve a future and feel able to fight for one and dom just doesn't feel like he does on either count when cole said ever feel like you died and nobody told you this is because cole had been avoiding confronting these things the passage of years and the knowledge that there's no winning the war even possible anymore hit him as kind of a surprise dom confronted these things in the previous game his path ended back there though soldier that he was he just kept marching the clever metatextual thing that the developers did was to set the sacrifice to the piano refrain from that gary jewels cover of madworld madworld was not actually part of the game's soundtrack previously not for gears of war 1 not for gears of war 2 yet it was such an iconic breakout moment for the early franchise and such an indelible memory of so many who saw that ad for the first time myself included that the game is able to inject a whole additional layer of wistful nostalgia on top of the emotions provoked just by the fiction itself that video of marcus alone pursued hopeless take that dot tie a thread to it you pull that thread all the way up all the way up through the memories that the player has of dom and marcus's friends even further up through the memories the player might have of playing dom as player 2 or of the actual human friend who was player 2 when you played it together and once you pull that thread through all those memories you tie it off on the other dot the dot of a trilogy reaching its climax things reaching their end the delicate sadness of knowing that nothing lasts forever neither the bad of a dying world or the good of a treasured experience the actual scene is kind of on the nose like it often is with gears of war but the mad world piano soundtracking choice is just chef's kiss brilliant it's practically pavlovian and getting the audience in exactly the frame of mind it wants them to be in at this stage in the franchise the development team is becoming even more skilled at cinematic storytelling and presentation at the same time the games are becoming long enough and complex enough that they can have their own internal rhythms of callbacks and connections they are speaking a cinematic language but increasingly the gears of war games are speaking it in their own proprietary dialect the last act especially grabs all of the dangling story threads and coils them into a powerfully strong narrative rope azura the secret luxury resort bunker where the rich powerful or those two skilled to risk in the war were kept hidden away from all the horror or realities of the war outside now everyone's pretty much all dead and rotting in their gilded holes queen mara and the locust attacking missouri is the very last act of the entire war the last clashing of the old armies before both are consigned to the scrap heap of history the tonal twist here is that this isn't some triumphant last stand but something kind of shameful instead everyone in delta squad is more or less disgusted by the luxury of the place some trying to justify it others feeling the kind of betrayal that the folks at charr had felt nursing the same sorts of resentments this palatial island of luxury appointments is the total opposite of not only char but everywhere the player has been in the world over the entire trilogy a reminder that as much as these characters had longed for the old world the old world had not longed for them in return plus it's just a knockout escalation of the aesthetic of lost dominion the dreams of a military aristocracy where the military part is safely out there among the common people there's a whole lot of corpses and a whole lot of ammunition to be found in the halls of azura but not a whole lot of sympathy the war finally coming to consume the last of the people who set the world's destruction in motion feels properly climactic even if the locusts win the war the story has looped in a satisfactory way the war between human and locusts ended really before you even got there in a certain way so the game's climax is more personal between mira and adam phoenix the question is what kind of legacy they will leave to the next generation of whoever's left this is what i mean about dynastic storytelling here being actually kind of compelling because of the way it shifts context and perspective from game to game rather than being used to enforce a creative status quo the story of gears 4 and 5 are built with this moment and memory at their foundation this failure of adam to commit to peace and this failure of mira to relinquish her resentments the game articulates these feelings using a boss fight against a giant flying bug that fires a death ray and then further concludes them using a fancy science exclamation point superweapon but rather than hold this against the game i feel like the game cunningly uses these outlandish elements to carry the emotional parts to make the sweeping themes seem maybe less obvious by dwarfing them with spectacle that's always been among the most surprising things for me about gears of war that it looks like sounds like and is broadly representative of a kind of teenage boys media phase of game development but it has humanity and heart to it plus some genuinely clever and thoughtful writing interspersed between the yelling and the gunfire and the cutting people in half the game uses the cut and folks and half parts to prop up and help hammer home the feeling sad about stuff bits and it is so damn good at both gears of war 3 underlines the central ebb and flow of the franchise by which all subsequent sequels follow so long as the sensation of the mechanics and the tone of the narrative are constant the plots can wildly differ and build off of each other in unexpected ways this extends not only to the games but also to the novelizations comic books and more the initial trilogy is so creatively solid so tightly constructed that its iconography characters and moods run through and unite the entire extended universe of the games in a way that is very uncommon at the end of gears of war 3 adam phoenix lives up to his reputation as master of genocide and uses his weapon to destroy the locusts and the lambent at once globally seemingly for good it's tidy but pretty open-ended actually this whole generation's story is over by the time gears 4 picks it back up decades will have passed in the fiction's timeline and a new generation of hardware would be running the games in real life this was the end of the period of the games being developed by epic too though many of the developers went on to continue with the company rebranded the coalition under rob ferguson yet in between the main sequence of games is a tail end of content that i've barely heard discussed a whole fourth game for the xbox 360 and a whole secondary campaign for gears of war iii where the mainline games to come all look forward these games look backwards to the unexplored time period around emergency they provide insight into something else as well what gears of war means this franchise without marcus and the phoenix dynasty front and center rams shadow is a dlc i wouldn't have known about if not for the research i did for this video i have never heard anyone speak its name or acknowledge its existence which is odd because ram shadow is actually [ __ ] fantastic possibly one of the best early instances of a high budget dlc campaign i've seen every bit as impressive as the missing link expansion for deus ex human revolution or the story driven dlcs from mass effect 2 like layer of the shadow broker it ditches delta squad for zeta6 a collection of all-star tertiary characters who never made more than brief appearances in the main run of games from gears of war 1 we have min kim the future commander of the original delta squad who dies in the cinematic at the end of that game's act 1. from gears war 2 we have tai khalisa the kick-ass islander character who appears in the first act of that game and is captured by the locust by the time you find him again and gears of war ii he's too far gone and he kills himself foreshadowing the thing with maria from gears of war three jace stratton is given a backstory and more narrative attention when you find him in an abandoned bank and help him evacuate from the gears of war comic series we have michael barrack who's actually in the player 1 slot and serves as the main character plus a new character unique to the dlc alicia valero the game is even set in a city that the player has likely been to a lima if you don't remember it this is because it was sunk underground by the rock worm in years of war 2 and you fought among its fallen rubble the game starts off at a wild pace as well trying to stop a major offensive from an underground sinkhole on emergency day itself while an oncoming krill storm darkens the sky in advance of the kind of infestation you saw in gears of war 1 act 2. use the hammer of dawn to take down platoons of enemies a fever pitch of combat and that's just the initial opening encounter all-out war a war you know is doomed and here you are using the weapon that helps doom it so here in this forgotten dlc is an effort to supplement the main campaign's impressive conclusion by looking backwards and making the introductory details of the settings stronger and more engaging the main campaign ties the main threads together wraps up the whole locust lambent situation in a neat little bow when you're doing gears of war 3. ram shadow is built from scraps and leftovers from these weaker materials it proves the quality and durability of the core gameplay loops and mood of the franchise by building something every bit as quality as the main campaign from what are essentially spare parts of setting narrative and gameplay i mean mostly let's get it out of the way right now that it has these odd gimmick sections where you play as general ram the boss of the first game and the boss of this dlc it's not that it isn't fun to be the big guy for a little while just that it feels kind of pointless it's not the same gameplay loop as when you're playing as a gear being ram is a little boring for the same reason that he's such a pain in the ass as a boss he's just wildly overpowered and hard to actually damage he doesn't need or use cover a game of the same era with some very inconsistent dlc is bioware's dragon age origins where some of the stuff is narrative critical and some of it is very slight but the most actively purposeless of all the dlc is called the darkspawn chronicles where you fight against the main characters as some of the game's bigger and meaner monsters and an alternate take on the climax chapters in dragon age this novelty experience is separated as content by the menus from the main narrative stuff which is mostly integrated in ram shadow you get the novelty gimmick mixed in as alternate chapters to the primary gameplay of the dlc which cheapens it because the primary content is of such higher quality the presentation really is on par with the original campaign it doesn't need anything extra like this the scenes of a collapsing city are so different in style with the post-apocalypse of the main timeline while maintaining that same enthusiasm for destruction take this scene where you drop a goddamn skyscraper onto your enemies to defeat them same level of excess same level of spectacular violence yet now you're creating the fallen rubble which will one day characterize the entire world block off the streets that aren't part of the playable level this could have been a story told much more simply or cheaply it could all be a gimmick like general ram being playable but instead it quite diligently does what prequels do best and establishes looping strands of post-hoc context in one of the early years of war comics the hollow the ending features barrett sacrificing himself to save dom marcus and j stratton this dlc is the story primarily of how jace became a gear prologuing that comic in particular along with the background of e-day in general the dlc also establishes the earliest origin of conspicuous lighter that follows major characters all the way through gears 5. it also resolves its motivation paradox in a looping but satisfying way there's no denying that it's kind of a problem that general ram is the big villain and final boss in the dlc because not only has that been done before it was done with finality you know that nothing you do will really touch him this is narratively unsatisfying in a way that the foreknowledge that elena itself is completely doomed at the war is unwinnable is not in that case we had seen the ruins but not the fall so getting to see the fall is still a hook it expands what was known before ram as a villain simply recycles what was known before to try to add some zest and flavor to it they threw in this absolutely ridiculous scene where alicia dai is trying to kill ran in the same way kim will be killed by ram in gears 1. it establishes that kim and ram have this prior rivalry that kim's future death had more personal stakes than perhaps it seemed at first and that is really overloading it not literally everything has to create a callback and a connection and mostly the dlc is excellent at picking and choosing which details to fill in mostly those details surrounding characters who never got much context or screen time to begin with re-contextualizing such a famous moment of the primary canon seems somehow beyond the mandate of the dlc reaching too far on the other hand all the spin-off material focused around the emergency part of the timeline is so consistently dedicated to forging and strengthening those peripheral connections that i think is entirely possible to rearrange them into a timeline linear order of play that complements and strengthens the primary trilogies that new linear order would be ram shadow gears of war judgment's first campaign gears of war tactics then gears one through three taking a break two-thirds of the way through gears of war 3 to play judgment's second campaign then gears 4 then gears 5 then hive busters playing them in this order the prequel material genuinely does deepen the connectivity between all the titles even the other dlc in prequel material this too is part of what makes the franchise difficult to talk about not only is the gameplay unified changing little from title to title but the narrative is unified as well in such a way that it never travels too far from the shore or gets into territory that could be considered truly experimental or weird it is a whole cloth without many dangling threads at all the games generally don't decide to do something wholly weird and different opening themselves up to failure with one notable if rarely discussed exception gears of war judgment was made by a studio called people can fly who came into renown with other over-the-top shooter projects like painkiller and bullet storm having ported the original gears award a pc they were a known and trusted quantity to the franchise when epic looked to shopping out a spin-off however the game itself when it came out in 2013 was met with such a mixed reception that the official book devotes only two pages to it one of which is pictures it talks about how long-running developer lee perry had a kind of loosely open hub-based design but quote they decided to bundle up what i had started with and they sent it to poland but any designer who gets handed a design from somebody else is going to say yeah whatever i'm going to do what i want to do so people can fly and want their own way with years of word judgment and that was the last i touched a gears game end quote the single page of retrospective in the official book is all like that a plight dodge on the question of what kind of a gears game judgment was compared to the other ones besides to note that it was positively reviewed at the time for the most part because the answer is clear it is a very gimmicky and odd one it did well enough to be the third best-selling game in america for a while on release behind bioshock infinite but it's been deliberately overlooked in many ways by the future titles in the franchise and its reputation among fans skews negative when it registers at all what absolutely shocks me on playing it however is that this bad game i'd heard people talk about is only half bad literally half because it actually has two separate campaigns of significantly different essentially opposite styles and structures one of which i have never seen discussed even in most release day reviews of the game this is likely because you have to complete two-thirds of the main campaign and level up your player account before it unlocks and then it just says aftermath campaign unlocked like what is that some bonus mode who cares right it does not at all say by the way if you want to play something that actually feels like gears 3 we did include it after all and here you are no the actual best part of the game is hidden behind the main content and the main content is so arcadey and frivolous that it feels like side content the whole game feels completely bafflingly backwards while i understand the version you can currently buy digitally sharpened for modern hd standards the xbox 360 disc version i played is also the least visually spectacular of all the early titles it's more colorful than the original trilogy but lacking in its grandeur or its detail so this is the one that i played couch co-op because i had read that as just a fun game to play with a friend judgment was pretty okay and that was broadly correct i did really enjoy my time with it as essentially an arcade experience something to feed quarters into to while away at the time the entirety of the main campaign leans into not only arcade aesthetics and arcade tonality but also plain old pure arcade structure the levels are all less than five minutes long and you're given a point score at the end as well as a star rating out of three more each level has a bonus condition that gives you double points in exchange for some kind of extra effort the points don't do anything except unlock characters and cosmetics from multiplayer with the notable exception that leveling up is how you unlock the other better single player campaign so if you don't actually invest in the game and give its arcadey campaign a very very generous chance you won't even be offered the superior alternative backwards bizarre as a prequel ram shadow dlc is tighter and better produced than judgement's main campaign which is extremely sloppy with its storytelling and world building compared to what came before after three stellar games judgment muddied the waters even if it would be too far to say they were poisoning the well it wasn't enough to damage the franchise with what they did but it was enough to reduce judgment's legacy to a single diplomatically polite page in history like all the most memorably bad direct-to-dvd style spin-off sequels a big part of judgment's problem is having huge ambition without an understanding of how to actually make that ambition conform to the thing the franchise actually is it uses the same framing device and ultimate framing punchline and i mean the exact same as futurama's season 4 episode 11 where no fan has gone before the main cast is being court-martialed they explain the plot as testimony and then at the climax the punchline is that the a plot wasn't actually resolved and the trial comes under attack as the story shifts into full present tense in futurama as comedy this works fine here as the structure that holds together 42 small missions it is tedious and over the top in a meta textual way where before the series had only been over the top in the presentation i suppose it makes sense that this is one of the few games without marcus phoenix because i feel like if john dimaggio had been there he might have brought up the fact that they're not only ripping off futurama they're doing it badly i don't know though perhaps he'd be polite about it too the game's very short missions are all introduced and strung together with voice over testimony from each of the four squad mates in turn the environment sometimes being vaguely tied to the character telling the story it begins with baird who's familiar to the player trying to explain why the squad went awol and fired a weapon of mass destruction contrary to orders so barrett introduces the conflict the fight over halvo bay frames everything all nice and workmanlike then it's time for the single element of judgment the later games would pluck out and recycle garen paddock uir soldier and indeed just about the only memorable part of the main campaign he's very wry and entertaining and not only is his personality large enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with colon baird he's also different enough to complement them his story focuses on fighting through the mansions of halvo bay leveraging his soviet vibes to bring a little bit of class antagonism into the picture the anti-capitalist sentiment blends well with the other anti-war messages of the franchise at large and halvo bay provides a neat parallel where you fight through the empty homes of cog bigwigs who likely had mostly already evacuated to azura the weakest character and the weakest chapters are sophia hendricks she's an onyx guard cadet and her role is obviously to replace anya as the professional young woman who provides directions which she does perfectly well it's all the stuff surrounding her that's odd namely that the only real character detail we get about her is that she knows all the science stuff because she was sleeping with her professor at war crimes university it could have been that she just attended war crimes you but no she knows exactly how to get into the secret lab where all the important war stuff is because that's where she's been spending all her time banging it out which is annoying two ways one being that it's such an old trope the other being that it's such a lazy shortcut she can't be cooler or more tech oriented than baird paired as a main character so she's diminished into a green cadet with no real world knowledge but she's also supposed to know where to go and what to do so the simplest way to split the difference between disempowering her to soothe the player's ego and needing her to have special knowledge anyway is to just imply it was given to her prematurely or unfairly paddock for his part shrugs in the voice over and says i did not judge her for it trailing off to allow the player to do so anyway if they so please the last testimony is kohl's which is a pallet cleanser and gets everything feeling loose and light again followed of course by the surprise of the courtroom ambush and the climactic boss fight compare though to the progression gears of war one there the focus of each act shifted to highlight a different aspect of the world or a different angle on the arcs of character and plot all the plot of judgment is utilitarian a drawn-out dithering where baird and kohl's say fires a missile and upper command says no i am retired and then they go across town and do it anyway this is somehow a six-hour saga in place of expressing a consistent theme or exploring the setting in any detail the game uses the framing device to establish the expectations in order of levels you know where the story will end you know the rough length of the sections you'll move through to get there each character having a section is technically an opportunity for character development and sometimes it feels like that's the intent but even within their own arcs and in their own voiceovers most of the dialogue is purely functional we went here we did that but what we didn't expect was the other thing over and over with four separate voices what this dialogue does provide is contrast a window into what's special about the writing in the main trilogy what makes the main trilogy feel genuinely cinematic there is more going on with them than what's literally right in front of you in the main trilogy in earlier titles character development even when it's broad even when it's obvious did provide an insight world building when it happened expanded the thematic impression a player had of the setting at the same time it established lore it was telling a story judgment from its framing device downward is merely relaying an event even the way in which it's borrowing from passive media and using voice over narration to move things along is considered kind of passe and cheap a real cable tv kind of move generally voice over narration is such a thing of the past that it's commonly used to establish either a period piece atmosphere or else it's used ironically probably my favorite example of why voiceover is so disfavored is the original blade runner neither ridley scott nor harrison ford wanted it or felt the movie needed it but the studio was very worried about a sci-fi movie that wasn't loud and obvious so they forced them to put it in anyway and it's probably the most bitter and listless acting performance of harrison ford's entire career you can actually hear the contempt he has for dripping off the words and thick spattery droplets and that was decades ago which makes judgment's choice to center around voice over entirely so bizarre and suspect this isn't like the dom and maria scene where the developers were trying to do a delicate scene in a very indelicate game world and so had to go through several versions of it to make it work this is a simple question of whether it sounds like a contemporary movie or whether it sounds like an antiquated tv show when it's talking to you the reason voiceover has become so disfavored is because it's a creative abridgement you have something to convey about a character's state of mind or want to clarify what's going on now or foreshadow something later the best way to do any of those things is to attach those narrative intentions to the world itself a character's state of mind can be conveyed non-verbally with gestures or intonation marcus as a character really excels at all of that you can clarify the present tense by setting expectations in the dialogue that the environment then follows through on and to foreshadow something you can do almost anything you want to do as an author so long as it is teasingly incomplete so long as the audience has something to chew on and anticipate or you know what hey just say it out loud all at once using voiceover so that nobody gets lost or left behind voiceover is either a condescension or hedge an assumption the audience won't be able to pick up on anything that isn't too explicit or a fear that the substance of what a player is being given is too slight and inadequate to convey what it was supposed to convey which in this case is a fair concern the 42 levels generally have no story content at all they're just fights from one place to another or maybe a wave defense level for flavor the voice over is the only thing stringing them together consider though how close the original gears of war came to this cheapness of storytelling were it not for susan o'connor's impressive work those levels and gears war 1 had no prior connections to each other they existed as mechanical experiences only much like the levels here in judgment but not hardly as short they could have been stapled together with a brute force tactic like voice over narration but instead gears of war 1's levels were woven together with clever consideration and modern technique the levels by themselves are sometimes scenic and sometimes feature compelling encounters here in judgement but they are also very inconsistent there's a lot of hallways and atriums and parking lots spaces to cross just to have spaces to cross the only thing that really keeps them fun and worth playing is the declassified objective each level has it adds a major complication or challenge condition like only using sawed-off shotguns or fight through a thick fog or fight against a strict time limit these conditions in aggregate across the 42 levels got me to use weapons i never have before and approaches i might not have considered it also doubles the rate at which you accumulate points for unlocking things as a kind of frivolous arcade experience this is fun like a gears of war themed novelty challenge mode it's neat to shake the jar of gameplay verbs and then just grab a handful without looking the declassified objectives provide a hook in the mechanical experience that the narrative experience fails to provide without these declassified challenges though even the mechanical experience feels stale gears of war isn't just the gameplay the gameplay provides the foundation for a lot of impressive multimedia artistry built on top of it visual art theatrical art music the main trilogy of gears of war one through three is so tight and ends so conclusively that spinoff would have to tackle things from a significantly different angle if it wanted to adequately follow up its predecessors something new in the setting something new in the gameplay and while its arcadey rapid-fire levels are certainly new structurally they don't provide any sort of new angle it's just the same old same old sliced into smaller chunks and drained of the cinematic verb that previously linked them when a band comes out for an encore it's usually something high energy something personal they don't generally come out and say hey everybody we're back and i hope you like the eagles because here's hotel california an immediate sense of an act overstaying its welcome settles in which in terms of the hardware generation was also true gears of war 1 set the mood and set the tone for a half decade of xbox 360 titles but by the time judgment came out the playstation 4 had already been released the era of the 360 was over the new console generation had arrived judgment was never released on any platform besides the 360s so i guess it was an encore in that way as well when this act is over it's time to turn up the lights and sweep out the popcorn that's a huge element of why the aftermath campaign is such a complete surprise it's another encore but this time it's the thing that i wanted and the thing that i expected the first time around it returns to garen paddock and helvo bay but much further in the timeline all the way up concurrent with gears of war 3. there's a story beat in the gears 3 campaign where barrett and cole split off from marcus and dom returning much later during the azura sequence with backup from a uir battleship what's the deal what happened there well that's the aftermath campaign it's an experience that's about the same length as ram shadow that might actually be a little better than ram shadow in the spectacle and in the fun of it it's everything that i had been complaining that the main campaign of judgment was not it is story driven cohesive connected in meaningful ways to the broader story and full of memorable imagery baird figures that if anyone can help them it's paddock and indeed their dynamic of friendship is something worth keeping paddock features heavily in gears of war v an entire section of that game even takes place in his homeland but when baird is asked about how he met paddock in that future game bear dodges the question just as hard as the official book did after gears of war ii when jacinto sang it created tidal wave that shook the coasts of the world halvo bay got some of the worst of it what survivor communities there had been there suffered huge losses just as adam phoenix's hammer of dawn had led to charr's destruction and the seething resentment of its people marcus phoenix's climactic solution had its own rippling consequences that's not something gears 3 made much time for in its campaign so it's fascinating to see it here because it strengthens the connections between gears 2 and gears 3. it resolves a dangling thematic thread and ties it back together with marcus and adam getting reunited for one final genocide at the end of gears 3. a climactic solution whose own consequences are the basis for gears 4 and 5. our car when you're balancing a tire a very small amount of weight can dramatically smoothen the feel of the thing on the road aftermath is like that a very small very peripheral campaign that nonetheless helps bind and calibrate the whole experience of the series long story by its emphasis on long-term unintended consequences the tidal wave didn't just cause thematic complications it also gives bear cole and the player an entertaining conundrum to solve sure you can have a battleship but it's stuck on the roof of a skyscraper and you'd have to blow up half the building to just get it to come down which is frankly an awesome plan that's just as fun to execute as it must have been to conceive another wrinkle that makes aftermath so interesting is that it has a lot of different moods and set pieces across its short chapters there's even a horror themed chapter where you move through what should have been an apartment block full of survivors but is instead full of the infected land and humans that in the gears of war 3 timeline marcus and dom are also discovering for the first time at really roughly this exact moment the landon aren't in the regular judgment campaign they make a special appearance here there's actually a ton of stuff in aftermath that was made especially for aftermath a whole bespoke cityscape fallen to ruin from the last time you saw it so much about the main campaign of judgment feels cheap but aftermath feels absolutely the same quality of production as the main trilogy which begs the question what happened then why was this not the main campaign and you unlock the arcade bonus mode instead why wasn't the skill and care with which aftermath was put together applied to the game that most people actually played how did one experience end up so tight and the other so drunkenly erratic and how people praise and talk about gears of war judgment i have never even heard aftermath mentioned which makes me wonder how many people bothered with it or even got so far in the main campaign is to unlock it by making it an unlockable the developer robbed it of its power to counterbalance the weight of the changes the other mode brings to the gears of war formula because besides paddock there's one critical innovation to the franchise that a person could reasonably credit judgment and that's the reintroduction of color gears 3 had already been moving away from a palette exclusively of moody earth tones but the aftermath campaign has blue skies and bright colors combined with a post-apocalyptic ruin in that classic gears of war style it prefaces the art style to come with gears of war iv and the aftermath campaign holds up all on its own the rest of judgment you can take or leave it only really scratches an edge of wanting to screw around and kill some more locus grubs if you played everything else in the franchise and if that sounds perhaps too harsh i wouldn't worry about it developers people can fly were invited to work with epic again anyway no hard feelings on a little game you might have heard of called fortnite there's a 25-year fictional gap in between the end of gears 3 and the opening of gears 4 but only a 3-year real-world gap between judgment's release and when gears 4 came out just look at the difference a leap in hardware can make i know i've already mentioned how the generation leap in the story and the look of the world go hand in hand but it takes illustrating it to show how large of a difference it is and how significant a resonance it is to change the setting so radically alongside the look of the game the game opens in a clever way precision calculated to establish lineage with the rest of the franchise and get the player considering the idea of legacy right from the very start 25 years after the end of the locust war the new minister of the reformed but not reformist cog is hosting a memorial ceremony as her speech drifts back the player shifts into short playable vignettes from the perspective of anonymous soldiers across significant battles in the game world's history it begins back during the occasionally referenced but never interactively featured pendulum wars the battle for asphalt fields where the uir fell and the hammer of dawn's principled technologies were stolen marcus dom hoffman and even bernadette were there and the battle is wildly important of the series lore but you'd only really know that if you had read the novels for someone just going through the games it establishes the kind of expansionist government the cog used to be and still largely is if you are a fan of the novels this is an even more meta cameo the game is trying to reassure a dedicated fan that even if it's a new development house developing on a new engine this is gears of war down to the bone down to the deep lore that most people aren't even really that familiar with the flashbacks continue into emergence day the fall of the great cities to the cogs owned superweapon it's great to have that little bit of context the scene they chose is even right in front of the house of sovereigns the wreckage created there in this introductory flashback is the same that marcus and everyone uses for cover in act one of gears one so it's really tying two memories together two plot beats into one layered vignette which i think is pretty clever then it's on to anvil's gate under assault one final desperate time waiting for the cavalry to come which it does in the form of the science fiction shock wave created by adam phoenix's plotline resolving device from gears of war 3. just as important as the memory is being relayed is the person relaying them prime minister jin someone who was a child during the timelines of the original games and next to her is hoffman sitting in a wheelchair older faded the world here is a starkly different one and yet it's making the same mistakes of the old world again it's allowing the anger and fear of the wartime era to persist as authoritarianism into the new peacetime jin is an interesting symbol for the new cog because she's just as craven a politician as prescott was while having less actual justification for holding on to that power hercog is a bureaucratic totalitarianism and not necessarily a purely military dictatorship it's odious and so it comes as no surprise that marcus phoenix and his son start off the game wanting nothing at all to do with it act one opens with the new protagonists as capital letter outsiders rebels living outside the law of the cog as a way to recolonize the empty spaces where all the skeletons and the ruins are the new cog is building these automated settlements with robot labor all of them exactly the same so before there's anyone there to actually be hurt by a little criminal misadventure your first real act as an actor in the new timeline is to raid the cog and seize their nanofabricator for your own community there are a lot of things that we learn in gears of war 5 that re-contextualize how a person might look at jd phoenix marcus's son but when we meet jd here at the opening of years of war four we are not supposed to feel critically toward him we're supposed to give him a chance according to the official book it was meant to be his trilogy jd front and center the same way marcus was but during development the team realized that wasn't the game they had actually written with gears 4. the core trio of next generation characters are jd the action hero type sporting a kind of jj abrams captain kirk attitude dell a sarcastic science guy replacement for baird with a much friendlier personality and kate a member of the outsiders whose family connections provide not only the momentum to drive the main plot but the twist that transforms the climax and forms the plot of gears 5. i really enjoyed jd as the protagonist of gears of war 4 but i wouldn't have nearly enjoyed the new games as much if it had been his story so to speak it is kate's story instead yet having jd as the player one protagonist in gears 4 is the perfect lens in which to shift into the new time period of the setting the perfect bridge between the past games and the present games not even the developers quite realized at the time that they were writing jd as the main character but not the actual focal point of the story in the official book rod ferguson remembers quote when we were starting to do gears 5 planning we felt like the idea of watching something happen to someone or watching them go through something is not as impactful as actually being that person i think kate started to come to represent the game more than a sort of clean-cut white kid you know what i mean so i realized it makes sense from a story perspective and it makes sense from an experience perspective and it also makes sense in the way that people think about the game people are drawn to kate moore end quote i bring this up now at the beginning instead of at the end where the big twist is because i want to highlight how natural of a shift it feels like hate is player two jd dell and kate actually get pretty much equal screen time and dialogue the entire game is written as an ensemble piece first and foremost while jd is an excellent lens into the world especially for player one one of the things i enjoy most about the story in gears 4 is the feeling that there really isn't a particular main character just the group their banter their friendship their surprises and their struggles it fits the slow pacing of the game just the three of them and then a surprise fourth character enact into the game no cog no support no clue where they're going or what they'll find as a reintroduction to the setting this languid pacing is a minor strength as a gears of war game though it ends up being the most prominent weakness that gears 4 has the plot progresses so slowly in gears 4 that i think it's safe to call it the least eventful game in the franchise despite its campaign being on average a couple hours longer than 360 era games were its first couple acts are the worst defenders by far but the whole game has this feeling of being drawn out and over detailed the previous slowest game was probably gears 2 but gears 2 still had more overall variation and took place over a larger distance than gears 4 does it's a very conservative sequel this way not politically obviously conservative in that gears 4 wants so badly to adhere to tradition that it's unwilling to take chances in the present years of war 4 is a good game i have a very high overall opinion of it but the lens with which it views its new world is very narrow deliberately in a risk-averse way it's meticulous with its world-building maybe more deliberate in how it establishes details than any other previous title yet these details don't quite amount to the feeling of non-stop spectacle that the previous games had a large part of this is the choice of where to begin the story much of what's in gears 4 is build up context introductory details for games to come which makes those future games stronger in their narratives and themes no doubt it's just that other gears of war games have begun much closer to the actual meat of their conflicts in gears 1 the world had fallen to ruin and marcus had been a soldier for long before we meet him in gears 2 we skip 2 years of fighting and scraping by to jump almost immediately into a major war offensive in gears 3 you get about 180 seconds of peace and curiosity and then the lambin show up and it's weapons free never slowing down at all from there gears 4 by contrast takes two and a half acts to actually warm up and get started and then it doesn't deviate from exactly what it sets out to do at that point until the climax the first time i played through the game i was honestly pretty irritated by the pacing and structure of it on my second playthrough though i tried harder to figure out why they chose to do it this way this is when i realized the density of what they were trying to do they were using each overlong chapter to emphasize some key detail of plot or element of atmosphere take this first act the raid on the unfinished settlement in three chapters you fight your way in seize the fabricator and fight your way out it's like a 90 minute process why so nam long well first the approach to their settlement the colors of the natural world have returned but the apocalypse has stayed something the game demonstrates by having your very first obstacle be a wind flare a combination extreme weather effect and game mechanic you'll see a lot of in the coming games then as you move into the settlement itself the environment teaches you about the culture of the new cog it's based in replication and veneration of the old cog the street names are propagandistic the wallpapers your style like the old ones you once saw rotting in the poison reign the whole thing is a planned community with no personality or individuality its caretakers the robot defense force are kind of tough opponents and as you descend to the central tower and see how endless they are this tells you also about how the new cog isn't about human soldiers anymore now this is expansionism 2.0 digitally accelerated to fill a gap left by global genocide the first minister confronts you by proxy bot blaming you for all sorts of disappearances and so the fight to get out is much more intense as the defense bots label you a military target so the player is being invited to learn quite a bit about the world if they're willing to just slow down and absorb it it just takes a little patience which is not something a gears of war game is well positioned to ask for the second act bears a lot of the burden for being truly truly over long its problem is that it begins with the game's pivot to the real enemy the return of the next generation of the locust now simply called the swarm after meeting reina kate's mother at the end of the first act there's hardly a story beat goes by before reina is kidnapped along with most of the rest of the outsider village by monsters in the night to swamp from the cog automated army to a real meaty threat would be perfect right here at the transition from act 1 to act 2. instead gears of war 4 tries to hold off to build tension and focus more on setting the stage before it gets into the actual war to come usually i appreciate a bit of patience in this regard and there's things about act 2 i agree with reasons for it being the way it is that i can appreciate but the simple fact of it is that fighting bloodless robots for two back-to-back hours or more at the very beginning of the game is a slog in act 1 these robots help with the world building they set the scene but there's only one thing act 2 cares about and it isn't actually the gameplay or the enemies it's marcus phoenix to rescue the outsider villagers jd's only got one place to turn to the crumbling mansion where marcus lives paralyzed now in the shadow of anya's grave the entirety of act 2 is a conversation tube facilitating back and forth talk between marcus and jd articulating the ways their relationship is strained giving marcus a chance to be introduced to kate and dell to feel out their new dynamic and come to influence it slightly in act 1 kate's uncle is the older buffer veteran from the past so marcus is actually slipping into a role you've already been conditioned to accept in the player 4 slot i love this story beat it happens exactly at the right moment of player investment into the world not so early as to have marcus steal the show not so late as to leave marcus unable to influence the way the squad behaves plus there's plenty of gears of war trademark big and obvious symbolism like the passing of cog armor down to the new generation of characters marcus and dell get the armor they had when they were enlisted the first time around but kate gets the armor that anya would have worn it's quite an honor in the story but kate is a much more expressive and dynamic character than anya ever was and that goes for the whole new squad jd and del are more casually complex characters than marcus and dom were in the first generation of games and marcus as a character is now even more impressive with more dialogue and more connected subtext more than any previous gears of war game banter is king in gears 4. everything takes absolutely forever to navigate through but this navigation is accompanied by a higher quality of joke and a higher volume of exposition as you move through it this is what i mean about gears 4 being meticulous of detail sometimes to its own detriment act 2 wants all the conversations of backstory and team building to happen now at the moment they're most relevant and it will not allow the levels to progress until it's all been relayed the rhythm of how this is all relayed is about one anecdote per firefight so you've got a god damn shitload of fighting to get through before the talking is actually complete and since the game has already sort of revealed the swarm that makes them the natural next step for the encounter design however these conversations are about further setting the stage for that next step of encounter design so instead it's robots again but really just as a spacer act 2 is important for the cinematic ambitions of gears 4. it's narratively important but it is uncharacteristically devoid of mechanical purpose all on its own the beginning of the act is arriving at the phoenix estate the end of the act is finally escaping the phoenix estate on a motorcycle on a macro level it is gratingly uneventful even if there are good intentions for what act 2 is trying to accomplish within the overall narrative there's just one moment where it really truly does all come together in a perfect gears moment after fighting through the main house you wind up trying to sneak through marcus's greenhouse you're immediately found in the firefight resumes shattering pots of produce left and right my tomatoes marcus growls utterly pissed and frustrated and hilarious in his teeth gnashing anger about these vegetables dom dealt with maria's passing by growing tomatoes on the ship in gears 3. now that dom is gone too and anya later on maybe marcus thought it might actually help him get past things to grow these tomatoes and that's the connected meaning even alone with no prior knowledge the comedic timing and the comedic delivery are [ __ ] fantastic the game is actually revealing a lot even with this joke that marcus's attempt at retirement was earnest that his attempt at retirement was also a failure because here he is back on his [ __ ] lancer in hand and also revealing through his growl that he hasn't changed hardly as much as he may have tried to i appreciate these things much more my second playthrough my first play through i'll admit that i was quite impatient for the game to just get to the good stuff already even then when you're knee-deep in the swarm and chainsaw and fools left and right when the gears of war feeling is at its most feverish and faithful the game seems like it sure is taking its sweet time getting around to the point of anything that it does i enjoy act 3 quite a bit but it was twice as long as i imagined it would be both times that i played it even in my memory there was a lot that didn't actually feel that important exactly in the way that the xbox 360 trilogy had been so tight and so relentless with its world building and its sequence of levels act 3 is a mood piece primarily a suitably gothic introduction to a more monstrous foe than the last time around and you can't say that it isn't interested in world building the act is littered with historical plaques that helpfully provide all sorts of information about the very early days of the cog the kind of culture that the cog grew out of all of this next section takes place in fort revel an old almost medieval fort from the days when these lands were ruled by monarchies there has never been a regime in this game world from the ancient to the modern era that has not glorified and sought out war the juxtaposition between the art style and mood of the old trilogy and this new one is very interesting to me gears 1-3 felt like the end of the world it was strange to think that there could be anything afterwards and now gears 4 is pretty explicitly painting a post-post-apocalypse where just because the world is broken doesn't mean it's over even as the weather becomes deadlier even as the locust and lambent have merged and mutated into the sickly organic swarm even as the new cog makes the same mistakes as the old cog the world keeps turning time keeps on passing one war's ruins become another war's battlefield again so this theme of history cycling over and over through the same spasms of violence is both in the background with a fort revel tour and also in the foreground with how act 3 of gears 4 tries to mimic the rough progression of gears 1 act 1 reintroducing each of the new versions of the old enemy types and sequence ramping up tutorializing them to some extent through a very gradual increase in encounter difficulty comparatively though a lot more actually happens in gears 1 act 1. new characters are introduced principal details of the setting introduced there's a sense of traveling through many different kinds of urban terrain gears 4 act 3 instead redacts a character marcus is captured very early on giving jd and kate equal stakes and going deeper narratively this is a good idea taking away the authoritative perspective of marcus and forcing new characters to fumble in the dark and make their own mistakes it's another story beat that interacts poorly though with the mechanical pacing mark is being captured might have fit better as the climax of the ford rebel sequence instead by kind of leading with it they've taken away an opportunity for any real climax the chase to save marcus will last into the coming act making them essentially continuous one long slog where neither intention nor a tension deviate or vary in the 360 era every act had its own climax every act had its own theme an independent arc of action gears of war 4 often does not when you fight through fort revel in act iii then down through the catacombs and mines under the town in act 4 this is the same monotonous through line the entire time you're perpetually 10 minutes or so behind marcus and the monster what nabbed him for three or four hours of actual gameplay which is not to say that the time is purposeless there are some memorable fights and solid set-piece action sequences along the way and the absolutely constant dialogue and banter do a lot to further establish the characters in their group dynamic it stressed that these details seem to pass by in a procession like they're on a conveyor belt instead of accumulating into the peaks and valleys of subplot meaning sub-climax and then resetting again in the broader context of the new trilogy with how much scene-changing and globetrotting gears 5 does and the fair assumption that years 6 will probably be similar that way the meticulousness with which gears 4 sets its scenes and stacks its details does help the later games feel more complete it's a solid foundation the foundation however is not an exciting part of the house it is flat it is cold it is undecorated when i say gears 4 is the most conservative this is what i mean it is unwilling to say too much or fill in too many blanks of the new era of this timeline it says too little instead it does exactly enough to adequately support whatever game will follow it up and no more the entire game in a way is an introductory chapter knowing this accepting this gears 4 does an admiral job in the role of the grand reintroducer compared to the original trilogy though it is such a strange thing gears of war 4 is more sophisticated in the methodology of its storytelling to the detriment of its impact of storytelling it conforms now to modern expectations of tone and style conformity though is pretty far down the list of the things that make years of war so compellingly strong there are worse things to accuse a game of than being competent of course even if the game is uneventful the sensations of combat feel absolutely consistent with everything that came before the official book points out that this is no small feat nothing from the 360 era translated onto the new unreal engine 4 the team had to recreate the entire feeling from scratch even in the ways the game is predictable and familiar it has a hidden depth of effort it took thousands of cumulative hours of development time for it to even be able to feel predictable and familiar in the first place the game's effects are immaculate the sparks of ricochets and chainsaw duels the puffs of dust from the impact of boots and bullets the fire and the blood the moment by moment playing of gears 4 is equally satisfying as any previous entry and a good deal more impressive looking that being the case what's wrong with drawing out the sequence of events if the storytelling is using more convincingly cinematic methods and the gameplay is faithful to what makes a gears game feel like a gears game what could i actually be complaining about i mean this is clearly the pitch both for the game as a sequel and for its creative conservancy essentially it's just the same as before but classier brighter more detailed promising only what it can deliver on and then delivering exactly that besides wasn't judgment's made your mistake having leaned the other direction too hard into tiny levels and arcade frivolity it absolutely was and this is absolutely an overcorrection in the other direction towards a threshold where cutscenes and squad dialogue are arguably a higher priority than the pacing and variety of the levels themselves consider what the last time on gears of war bonus video in gears 5 has to work with there's a whole section remembering the act 4 descent into the swarm's hive grown from the mound of corpses they were left in the mine to rot as one of the war's disposal sites i mean there's even a whole room just of piles and piles of discarded and useless locust weapons a sharp and lasting image that kind of sums up how much things have changed in the game world's last 25 years now what the squad find in the mine is plot critical the new squad saves marcus and you as the player get to see how this new threat evolved in darkness slowly festering in the piles of dead grubs yet that's pretty much all that's meaningful in act 4. you go down the mine you vibe with it you get a little backstory and then you move the plot forward at last by finally catching up with marcus the last time on video however lingers on this sequence where you ride a large industrial elevator miles down beneath the surface doing wave defense as the giant rollers it's descending on get stuck on swarm materials and have to chew through it why would a new player need to be reminded of this well they wouldn't it's just a really fun exciting well put together action sequence and it doesn't hurt at all to say hey remember that one time with a mayan elevator and it was all sk and he got attacked like oh [ __ ] but he got him good and the elevator was still all chick and you were all oh i mean that was great right and you know what it's true it was great and it was great for those exact reasons it's not helping my argument for these games being deeper than they might appear at first but it is at least pretty [ __ ] rad which is itself another layer of consistency there are no bad encounters there's just an overabundance of otherwise perfectly acceptable ones each particular arena whatever hallway or atrium or what have you has a heavy crunchy flow of enemies from all kinds of angles that either force a player to advance carefully or directs the player's attention to something spectacular or scenic and if every gears of war game was like gears of war 4 i'd barely have anything to talk about at all among the things that makes the original trilogy so strong is its willingness to take risks its capacity to surprise its ability to subvert itself and swap sympathies from one thing to another these games are so fun to play and so fun to talk about because the things they're doing on top of and underneath the surface details the subtext and the context to the non-verbal character work and the environmental storytelling the daring creative choice to be so loud and colorful it actually allows the thematic storytelling to run in complementary contrast to the gleeful gore of the action gears of war 4 is something kind of different it's trying to create a more refined version of the kind of high-octane cheese fest the game's a-plots used to be a more grown-up version of them and this misses the point the sophomoric and silly elements of how things used to be were just one side of the coin with a winking subversion and a kind of melancholy satire on the other now the sophomoric and silly has been tied up into something more consistent but in being more consistent it's no longer in balance with anything else each face of the coin is the same the game spends a huge amount of time building up to a place where it feels confident enough to try to be as truly surprisingly over the top as the original trilogy the game's final fifth act loosens its grip on the impulse to tidy up the inherent ridiculousness of gears of war and it's in letting go that gears 4 finally finds its footing at last fraying marcus leads to dilemma that splits jd's character arc away from kate's in a sympathetic and believable way marcus wants to call in backup realizing that nothing the four of them alone can do will help save reyna but kate feels that they spent all this time on jd's dad and now he can't be bothered to return the favor marcus may be right it was already too late it was too far to go alone but kate is still correct in her reaction her immediate pull to keep going after her mother it was their original priority after all they've been delayed so much longer in finding her than in finding marcus this is also on another level the moment where the question of whose story this actually is becomes most relevant all game long player 1 and player 2 jd and kate were equal equal screen time equal plot time equal action time but now there's an unequal outcome between them in the most painful possible way jd was player one he was the heir to the legacy marcus is more important as a franchise character and so his safety was something you could more or less assume reyna was in a narratively clinical way more disposable yet the game trusts this unequal outcome it lets it have the dramatic weight that it ought to have and then saves the true ramifications of this inequality for gears 5. like the original trilogy this binds one game's campaign to another so much tighter than simply fully resolving one thing and moving on to the next act 5 of gears 4 is a blend of foreshadowing what's to come with reintroducing triumphant elements of the old games it's very well balanced first the serious part this sudden rift between the phoenix's and kate the sympathy is squarely in her corner not that they should abandon calling for help and follow her impulse but sympathy for how shitty a position it is that they can't how it feels like a failure as a friend to try to guarantee the success of the mission this way the transfer of the player one position between jd and kate begins here and that differential of outcome and the dynamics it suggests of which characters are safe and which characters can experience more sweeping and surprising moments of change and loss and when marcus's help arrives it kind of underlines why cole and baird arrive in giant assault mechs to help save the day baird has been secretly watching over the gang this whole time helping them from the very beginning of act 1. they do some impressive rampaging and then hand over the keys to players 1 and 2 to drive the robots just the simple act of having cole around with his old energy and his old catchphrases is transformative of the whole mood of the game everything is big again big robots big boss monsters big stakes if the entire game had been so indulgently nostalgic it might have been grating it would have worn away into something gimmicky something too narratively weak on its own to hold up gears 5 the way gears 4 does instead of indulgently nostalgic it feels triumphantly so it climaxes the arc of jd phoenix as the primary protagonist by folding him back into the family of brothers that the player is so familiar with from the previous games all that's left is helping kate and i mean all that is left the player won't ever even leave their robot again not even for the final boss fight lurking just around the corner which is i think a little cheap it's easy to go big literally this way reducing the boss fight to a simple kind of combat puzzle but i would have really preferred to have a boots on the ground climax for this reintroduction to the setting a boss fight that really felt like gears of war instead despite some stylistic elements that feel like years of war this boss fight is kind of anonymous it doesn't draw on anything special to the franchise and it doesn't require any skills particular to the franchise to defeat just hit the weak spots and staple them to death it is better than the lambent brumack at the end of gears of war ii but only by virtue of being more meaningfully interactive the level of disconnection is kind of similar this is the end of jd phoenix's story killing this monster being the good guy he won he was a hero let him enjoy it because it won't last for long the game's biggest accomplishment and its cinematic ambitions and cut-scene storytelling comes after the boss fight the moment that forced even the developers to acknowledge that they hadn't written a story set up to follow the marcus dynasty the way that they had initially intended let's let the official book take it away one more time to demonstrate the gulf of difference between how gears 2 handled dom and maria and how gears 4 handles kate and rayna developer greg mitchell said quote we had elia o'brien playing part of kate on the stage you can talk about mocap actors being people who just apply emotion to a character but these are actors and they come in and they give their all in these moments they're not just a puppet for the voice over actor they're embodying this character aaliyah came in and she's crying that entire scene and she goes up to rain and starts cutting her loose i don't think there was a dry eye on the stage that day when the scene was happening you know including aaliyah i remember rod showing that to the entire studio saying look this is the kind of dedication these actors are giving to these moments they're heavy moments end quote the difference between these two heavy moments in gears 2 and gears 4 is the difference of skill scale and talent the writing is stronger more confident than it used to be and the scene doesn't insist on its heaviness with brute force soundtracking and heavy-handed imagery the moment is effecting enough on its own for the new talent the mocap actress to tap into its melancholy and express that melancholy in her performance and finally the technology has evolved to the point now with gears 4 that the physical subtleties of those non-verbal expressions from the actor are able to be rendered alongside the much louder special effects aspects of the scene they coexist now as complementary aspects the impact of the scene would likely not be as strong if gears four had not taken so much time meticulously forming the bonds between its principal cast members making their ensemble dynamics so completely airtight it is unfair to say that gears of war 4 is a bad game or really even a weak entry into the series i think it is fair to say that its creative priorities were different than any previous title it asked different creative questions and it gave different creative answers gears of war 1 when it kicked off its trilogy began with a blank slate it built its characters and its world at the same time it was admirably deft doing both at once gears of war 4 inherits a world there are choices already made that it cannot contradict characters it doesn't feel entitled to de-prioritize or to sacrifice an entire constellation of mechanical subsystems that it had to remain so faithful to it recreated them from scratch to be exactly the way they were before i feel as if the game felt it had one primary responsibility establish a meaningful continuity from what came before to what was coming next and in this narrow but important goal i think it completely succeeded it needed continuity between marcus and jd including resonance with how adam and marcus were estranged and it did resolving it by integrating both past and present castes into one at its climax it needed continuity between the lore and history of the world which had established from the introductory chapter forward portraying the pendulum wars visiting fort revel and its history museum visiting the locust mass graves seeing what they metastasized into and lastly gears iv needed a hook that could tie not only past to present but to future as well and that's what we have here at the very last a passing of a locus talisman from reyna to kate as a final dying act a talisman that's even a collectible item in gears 2. it's got indirect foreshadowing credentials on top of everything else gears of war 4 might not be the best gears of war game its structure is a bit of a mess it's oddly paced and oddly prioritized compared to what came before or what comes after yet even where i disagree with its design there's a logic and a creative impulse behind those changes that i find persuasive it's a lush and beautiful production it's a true aaa action experience my complaints are all less grounded in what it was than what i felt it could be if it had simply come from a more creatively daring approach gears of war 5 is that game denser and more action-packed from the get-go then gears of war 4 was even halfway through and yet it didn't achieve its running start in isolation gears of war 4 spent essentially all its creative effort building the momentum from which gears 5 would benefit more than gears 4 itself ever did i love gears of war 5 the best out of all of them in ways that can never actually be separated out from the full arc of the broader franchise gears war 5 unites and revises huge chunks of lore and world building it also takes more risks with its characters and with its structure despite all its attention paid to the past it never wallows in any kind of wistful or backwards nostalgia each detail gears 5 brings together is chosen for its necessity and relevance in repositioning the story to look forward into something new it's almost a shame to do this video without a gears of war 6 being released because that would almost certainly recontextualize a number of elements of the story here and call attention to some of its more minor world building details that is after all exactly what gears of war 5 immediately starts doing to gears of war 4. the transition from jd to kate is left cleverly incomplete at the beginning of gears 5. the whole first act has him still in the player 1 slot and holding those associated expectations and then act 1 ends with a truly dramatic severing of the bonds that we spent the last game establishing even going so far as to make the previous game squad dynamic a little bittersweet with the foreknowledge of what's to come it's a bit like the opening of gears 3. sure it seems like a lot of change at once but only if you haven't been paying attention to the way it's all been consistently foreshadowed and extensively set up in previous titles where gears 4 is the least eventful gears title gears 5 is arguably the most eventful not only is it longer than any previous campaign the middle sections of the campaign use semi-open world design to expand these acts into experiences more vast and cohesive than before these are bookended by more traditionally linear introductory climactic acts while it might seem surprising to see so many structural changes especially compared to the last game consider all the ways gears 5 resists fundamental change the rhythm and sensations of the weapons are the same the look and feel of the animations are the same the balance of grandeur and ruin is the same the mixture of playful joy and background melancholy is the same these foundational elements of mechanical design and artistic style are absolutely consistent with the entire rest of the franchise going all the way back to gears of war 1. in fact the very opening of the game is a deliberate attempt to refocus the plot on details from gears 1 and gears 3. after decades with no maintenance the hammer of dawn orbital superweapon is failing so marcus dell jd and kate return to the ruins of azura to raid what's left of its weapon stockpile looking for a stray satellite that they can supplement the system with the hammer of dawn is the thematic and narrative focus of gears of ora v in a pretty major way but part of what makes putting it front and center work so well is how it's been there from the very beginning it's always been a complicated presence without it there are many times delta squad would have died but more than any other choice in the locust war the decision to use the weapon against their own cities stands out as the cruelest most heinous thing that the cog ever did the temptation here is the idea that such a weapon could be used only for good the lesson is that that destruction cannot be controlled not really a path of violence is a slippery downhill one it's easy to lose any semblance of control and almost impossible to regain it once lost the hammer of dawn is adam phoenix's legacy a remnant of a world that refused to contemplate peace and bought only precious minutes of it at a time with the threat of overwhelming violence from above this is in certain respects a brand new world now 25 years down the line these characters could choose differently and yet here they are in the basement of the past looking for that old brown box with genocide written on the side and faded letters to this new generation it seemed like when it came to war the oldest civilization had all the answers and kate is in pain her war is personal now not only a fight for revenge but a fight to remove herself from the legacy of that locus tag that she inherited it's only a pain like that where an otherwise smart person like her would miss the irony of prying a weapon from the bony clutches of the dead without reflecting on all the good it did those bones the first time around gears of aura 4 had some dark moments in the narrative but no one made any mistakes exactly none of the bad things that happened could be interpreted as consequences for anything besides the hubris of adam phoenix to think his super weapons would be 100 effective not so for gears 5. act 1 ends with an attempt to save an inhabited settlement from a major offensive by the swarm putting the new characters into a situation eerily similar to the early days of the locust conflict gears 4 was a small cast conflict with a narrow scope this war is chaotic out of control larger much larger than just this squad of characters initially though the vibe is kind of heroic here you are on a rescue mission swooping in to save the day this doesn't last and the game is willing to subvert itself in a strikingly serious way you see a long time ago this settlement rebelled against the cog the order was given to put down the protesters with live ammunition so they did it was a pretty compliant place afterwards outwardly but it was not something that a community forgets in the initial trilogy marcus's crime was to disobey orders and follow his own conscience instead saving his father at the expense of the soldiers he was supposed to be reinforcing in this new trilogy despite the banter-heavy dialogue and more colorful world the story flips that for jd into something much darker his crime was uncritically obeying and giving orders he was one of the trigger men that day not only that he gave the order to fire in shame jd left the cog but he lied to dell about it and never said a word to kate marcus knew and no doubt that had something to do with their strained relationship jd's involvement in an explicit act of authoritarian violence acts as a kind of internal critique of his self-assurance and swagger which in the last game never steered jd wrong what is the darkest possible expression of that uncritical ego well the old supposition about the mindset of military fascism even in genre fiction from starship troopers to 300 there is a moral separation between civilian and soldier in those fascistic systems the soldier risks everything gives total allegiance total fidelity and in return is given total social superiority living close to war and death morally qualifies them better than the nameless faceless little people who do the boring work of maintaining a living society jd regrets the obvious mistake of mass murder and for that he left the cog but judging by last game his heart is not that heavy about it a person might say this is an unfair retcon but i really disagree because of how impressively this alters the trajectory of the story first the sense of betrayal kate and dell want little to do with jd after learning this and so did i it's rare that a game successfully corrupts the dynamic that an audience is familiar with to create a new dynamic fun to destroy the old dynamic easy to take the camaraderie leave the memory of it intact and taint it instead that takes guts plus no small amount of narrative skill what is the most disappointing thing a son of marcus phoenix could do probably to trust the same government that imprisoned marcus that stole his own grandfather from him and destroyed his entire world with its hatred and greed right not only to trust them but to become a man more in their image than his own father's what a painful choice what an awful failure to prevent his son from making the same mistakes he made and worse made more intriguing by how likable jd can be how good he is in the banter and the group dynamic how easy it is to want to forgive him and his awe shucks demeanor for things that in truth are completely unforgivable jd's enemy is his ego and to demonstrate that he orders a hammer of dawn strike on a swarm unit advancing on an evacuation convoy it's a bad situation the convoy is in mortal danger no matter what but bared over the radio cautions jd not to do it and jd demands that bear to come through anyway the weapon is old it's imprecise it kills friend and foe guilty and innocent alike he made the same choice in miniature that the old cog made globally take the shot no matter the cost and then suffer the destruction of everything you hope to save by doing so how could someone like j.d such a nice boy commit an indisputable war crime well it was easy he thought he was right and then he stopped thinking about it at all how could he be wrong isn't he after all the main character what's so bold about this as a storytelling beat is that it essentially sacrifices him in that role of main character the square shoulders and square jaw in which to rest to the new trilogy to instead re-prioritize the anti-war themes that have been so critical to the storytelling at large in the gears of war franchise in war there are no main characters in life no one person is any more worthy than another heroism is something you do not something you intrinsically have jd wasn't born a hero because he was born a phoenix born into the royalty of the correct narrative dynasty he thought he was though and in that conviction he made mistakes that'll never let him be the kind of true hero that his father was mistakes that cost him his friends mistakes that cost him the player one position itself games almost never allow their storytelling to dole out a consequence like this to a character like this let alone one as important as jd he was the golden boy and the only real golden boys are the statues that the cog puts on marble pedestals to convince people that compliance is a higher moral virtue than compassion then only service guarantees citizenship i mean that's all kind of heavy right well the very first chapter of act 2 keeps the loss and the sadness coming for a while when that's over years 5 opens up into its back-to-back small open worlds and uses the free-form nature of them to recover the mood to take the player and kate away from the cinematic tragedy and point them instead towards a purposeful curious exploration of a suddenly much larger world than gears of war has ever shown at once in an interview one of the lead developers of the god of war reboot called its approach to another semi-open world arrangement wide linear and i think that phrase applies equally well to gears 5. in the god of war reboot it used a kind of hub world with a lot of optional content that became deeper and denser as the player accumulated powers and the areas expanded then the main content branched off into other side realms with their own less extensive optional content gears 5 doesn't use a hub system at all which significantly differentiates the feel of it the god of war reboot was like the previous god of war games deeply mechanical full of secrets prioritizing player exploration and interactivity gears 5 also keeps the traditions of its predecessors but its predecessors are cinematic and linear in their design intentions they are interactive but in much more equal proportions to their traditional storytelling and cutscenes as such there are much fewer optional and secret places compared to the lake of nine but each piece of optional content has both an important bit of lore context and an unusually challenging combat encounter large areas connect the points of interest but it's unfair to call them hubs because nothing is really done with them there is no real reason to return to the safe zones where the npcs are there are no events or changes that occur these areas are just large and intermittently featured wilderness areas meant to add an element of player choice to the progression and better suggest the true size and scale of this empty dying world in some reviews i've seen people suggest that this is an underutilization of the open world format but i think is actually a very clever compromise that allows the game to radically shake up the structure for content delivery while still maintaining the pace and style of a fully linear action game none of the side content feels frivolous like grinding or purely interactive like discovering a secret they're just extremely short supplementary chapters within the larger chapters of the main plot in choosing not to go for a maximalist approach to their open world elements gears 5 stayed truer to the pacing and purpose of the older gears of war titles blended those older titles with new in a way that makes it feel effortlessly correct as if the games had always been intending to do this sort of thing but hadn't really gotten around to it until now another element of what makes it feel so connected to what came before is the choice of setting the environment around new hope and mount kadar the wintry mountain highlands of gears of war ii out in the hills is a cornucopia of gears of war history there's side content that features lost equipment from the time around emergency there's primary content about a deep and dangerous mind that was a locust gravesite there's side stories about scavengers who fell victim to grizzly ends arena battles among the wreckage of grindlift transports destroyed during gears 2 little rusty piles in the snow that turn out to be a vehicle that bared and coal piloted once upon a war plus the center of the actual part of the act pivots around returning to new hope the scene of the crime for the locust and discovering more of the backstory than marcus did as he roamed from place to place on your rather beautiful windsail vehicle you roam backwards and forwards in the timeline placing these different points in history in better context by using a landscape instead of an encyclopedic codex to arrange them it's spectacularly done and uniquely paced for what it is a wide linear vessel in which to hold a multitude of classic traditional gears of war moments act 2 hits on what really is a winning ratio of side content to main content linear design to player choice gears 5 demonstrates the strength of this formula by miscalculating it in its very next instance of the wide linear approach the red desert of vasgar is one of the most strikingly violently scenic settings in the entire franchise but its reliance on a recursive backtracking heavy main progression paired with more monotonous side content keeps it from feeling as creative as the previous act this act is completely centered on one long enormous task that every single part of the main progression serves in a much narrower way than the previous act act 2 was a search and scavenger hunt you weren't sure what you would find and you found a wide variety of surprising things act 3 is a procedure sure you can do some parts before the others but it's less of a wide linear experience and closer to a classically linear design a layer of memory is player 1 and gears 2 a layer of memory of the cog that was a layer of apprehension about the cog that is all of it overlapping and the blending it leveraged its familiarity in compelling ways vasgar has no such familiarity to build off of it has to establish its through lines a little differently it can't compare and contrast one player experience with another so it has to build all its context and all of its backstory as it goes along the world building is obviously the higher priority compared to just simple banter but if we're focused on talking about the past there can't be a major distraction in the present so what we have then is a kind of reimagined cold war scenario back during the pendulum wars the cog fought another government called the uir vasgar was a uir satellite state kind of like a former soviet block state before the former was applicable they had their own hammer of dawn program farther behind never completed the cog's own hammer of dawn would itself never been completed if they hadn't have won the pendulum wars and seized all of the uir research but now that the cog satellite network is down the only way to refresh it is to launch that old uir equipment after emergence day after the hammer of dawn was used to carve up the planet the weather became unstable so you get the electrical wind flares of rain and lightning and gears for the super blizzard conditions of the past act and most impressively you have the encroachment of the crimson desert on the old of hisgari cities now lying buried and mostly abandoned a large part of the main map isn't filled with optional areas but serves as just a linear puzzle where you have to make your way to the end through vasgar's extreme weather which includes lightning that superheats the sand and creates instant obsidian pillars which can be used as cover in combat or obstacles during traversal so the main plot of act iii holds two incompatible truths truth one is kate's truth endells and marcuses and newcomer fosses where the best way to win a war is with the most powerful weapon so they need the hammer of dawn truth 2 is all around them this weapon destroyed the world its legacy isn't just the death of your enemies but the death of whole ecosystems cultures a global death where the emulsion plot was an articulation of iraq war anxiety the hammer of dawn is more explicitly a cold war anxiety an anti-war message about the age of nuclear weapons the cold war is over but that doesn't mean that anyone is actually safe from these things the one single argument you can make in their favor is mutually assured destruction the idea the nuclear weapons won't be used because tactically they cannot be used using one would provoke response in kind and that's the end of it for everybody nuclear weapons are the absolute pinnacle of military technology in ballistic science and gears 5 act 3 does a great job of using the aesthetics of industry to suggest to the excitement of that military science launching the satellite is the closest any of these characters will ever get to touching the stars and by perpetuating this weapon they're ironically putting the stars further away from them without ever meaning to without spending so much time on the ruins of the past there would be no thematic counterweight to the g-whiz capital letter science of the hammer of dawn satellite launch no irony no complication the past is more compelling than the present in act 3 leading to a certain sense of monotony in the present it's annoying like actually fixing something is sometimes annoying it takes a long time to get your bearing on the procedure then it turns out you don't have the tools and parts so you go to the store you come back you discover another thing you forgot you put your jacket back on you go out again you get a call asking if you can run another errand while you're out and about and by the end of the process you can sum up as fixing something the fixing of it was the minority of the time that he actually spent that day side content can't even help the situation because it's just two sets of three similar activities find a lost vasbari scout or help turn the water back on to the uninhabited section of the desert they also primarily exist in the present tense's errands not the way side content and act ii connected the threads together i hope that gear six eventually continues the wide linear trend because i feel like if the scope of act three in the vasgard desert had been wider it had simply diversified its content more it would have been just as good as the previous attempt there's more here to try more here to perfect with the wide linear approach and if nothing else years of war is a franchise that owns its mistakes and improves on them willingly acts 2 and 3 are united in one thing at least and that's how they use the corrupted dynamic between jd dell and kate to build up to a moment of loss in act 4 that is more genuinely surprising than any previous dramatic or climactic character death that gears of war has done act 2 is kate's story alone dell is there to offer fire support and offer emotional support but it is kate's story it begins with a trip to see your uncle oscar and the outsider village that he runs now his role there is even foreshadowed in a gears 4 post-credits scene what's cool though is that the village was constructed in the remains of the riftworm that you killed in gears 2 its bones and decaying body provide for the outsiders provide a basis for an economy and what a cool little symbol of how the world has moved on in a more general sort of way kate's been having visions of the swarm though and when the village is attacked she ends up accidentally controlling them from inside one of those kidnapping creatures the snatchers it's not a cut scene either but the player who controls the swarm in this sequence you can do nothing you can fight the other swarm you can even deliberately attack the townspeople if you please total control you move up through more and more difficult enemies until the largest of them reaches a point where you can't control him anymore and it's that one in that moment of course that kills uncle oscar with kate trapped in the pilot seat perhaps this is part of what drives kate's fixation on the hammer of dawn it's an illusion of control that she's chasing i wonder if gear 6 will adopt this body hopping mechanic further as this one sequence is the only time it happens in gears 5 but the end of the act is cryptic and inconclusive climax of act 2 is an echo of gears 2 act 3 where kate confronts niles samson's electric ghost to another long interval of creepy exposition it's the way it differs from gears 2 that's so interesting though kate is foolish enough to trust niles and climb into his giant weird science apparatus which will connect her to the matriarch a giant locust berserker kept in a tank the matriarch serves as a kind of hive mind for the swarm the locusts were united under queen mira but in their long dormancy this ended up manifesting as a physical characteristic a queen is needed to lead so long as mira is gone it fell to the matriarch who controlled the swarm in an animalistic way nile's machine allows kate to touch its mind nile seems to have expected this to kill kate but instead within the hive mind she discovers some lost remnant of her mother's psyche which awakens to lead the swarm anew so where the phoenix dynasty defined the last trilogy it's mira's lineage that actually defines this new one what's cryptic is that by all counts kate is cured of her connection to the swarm the plot line is resolved but not a single thing niles says can actually be trusted as exposition in the extent of exactly how he was trying to use kate in this sequence is still unclear in the official book developers refer to the idea of negative space as a key element in effective world building the art of leaving some things deliberately blank to fill in later on when marcus confronted nile sampson it wasn't at all this exposition heavy much of what exposition there was came from collectible documents gears 4 clarifies and expands fills in the negative space then gears 5 does even more structuring things this way builds meaningful connectivity between titles much about reyna mira and what niles did decate remains unclear but these things will make obvious plot beats for the forthcoming gears games or how jd's arc in the game is only possible because of negative space left in gears 4 about why he left the cog or how negative space surrounding adam phoenix and marcus phoenix's crime and gears 1 was so handily available to be filled in by gears 3. not fully resolving a major plot element is kind of a signature feature of the gears of war games part of what makes them linearly cohesive from gears 1 all the way to gears 5. or consider how dell is used between gears 4 and 5. in gears 4 he's the third a dedicated ai in gears 5 he's player 2 for both jd and for kate the bridge that unifies them and keeps their experiences so closely tied together when act 3 brings them all back together it's jd who's now in the third slot the unknown character whose place in the dynamic has to be proven anu when jd and foz come back to offer help kate is willing to accept jd's apology to let him help as the friend that she's always known and foz is here too i guess so won't you forgive them look at his medial face is that the face of a monster or is that the face that you know of player one one of the big dialogue surprises of the third act is that foz is even more endearing than jd is the group dynamic was so tight before and now it's so loaded with questions that it makes fawz as a sarcastic outsider a wonderful foil in the dialogue he helps keep everything light and snappy flipside is he is also the most unrepentant cog stooge of them all and doesn't even feel bad about killing all those protesters he was joking if you recall about the murders back in act 1 the same way he's more amiably joking about stuff now fawz is a kind of weather vein of sentiment even leaving out the memory and importance of jd phoenix the main character will you as the player forgive a known war criminal just because they're quick with a punchline if yes then likely you'll side with jd as well and the path of cog skepticism that dell represents will be closed to you forever if no then perhaps later on you will hold jd accountable perhaps you'll be unable to forgive and when the time comes you will choose to leave him behind because that choice is coming act 3 simply gives you a nice chunky block of time to mull it over critically baird can't bring himself to forgive jd at all for involving him in what happened at the end of act 1. baird's one of the most familiar voices in the game besides marcus himself if baird is so visibly ashamed of the guy then this is a cue for the player also to step back and reassess their relationship with the younger phoenix it's notable how awkward baird is around jd how painful it is for a beard to feel so conflicted would the game have been stronger if it had been more fully condemnatory of jd and fawz making fascist choices i feel like it speaks to me more as an american that it doesn't because trying to parse the difference between personal choice and professional action when veterans return home is incredibly difficult and often painful for everyone involved now in the case of gears 5 what jd did is crime beyond the kind you'd typically encounter in real life there's a reason after all he didn't tell kate or dell it makes it impossible to see him the same way again it's the urge to forgive that i want to talk about i met someone who is an artillery man deployed in the middle east he's kind he's got a family he's got kids i find him very personable and i honestly wish him well yet his job was hugely destructive a task where it's impossible to know the real consequence or the human cost of your place in the machine of war the anonymity and interchangeability of soldiers is a necessary moral defense in addition to a structural requirement if not him someone else would be manning the guns the system decreed there would be violence and so there would be if i held him personally morally responsible it wouldn't bring anyone back it wouldn't help anything it wouldn't even remind him of anything he did not already know and neither would it help for me to pretend that i was somehow above it i benefit passively from all the exact same choices of government that directs the violence of the military without having to even bother putting in an ounce of work just as it isn't my place to forgive on behalf of the dead it isn't my place either to feign innocence among the living i live in easy life biting deep into the fruits that war and death so verdantly fertilize that gears 5 doesn't take a moralistic stance exactly regarding jd and fawz isn't an act of sidestepping the issue like an ubisoft title night instead it feels like a very familiar very real feeling of moral confusion of a kind of moral hypocrisy that you almost need just to be socially functional as an american if i lived my ideals so legalistically that i cut everyone i know who's ever been in the military out of my life i'd be throwing away some of the most valuable friendships i've ever had i can't do it does it make me a hypocrite from an absolutist perspective it might but is it any more hypocritical than pretending i'm not part of the same society the same system again war crimes like jd's are going too far obviously too far but every act of war is a crime by peacetime standards i don't believe in war but war sure as hell believes in me i live in a society bought and every day paid for with violence it's not even kate's role to forgive jd she's not the one who is wronged yet she's tempted to i would be tempted to not for fos fozz can absolutely go [ __ ] himself he doesn't feel bad at all and not about to feel bad for him yet i know to say that i would be tempted to forgive jd if i was in kate shoes is going to sound gross to some people that it runs contrary to my actually pretty basic beliefs that murdering innocent people for the state is bad but that is precisely what i find so compelling about the way that gears 5 handles all of this it's so familiar i face this dilemma all the time in less dramatic and less loaded contexts most americans do via their social connections gears of war has always articulated how it's possible to hate the war and still cherish the soldier but where's the line how far can that be pushed before the hatred is justified elso against the individual there has to be a linux and jd is certainly well past it more broadly it is a very wide gray line even in less egregious circumstances than what jd did harm is harm violence is violence if we're socially willing to define peace and war as being two conditions with two different sets of rules though does it do any good to continue to hold that violence over a person when they come home supposing that they don't revel in it because i mean there are certainly those out there for whom the violence war is a big part of their personalities and who feel nothing at all about what they've done besides perhaps pride people like fawz i'm not trying to make it my business to defend them i'm not even actually trying to defend jd i'm trying to explain why his attempt at an apology means something even if he cannot be forgiven if there is contrition and an understanding of harm a question of forgiveness can become a question of how a thing persists in the world if you let a person be defined entirely by the worst thing they ever did there are no redemptions there is nothing but the crime with forgiveness you also open the possibility of atonement this world is cruel eventually most of us will find a moment where we are cruel as well i think at a moment like that what i would want the most was for my friends to think of me as the person i was before that they would hold out hope for me that i could return to being that person again because that is the saddest thing about letting jd die in act 4 if you choose to if he dies a stooge he will stay a stooge forever in act four one war is layered on top of another new ethera sits on top of old afira the first city you ever saw in years of war in fact the climax takes place right by the house of sovereigns which was featured so prominently in gears 1 and gears 4. the effect is a kind of grand visual irony the next generation failing to learn from the mistakes of the old so completely that they build their new cities on the old ones and have them be consumed by the same wars it's like the monty python and the holy grail bed where the king explains the prince's inheritance says quote when i first came here this was all swamp everyone said i was daft to build castle on a swamp but i built it all the same just to show them it sank into the swamp so i built a second one that sank into the swamp so i built a third that burned down fell over then sank into the swamp but the fourth one stayed up and that's what you're going to get lad the strongest castle in all of england and quote i mean that's pretty much the whole new cog in a nutshell surely the strongest castle in all of england because there can't be any farther down to sink this feeling of cyclical failure of personal helplessness in the face of systemic dysfunction is why i chose to let jd die often a binary choice in a game can seem almost arbitrarily binary like how in bioshock who choice to harvest or save little sisters was absurdist at the point that it wasn't exactly a moral choice anymore or conversely how bioshock infinite used the bird and cage symbols to illustrate the player's futility of agency gears 5's big binary choice is so much more complexly balanced than is usual for even a triple a game like this first the villain the awakened remnant of reyna who now controls the swarm this is kate's birthright the legacy that she is expected to perpetuate and visit on the world this she rejects utterly but she can only reject it incompletely reina will still kill one of her closest friends and they will still be connected by memory and by blood for the deaths on one side is dell he's new he's not part of the old war he's also been throughout years four and five the most consistent friend decate and the most trustworthy of the main cast on the other hand you have jd i think part of why they made his crime so egregious was to make players more willing to let go of him in this moment to be less reflexive in siding with a legacy character dell is the better man he's just not a phoenix that's all yet even if you feel a stronger affinity for letting dell live there's that issue of denying jd his chance to atone there are many variables individualed how a particular player interprets these characters their actions their potential future actions that weigh in on the final outcome and choice this is so much more dramatically pleasing and waiting than a choice like this often is in a game like this and it's not one that gear's sick seems like it would be at all inclined to take back or retroactively mess with when you catch up with marcus and kate gives him his son's cog tags it is portrayed without the game's usual volume and bombast it's quiet it's devastating as much as you've ended any chance for you the player to see how jd's plot might have been resolved in the game world itself this is the end of any kind of reconciliation between the older phoenix and the younger phoenix what was broken will stay broken except i hope that central cycle of making the same awful mistakes over and over i chose dell because i felt that choosing the unknown thing versus the comfortable thing is one of the primary themes of the whole game that following this theme to its most extreme conclusion would be the most dramatically worthwhile thing to do and i think it was especially because kate wasn't even on the same page as i was about it at all kate as she becomes even more desperate in her loss and her sense of guilt and responsibility over that loss looks more and more towards the magical solution of the hammer of dawn so the climax builds and builds off of the loss of jd or dell whichever squad made you choose in essence by overwhelming it with combat there's a long effects heavy vehicle sequence some arena defense fights all leading up to a last stand defense at the inner walls of new ofera kate doesn't have time to process what's happened and neither does the audience it backs both of you up against a literal wall until you're each provoked to lash out in the most violent way possible which in this case is the hammer of dawn to fire it jack the robot chooses with that janky little sliver of agency it has to sacrifice itself and act as a targeting beacon for the weapon deliberately getting itself swallowed whole and then incinerated now jack is actually also player 3 for doing co-op and trying to play with a full team it's the dedicated asymmetrical support role so in this climax you have the deaths of player 2 and player 3 all in the service of getting this weapon powered up and fired if you're actually playing co-op what an especially heavy cost that feels like in a fascinating wrinkle there's only one character who spoke out against all of this first minister jin the obvious villain the irritating bureaucrat the least likely source of meaningful advice she doesn't hesitate to use the autocracy of the cog to benefit herself or her agenda but she nonetheless sees the hammer of don as too far of aggression drinking too deeply from a tainted well in gears 5 characters i loved made choices i hated characters i hated saw things clearly at unexpected moments and throughout every true narrative surprise mechanical familiarity that fits like a glove it's this balance this unity of design that makes gears of war at once so self-explanatory and so thrillingly distinct the core identity of the franchise is so strong that it can even translate itself into a completely different mechanical genre and lose nothing in the process gears of war tactics is among the best games in the franchise at the same time it's also the most experimental it just doesn't seem reasonable to take a third-person shooter and turn it into a turn-based isometric squad strategy title and simply expect it to work and that's true if the developers had just winged it and half-assed it who knows what we would have wound up with but they did not gears tactics is a considered and a meticulous adaptation of the core action verbs and player emotions of the real time games into a much slower paced and abstract experience it's the most structurally mechanical out of all the games even gear's judgment where most of its levels are based off of a template and story content is distributed somewhat thinly among them it is cheaper in some aspects than the more mainline titles reusing its assets more prominently gears tactics is in essence a board game recreation of gears of war it leans more heavily towards the board game part than the traditionally cinematic years of war experience and that perhaps was the most truly tactical choice the developers made by leaning heavily into the mechanical parallels that can be created between traditional gameplay and squad turn-based combat it feels inescapably like a gears of war game in the moment-to-moment game play at all times gear's tactics feels authentic to the franchise that foundation of authenticity radiating out into all the systems visual effects sound effects and script gives gears tactics and overall cohesion every bit as professional as its aaa action predecessors i found this cohesion really counter-intuitive at first the game feels effortlessly in sequence with the other games despite its massive structural differences but those massive differences ought to create an insurmountable gulf i was looking at this too much on the surface hung up on the essential genre differences consider as the developers so carefully considered the ways in which there doesn't have to be any difference at all between this game and the previous ones first is simply the theoretical difference between real time and turn based seems obvious until you take into account what makes the rhythm of gears of wars combat unique and special in the first place it's already happening as a back and forth you wait for an attack you outlast it and then you return fire or you flank an ambush conferring an initiative bonus of sorts gaining an extra turn if you like you can stay safely in cover for essentially as long as you please pondering your move or discussing it in co-op there is already a kind of strategic slowness in gears of war despite the real-time gameplay of the earlier titles the shooting is deeply deeply important to gears of war but it doesn't actually dictate the rhythm of play the navigation does and the leapfrogging cover-driven navigation is actually quite readily adaptable into a turn-based format without losing hardly any of the sense of immediacy that it has because gears of war never demanded lightning reflexes in the first place it had always allowed a longer more strategic approach to advancement gears tactics takes it much farther than simply pausing to get your bearings but there isn't a single thing in gears tactics that isn't fundamentally tied to something deeply familiar and comfortable from the design of the main gears titles gears tactics is the only exclusively single player gears title which is especially interesting considering its choice of genre because it takes those co-op elements and automates them further gamifying the human camaraderie that's always been so key to the franchise's appeal combat isn't done on an individual basis you don't actually roll for initiative like you would in d d instead your squad of four moves as a team then all the enemies move as a team then back to you attacks do large amounts of damage if caught in the open like in the action titles it's pretty instantly deadly but also like the action titles you enter a downed state where you can be revived by your co-op partners so can the enemy and also like the action titles you're vulnerable in this down state to executions a coup de gras attack that settles things more finally gears tactics integrates these things in a robust way by giving an extra action point to everyone on the team besides the character who initiated the execution all of those things in tandem create a fast and heavy back and forth rhythm where aggression is always rewarded beyond caution most missions are settled in 15 turns or less for a turn-based strategy title that is extremely fast-paced in aggregate then gears tactics manages to translate the essential rhythm of play from one genre to another without sacrificing the tension the aggression or the peril of combat and i think that's quite a feat the scale of the combat is even a direct adaptation of the structure and rhythms of the action games your four-man squad exactly mimics the squad size of all the previous gears games you have between one and four main characters and then supplement them with unvoiced support characters the main characters are instant game overs if they die the unvoiced characters by contrast are expendable replaceable of course if they do die you'll need to replace them with less talented or less customized recruits but being able to lose them offers an interesting mix of soft and hard limits for what you can risk during a mission meanwhile enemies constantly reinforce there isn't really such a thing as a turn without combat and gears tactics with the exceptions of occasional traversal turns we have to close on an enemy position but it is impossible by design to run out of things to kill unless that's the explicit objective of a mission this is essentially a shoehorn mechanic designed to pry timid players out of their positions and force them to fight or else be overwhelmed and die to win a player must always be pushing forward as hard as possible to be aggressive even in those missions where you're supposed to defensively hold control points you are always overwhelmed as is appropriate to a war that you'll know you'll lose so the game is missing the co-op aspect it's missing the real-time aspect but it's honestly more fair to say that these things have mutated than to say they've been wholly lost and replaced the new structures and formats are so influenced by the old that even though they have fundamentally changed they retain the same flavor and feel so what if you don't play with three other friends you control three extra bodies that you have to push as hard as you can each and every turn you can't let them become isolated or leave them behind so what if it's not real time it is remarkably fast-paced and visceral in combat just as it is and in the longer pacing of it each act takes about the same amount of time as an acton gears of four or five would in the short and the long rhythm both it's familiar comfortable the ways in which a player might approach the game opposite from a traditional gears of war experience to play conservatively and slowly these things are disincentivized by the reinforcement mechanics and the ai's constant interest in flushing you out of your hidey holes to play in keeping with the spirit of the main series flanking and chainsawing and [ __ ] [ __ ] up the game yields to you you progress quickly you're rewarded handsomely so it's not simply the visual design or the mechanical design that makes gears tactics feel like the mainline games it's that the design convinces or coerces a player to approach them faithfully on their end the user end as well gears tactics doesn't have co-op but its automation and ai is responsive enough compelling enough to feel like a conversation of sorts anyway the language just all happens to be violence each weapon action verb and sensation of gears of war has been taken out and recrafted as a board game version with an individual strategic purpose even the lowlaced pistol really the stump pistol has a special role now where it can be used as a low damage attack that startles an enemy and causes them to recoil out of cover opening them up to a different character's more devastating attack if an enemy or anyone is uncovered then even if a piece of them is technically exposed visually they still get a massive damage reduction explosives and melee attacks and special attacks like the snub pistols become even more critical tools than gunfire in clearing the field interestingly characters don't exactly choose their own loadouts each character's guns are determined by class and then you upgrade those guns with customization parts that give different bonuses that sync up with different kinds of progressions in the skill tree for that class eventually you get a main character in each class role but to start with you get just two complementary ones gabe diaz and sid redburn gabe diaz is the main main character a stripy-haired fellow who is likely kate diaz's father although it isn't made completely explicit he is also in the medic support role this is actually pretty brilliant design because since you take him with you on almost every mission that role is always filled by default with a very powerful version of a support medic unless the party is split or you're trying to fulfill a challenge condition those other slots can be filled with more customizable offensive roles said redburn you might remember from gears 5 though if you did i would be impressed because he only appears as a name on a collectible document it was a new hope whistleblower a security officer who tried to get nile samson shut down here he is in this early part of the timeline trying to right that wrong by tracking down uconn a locust geneticist who's responsible within the lore for creating the franchise's iconic big monsters like the corpser in the brumack redburn's class is the vanguard a high damage tank kind of character where gabe wields the classic chainsaw bayonet lancer redburn uses a retro lancer one of the old pendulum war models and the action titles the retro lancer had distinguished itself by having a slower rate of fire yet more damage per shot along with a much crazier recoil this is taken into account with how the weapon has been translated into the game ineffective at range brutal up close gabe diaz is able to use the chainsaw bayonet of the lancer at will with a multi-turn cooldown it'll wipe an enemy off the map immediately but it doesn't count as an execution no one gets any extra action points however gabe diaz uses movement points closing on an enemy to make the chainsaw kill said redburn does not with his regular bayonet charge if he has a straight line in which to make the charge the vanguard class can immediately close the distance for free allowing the short-range lancer to fire more effectively and these are just your starting characters one of your earliest tasks is to rescue some more gears to fill out your starting roster i kept these other starting 2 with me for pretty much the whole game because of the downing mechanic it's unusual that you'll actually lose a squad member and even if you do the game is pretty generous with auto saves and no one mission takes very long to replay even from the top one of these newer crews is a scout she uses the classic nasher shotgun but can also be specialized into a tree where the shotgun is supplemented by different types of grenades the scout is i think the most dangerous class in the game weak at first but wildly mobile and hugely destructive because of how grenades can catch an entire wave of enemies flat-footed especially wretches the minigun wielding heavy support class by contrast is actually not that threatening at all they're very good for defense and point control but their poor mobility means they can't actually advance as aggressively as they need to for offensive purposes coupled with poor range it makes them likely the least dangerous class so as a four-man starting team take a look at everything you have four classic years of war weapons distributed to four balanced tactical roles too aggressive to support a distribution of skills that allows for both fast aggression and defense against overwhelming waves and underlying each tactical feature a familiar sight or a familiar sound from past games tying the old sensation to the new format by the time sid redburn returns gabe diaz to the motor pool only to find it sacked and on fire the game has barely begun and yet it's already established its credentials as a bonafide and serious gears of war title on every level gears tactics also happens to have the best story out of all the prequel material handily beating out ram shadow and judgment from memorability and spectacle it's got the most impressive portrayal of the e-day chaos caused by choosing to fire the hammer of non-weapon to date and the game does it halfway through the tutorial i mean talk about starting things off with a bang for the most basic elements of traversal in combat the tutorial has you play in a pre-collapse cog city all gleaming white marble and bright sunshine like ede lima was in ram shadow then gabe and sid reach prescott's office take his files on uconn and get a front row ticket to watch the world burn rather than getting tired of these repeating themes and elements i feel like they're used in dramatic context that are meaningful enough to build connectivity and resonance instead of just fatigue of repetition if you've only played the next generation titles with gears 4 and gears 5 this may very well be your first peak at the e-day experience as a player so why not be incredibly lush with it gears tactics has the same quality of cinematic presentation in its cutscenes as gears 4 and 5 do which goes a huge distance towards keeping it closely tied to them the way the initial trilogy was so united by their shared aesthetic and the console limitations they all faced admittedly the cut scenes here are fewer and farther between than usual that was a budget limitation certainly but by leaning on the template format missions to pad out the acts and saving the big money cutscenes for the dramatic climaxes and transitions the game does maximize their effectiveness at least like in the old days with starcraft you've got to grind some missions to get to the movie quality stuff the clever thing is the template missions are so fast in their pacing and heavy in their action that dialogue would just slow them down the enormous pressure you face from the enemy forces in each and every turn makes each move in a mission fairly important and that lack of idle mental energy on the player's part intensifies the momentum of play there is hardly any waiting in the game even on an enemy turn on account of how truly dangerous each enemy can be if they get their attacks offs correctly so even when it's the enemy's turn there is much tension and holding of breath or else anticipation for the enemy to walk into the traps and kill zones that you've laid for them the acts also help meter out frustration with the templar missions by making sure you only have to do one cycle of them per environmental tile set once through with cog ruins once through with a civilian desert setting once through the industrial desert setting sometimes in the dark and in the rain sometimes in the brilliant sunshine it's enough visual variation to make up for at least some of the lack of mechanical variation in the filler template missions then the big money climactic missions offer for you from each of those fatigues featuring a structurally unique mission setup in a very cool and unique looking place take the brumack boss fight there's a challenging push across a bridge through regular enemies as a kind of warm-up then the fight really begins the brumack can only be damaged like in the action gear's titles either hit it in the arm guns or wait for it to turn around so you can hit the weak spot or in this case the emulsion tubes so you need to split into teams of two one to distract the other to damage and then balance your attacks with running away from the constant barrage of area of effect attacks telegraphed just one turn in advance it is a slow and meticulous fight mixing it up with surprise reinforcements as the battle wears on it's a true endurance test compared to what you've played before the corpser boss fight is even more so of an endurance test with reinforcements flowing in at an absolutely outrageous rate and from very distant sides of the arena almost guaranteeing that they catch some of your squad members unaware the corpser itself isn't too bad except that it's only vulnerable at rare intervals or after receiving enough damage in a turn thing is doing that much damage doesn't leave you with much left to hit it with because of this the corpser fight doesn't feel as fair or as fast as the brumack fight it drags on and on and wears you down and then if you lose you have to take it from the top after that [ __ ] the template missions are honestly quite welcome in their shortness you feel like you're actually making progress let's be honest though gears of war has never been about the boss fights it's about the ensemble cast the vibe the atmosphere and in those things gears tactics also excels my favorite instance of voice casting in gears tactics is deborah wilson as anti-cog sniper michaela dorn wilson brings a snappy fearsome energy to the role which feels like such a necessary counterbalance to the rah-rah cog recruitment mission at the structural heart of things necessary because gears tactics isn't just a generalized origin story for the setting it's actually a very specific one this group of cog and survivors who band together to fight ukan become the outsider community that you meet in gears 4. from the cog michaela and her band of survivors gained firepower and mobility with their forces joined they actually are a small army capable of performing major military actions from michaela gabe and his cog learn to question prescott to rely only on themselves to finish the mission not because they've been ordered to but because it's simply the right thing to do michaela is like an inverse of fawz in the same ensemble role she's the skeptical one the sarcastic one the unknown element in the group who keeps them from getting complacent the weakest part of the main cast is actually uconn he's kind of craven and ridiculous a gas-huffing wizard-like figure he's not improved in villainous stature by speaking english either it just makes him seem even more cartoonish nothing about him is genuinely intimidating and there's no sense of real connection between him and the creatures he supposedly created because the brumack corpser and such belong more to the player than they do to him they've been icons from the start as a player as an audience i'm not here for him i'm here to see what the deal is with big papa diaz and the outsider brigade even the twist where sid tries to capture uconn instead of killing him is actually just an excuse to grow sid's backstory and set up the mystery fourth main character who you might have already guessed at during an otherwise pretty routine rescue mission gabe rescues a wiry and tough young woman named reina she got out of new hope and owes ukan a debt of pain i love how little fanfare there is surrounding her character to start the player knows quite well how outrageously important she is to the broader lore but the characters don't so they don't act like it reyna is just an especially quiet intense survivor when you meet her she doesn't even show up until quite late in the game long after she would have had a chance to really influence the ensemble dynamic all there's time for is to show that she forms some kind of friendship and connection with gabe there isn't much explicitly romantic about it just the fact that kate's mother is definitely that same reyna and kate definitely does share gabe's last name even in the creation of the outsiders as a collective prescott was more villain than uconn when prescott discovers that gabe's been talking to sid about new hope he orders a hammer of dawn strike on their position gabe having guessed this would be the case had given prescott false coordinates this betrayal is what cleaves them from the cog michaela was always right about them being a bunch of lying fascist bastards but it took prescott throwing them all away to protect that lie to actually turn the mass sentiment of the survivor group around it's a lie that prescott successfully protects for the most part until gears 2 and even then the full extent of the crimes of new hope aren't discovered until long after prescott is dead in gears forum so there's continuity being established for antagonist and protagonist both which is a pretty neat trick honestly i could have kept playing for a lot longer than the campaign lasted even though it's technically the longest campaign out of all of them by time to complete and if i wanted to i could have as much as i enjoy the character work and cut scenes gears tactics really is primarily about the tactics and so it will spool missions infinitely for you on the templates if you wanted to although i personally found it more interesting to just start over from the beginning partly because the game had significantly changed from the first time i played it while i believe the game is complete now in between when i started this project and finishing it the coalition added a new jacked mode which features an extra tier of gear and a support robot as a fifth squad mate i figured that having a jack would make the game more fun but what i did not anticipate was how the robot also makes the game significantly easier take the loot system you get more random loot boxes if you find them and pick them up mid mission on the battlefield in my first run-through i often missed one or two boxes because i just couldn't spare a squad mate to go out that far jack is perfect for that [ __ ] he has no real offensive value and the mission is already balanced for you and your main squad of four to complete it without him so bonus box similarly jack can be used to not only give massive bonuses like whole additional action points ammo and damage buffs but also to just flat out draw fire and tank damage theoretically there are new and more powerful enemies added to the field to compensate for jack but the balance felt to me like it was still wildly advantaging the player despite the presence of these more fearsome foes and these new enemies do add a lot of entertainment value i'm not saying they don't they buff surrounding standard enemies with different kinds of resistances or extra damage in a way the new enemies feel like an echo of the declassified objectives back in gears award judgment kind of like how the wave defense sequences with the countdown and stuff and judgment got incorporated also into gears 4 as a minor mechanical novelty these new enemies shake up how i remember the missions going and they had a lot of flavor the only thing that isn't really irrelevant with the new content is the extra tier of customization rewards they only appear after the climax gears of war games are famous for their arcade and multiplayer modes for content that you can play until you get absolutely sick of it once the campaign is over and gears tactics is clearly using the extra tier of gear to incentivize that kind of post-climax engagement despite not actually having a separate arcade mode and why not the war with the locust goes on for years it's unwinnable which means it's infinitely playable but also fundamentally futile if uconn had been a better villain and the game had ended with a better boss fight that might have given me the enthusiasm i needed to get really into the template missions but the second time around after all of the newly adjusted encounters the yukon boss fight feels especially flat took the wind out of my sails to play it lukan isn't as dangerous as the brumack or the corpser with his area of effect attacks and the reinforcement schedule for his fight is actually quite forgiving giving you plenty of time to set up kill zones so if you want a real challenge i guess you just gotta keep going once you're done and if you'd prefer to stop while the stopping is good and return to the comfort of real-time gears action well there's one last surprise stop on that tour as well more than a year after gears 5's original campaign more than six months after gears tactics the coalition released one last major piece of story content for gears 5 called hive busters it's the origin story of scorpio squad who debuted in one of the game's many multiplayer modes called escape now they're getting the full expansion pack treatment a modern iteration of exactly the kind of vibe and world building that gears 3 had done with ram shadow in keeping with how high profile and high budget the franchise has become it is actually one of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous pieces of content in the entire run of gears games its use of color is so bold and impressive that it's hard to believe this is the same franchise that was once derisively referred to as the graze of war because of its muddled and dim pallet hard to believe unless you're playing it of course there's nothing at all different here mechanically besides perhaps one unusual boss fight at this point is the mechanical fidelity to its roots a help or hindrance and moving the franchise forward into newer and newer iterations i can see the argument against the fidelity that these elements are essentially stale and played out that the formula offers no surprises and neither does hive busters it's beautiful sure and dense with images and encounters the island setting is novel to the franchise but it is an inevitable inclusion as the games move through what'll eventually be every biome they can come up with meanwhile you're fighting the same old monsters digging up the same old artifacts of the past chatting with some of the same old characters this fatigue is likely a widespread enough opinion that gear 6 will have to do something major to shake itself up like how gears 3 expanded the scope of its co-op and introduced the lambent however nothing like the lambent has been foreshadowed or introduced and now this new trilogy seems to be tighter in its storytelling using shorter intervals between titles i don't know if that's coming hive busters isn't even in prequel territory it is fully current with the gears 5 timeline and even sets up some characters like augustus cole's daughter hannah who i would certainly wager will appear in gear 6. and it's there i'd like to begin my counter-argument hannah's got this background dialogue where she talks about her dad the coal train she talks about how he's a champion for education and wanted more for her than war and this is partly a referential joke like dom and marcus with their tomatoes but it's also part of what i truly love about the gears of war games they've never expressed a trope that they haven't been willing to playfully subvert and lord knows they've expressed a few the familiarity of gears of war isn't an inert thing it's something the games acknowledge incorporate and creatively push back against i wouldn't call anyone who thinks the formula is still wrong necessarily but i think the coalition as developers have been especially clever and caring stewards of the franchise and i think they've been extraordinarily clever within the aging format of the games contrast gears of war with an annual franchise like call of duty now there's a franchise experiencing severe consumer burnout and fatigue like gears of war the call of duties don't change too much mechanically from one title to another like years of war they also rely heavily on spectacle but each is mostly self-contained and when they do allow serial storytelling it isn't with characters anyone would describe as likable i mean who among the recurring black ops cast isn't a colossal [ __ ] the call of duty games are unable to build upon their own stories unable to flesh out a singular world the way gears has call of duty's mechanical format as a first person shooter isn't necessarily any more stale than the third person co-op and gears it's just a standard form by now but call of duty is only able to adjust its gameplay by adjusting its setting changing the war and thereby changing the tools of war gears is not annual it takes its time coming out and each game is spectacularly dense even more so in the modern era than when they began really it can build on itself subvert itself and remain connected to a huge amount of legacy material and i crave many of its consistencies i want the lancer to always feel the same i want the way the characters slam to cover to always take the same amount of frames i want the mix of violence and grandeur that makes gears of war so instantly recognizable to stay true to itself it's interesting that call of duty has been so many more things in a superficial way so many more eras so many more styles so many more wars and yet it's endangered by familiarity and monotony so much more these days than gears of war is gears of war has never once tried to reinvent itself it hasn't tried to perfect itself either it has never reached a version that felt obviously better a version that could be considered final instead we have many houses built on the same foundation and they all refer back and connect with one another we don't just have houses we have a neighborhood we have a world one that changes and grows with its characters not even something as small and obscure as hive busters is apart from it the hive that you're busting in this particular case is called a sanctum and it was intended to be a kind of azura adjacent facility where it not for the local volcano causing all sorts of construction difficulties and running that construction up against the end of the locust war before it was ever filled so they did eventually fill it with the locust corpses and now it's a big nasty hive in real life and in games i'm a sucker for industrial ruins giant looming concrete and massive rusting pipework sanctum is more mothballed than rotting its metal still gleams and its doors still work but as scorpio squad leader keegan says they just don't build him like they used to resonances and parallels to american life and culture is part of what draws me to gears of war as the setting moves into its next generation and the old style cog architecture becomes antiquated and strange to its own characters this mirrors my relationship with mid-century technology and our plastic touchscreen driven present i know that much of it was built for corporate profit or in preparation for war but whenever i do a museum tour of an old bunker or power plant there's something about it that just sticks with me fires my imagination i'm awed by the scale the craftsmanship the secret and special nature of them when they were active facilities and the strangeness of how thoroughly they've been left behind and abandoned by the world today a lot of the legacy of these places in real life is toxic of course most often literally by way of radioactive waste chemical runoff and dangerous materials like asbestos but sometimes culturally as well representing the same kind of military-industrial expansionism that's at the heart of what gear's war is actually trying to critique i'm with keegan though even when it comes to the odious things about contemporary society its own impulses toward death and greed they don't make him like they used to we live in an era where even villainy is cheap keegan as a character is kind of interesting because he was an onyx guard posted to azura one of the few survivors of that last doomed holdout so he actually missed the war the first time around and in his old age he's trying to make up for it now newcomer and feisty redheaded troublemaker mack even technically outranks him mack though i don't enjoy he's a comedy relief character at heart but the script keeps trying to make him hard bitter and unpredictable in places to emphasize his emotional thinking and hot-headed nature it's not hot-headed so much as thoughtless when he gets in those moods though and sanctum's anti-climax as a set of levels as evidence of that the squad is supposed to go down a dozen levels deep into the facility hive and release an airborne toxin but the fighting is so tough that it takes the whole chapter just to make it down a couple of floors so mac gets fed up with it and detonates the gas prematurely he says it's because he doesn't want to waste his death and have it mean nothing this being a suicide mission and all but doesn't failing to properly set off the weapon and damage the hive sap their actions of meaning much more than just committing fully and getting the job done sure i was also slightly exhausted by the idea of continuing so far at the pace we had been going but hey man job's a job the rest of the dlc is spent improving the gas weapon and setting up a return to sanctum but you as the player will never actually get to see that happen the game ends on a cliffhanger where everyone gets themselves deliberately swallowed by snatchers as an express ticket to the depths of the hive i was so damn excited for the sequence it was so clearly the actual climax that when the dlc just ended i was sure as [ __ ] frustrated this is naturally because the conclusion is concluded in the hive buster's comic series expanded content within expanded content the thing i liked about the squad and ram shadow was how they were all mostly cast offs that you'd met before like how so many of the minor characters from buff the vampire slayer end up trickling down to angel where they'd either work out better or disappear entirely high busters feels more individual because of its independent characters but i miss somewhat how ramshadow prioritized making all these tiny references and connections for hive busters the most important legacy character is actually hoffman still wheelchair bound but determined to fight the swarm on his own terms by arranging this whole little rogue operation where bernie's gone it's never said but it gives some very impressive continuity to have the same man who gave player 1 and marcus their very first marching orders in gears of war 1 be the same guy giving you orders now decades later in the fiction years later in real life hoffman hasn't got the quid in him and i find that mighty persuasive the third squad mate you've got is lonnie who's supposed to be thai khaliso's cousin these are the islands that he came from and a lot of the dlc is spent exploring and expanding his fictional culture while i don't think the level design of the village sections is especially strong it does transition into a sequence that feels refreshingly new within the series to improve the gas weapon you need a toxin found in a mighty and legendary bird monster kind of thing the wakatu you walk an ancient path and participate in a ceremonial journey as you make your way to the biggest most beautiful tree on the whole island the home of the wakatu now by itself this isn't anything especially notable it'd fit in fine with any of the new tomb raider games with its aaa gloss and borrowed motifs what's notable is the way it resolves even though the wakato is the boss of the whole dlc you don't kill it you fight it you get it wrestled to the ground you steal its precious venom but the bird is important to lonnie's culture so the bird gets to live acts of mercy for sentient villains in games i'd certainly seen before but not really for a monster a beast a boss creature like this and especially not for reasons as simple as this it's an act of nature conservation in an ultra-violent shooting game and that is startling there's plenty of hive busters that's a little wrote in by the book mostly in the way the squad's character arcs pull together and how everyone does stuff like taking turns to explicitly state why they're fighting and why they're friends now and there's ways to see this kind of thing as being representative of stagnancy and how the gears of war games are constructed and presented he can't really accuse hive busters of being original in any way even within the franchise yet it doesn't feel stagnant to me in the quick condensed four hours or so that hive busters lasts it's got just as many moments of surprise and delight that the main games do surprise doesn't mean you don't see it coming it might mean it just comes at you from a slightly different angle than you expect wearing a different mask provoking a different reaction there are many many small variations on the formula and themes at work here even if the aggregate is extremely familiar hive busters does exactly what it says on the box there's a hive you're trying to bust it there's monsters and explosions and chainsaw bayonets yet even within this it does surprise keegan the veteran with no veterans hoffman the warrior in search of a war lonnie and her capacity for mercy towards something that by genre convention should receive none how long can gears of war keep up its consistency maintain its hot streak as a flagship xbox title there's a lot of pressure writing on it to continue to perform but what does performance mean within the context of the franchise does it mean bigger better more badass or does it mean remaining faithful to game design that'll soon enough be two decades old for gears 4 5 and tactics what i find impressive is their ability to split the difference they are utterly faithful to the sensations and rhythms of the original title even tactics with its wildly diversion structure and at the same time they are bigger gears 5 was superior to gears 4 in almost every way and in adopting the wide linear format gears 5 is even more flexible in how it delivers its content hivebuster shows though that even hewing to the most traditional and linear approach gears of war still has room in which for the series to grow and evolve as the franchise grows older it fills in the negative space that had been so important to gears of wars lore and world building like a jigsaw puzzle the more you complete the picture the easier it is to guess the rest of it the only creative solution to this problem is to create more negative space to expand the scope and transition into something new that's what gears 4 and 5 did with their generational time jump and now even that space is being filled in i don't think there's any question that these games are art and hold artistic value their visual complexity alone earns them that yet they're also entertainment and in entertainment there's a useful maxim always leave them wanting more there's a climax brewing out there with gears 6 but i would be a fool to figure that was actually the end of things there will be more gears after and each of them will have to creatively negotiate the things that it's able to uniquely do for itself and the things too critical to leave behind the day that the lancer stops feeling like the lancer will be the day the franchise finally and fully grinds to a halt straightforwardness and consistency might not be exciting things but they are important things things people crave on a deeply human level some things we want to change some things we love for the way in which they stay the same gears of war might not seem on the surface like a franchise with enough going on for me to talk about it for so long and if talks all there was you'd be right the only truly correct way to understand gears of war is just to play their language is the language of design in translating these things into the language i'm proficient in instead it's taken me hours to explain what i love about the games their joy is the joy of play their success is one of the most positive examples i can think of where aaa design truly justifies its own expense they're fun they're just a whole [ __ ] heap of fun and if i'd stopped drawing at you you could find that out for yourself thanks for watching this video and all the videos i do are supported through crowdfunding via the website patreon i'd like to take a moment to thank my name some of the people who are currently donating ten dollars a month and more to keep these 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saying argus swift r adair ahri erik strickling arcady ragzia arnie hd asbjorn volkavalbian askance glance astrozoid austin matheson austin milner austin aloysio ava gravy avery holmes avery thorpe banks barton donaldson bastian frost succubus 87 ben ben mcdonald ben pace ben perkle ben willard benjamin glover beth lewenberger bibb bob biggest communism builder blonde blind fighting blue bishop boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers boogers brad wallace brad wallace brandon richards brandon richards brandon rodriguez brianna manasseh brendan mccauley brent hughes brandon buchanan brett brothers brian barrow brian plockleman ryan vanderle brynn davies boucher 88 byron callum c cal collab fields callan helens caleb tm cam pendland caro council c e keem chad horton charles merrick charles woodman charlie pouch chase baker chase carnival chase h chubby bang chris harajuk chris tekkenton christopher clack cian higgins claire gillian clancy bundy cobra codfish cartographer code avery cole wardell colin colin basnett colin birens colin mcrae colin stoltz comfy hat commissar conceded axis connor plantier conor herstedt corey austin craig pharrell cross muradin dan custer dan ludwig dane rosengren daniel larose daniel billow daniel sarnowski daniel drexler daniel floyd daniel camp daniel mccarthy daniel morton danno morrison danston daniel orn christiansen daryl shafer dastardly bastard ii dave dave hoyt dave kassan david i cannot fly i computer imran momori i'm sorry about that isa porto ivan echeverria jack davis jack holmes jack royne jack shahan jackson fraser jackson rolls-grey jacob alexander jacob benson jacob ester jacob macmillan jacob moanish jake lamb jake mick williams jake raynor jacob sindalar james brandon james crowley james gutierrez james henderson james mosca jared kay jared a hicks david adrian david carlson david dope david harp strike david larkin david repoccio david reynolds david s david schumerman davis navarro deacon st john declan hertel derek allman derrick sudbury devin fitzpatrick devona uparock drove bonzo dijon juan dios dirt person disco lord boris dr mod dominic dold dominic hickman don't read my name i don't care donny doid sheridan dorian sanchez dr crime dr motorcycle dragon cobalt dralek789 drew nab drogan dewey dylan cabal dylan o'shea dylan scott isgar eddie bc edmond horny edward d heap egg roll buddy elde abyss ella fox eli youngs el pascal el weasel emily julstrom epitome 22 eric goose eric hamilton schmidt eric joyner eric jackson eric jepson i'm jensen i'm sorry ethan hayes evan barnett evan hill ferris attala finley m finn gleeson fitz foratus freddie guyot frogfoot frosting the birthday clown fugla gabriel sora golden eight gonzo bama [ __ ] garrett johnson gary marshall gaspard fleury hertabise gordon emerson grang 10 grade greg greg rucka grendel greymane gm gs pory gunner pearson gustav lindstedt hagup han jiping hannah haste gray hayes henry black hfd jj hgd highland fox howard knutson hugh o'brien hunter rasmussen histoclop ian buckley ian durdell ian kidwell in wasserman jason mckillin jay caudill jay alamein jay calder jeanette jed jed grabach jeff gibbs jeff mace jeffrey b doran jeffrey mcintyre jens christian sorensen jeremy harris jeremy kirby jeremy saunders jeremy wolf jesse james jesse lacks jim mcgeehan jimbo jay mackery joe davis john brown john henry franco john libra john zaklovsky jonathan gill jonathan harrison jonathan sasson jonathan waineau jordan klein jordan griezmann joseph griesman joseph joseph smith joseph schultz josh waters joshua aslan smith joshua lewis josiah tull jrg123 js juan trevino julius janeskovis justin michael justin miller yuan nixon kai sorenson kale perrian caleb carl gleeson casa corstalia keegan little ken olendorf kevin martell kevin oliver kevin schaub kevin sheehan kh maker d kiernan bagga kim winston kirby monger kirk fury kissa cold beans crayso christian planck christopher kollisch kyle parliament kyle zainer lassalis leyton harden leo zarni leo peril leopold gloom lesser sage of stars levi thomas liam pierce l i y w j l l l logan hickman logan sailors lord jenkins lorenzo louis lorati low beyonder lucas staniland luke luna litwin magnus manfred manu weedman marcus smith marek jones marius labonte mark phillips marcolath martin michelson martin peterson mathias vanderbosch matt blevin might finale matt lefler matt juan matthew matthew again matthew allen kelsey matthew cassidy matthew cornelius matthew flowers matthew fround matthew kenyon matthew mason matthew morrow matthew shyrock matthew sutton and matthew xender maurice decero max baker max cohen maxine d maxwell baum mcdingus mcshell megabyte01 melo may mozz michael atwell michael brewer michael guerin michael litki michael nessberg michael plasa michael riordan miguel ramirez bihar nita mike norman miles luna miles phillips misha cranebring mj muhammad sallahi mark sharks moore sharks i'm sorry morgan cramer morton anselhelm mr b pig mr fabulous mr gobble mx mx mystical lint n.k jemisin nate tenzar nathan feldman nathaniel johnson nemo vandenbrink nick cole hamilton nick korasek nick v nikolai no pun intended noah baldwin noah kentrowitz nolan pete nuan sonar obelisk art history old man jb's olaf person optimus crimes aurelian oscar sangenberg ottavio albanissi paige leffeburg paj pascal morae pat healy patrick gaumont patrick mcgranahan patrick mills patrick morrison paul bosch paul d mackey paul field paul glazer paul quast pedro gonzalez fernandez peter sicolo peter flink payton helix phil harding phillip a coffee philip wooley p face pierre berkey pigeon boy piotr kaspersky preston mike michael ezio proton reader queen and q ray x kwitch rachel reeves ralph raine water ranger ridiculous rasmus jensen rauno villeberg riley peters resell collander revan777 rex shepard rich store rich to the rdo riley bozarth rob diehl robert conley robert strange robert stefan robot ghost rogue threats ross bennett ross dexter rotten avocado ryan fram khan ryan keaney ryan rau ryan snyder scream black s engball cybot d sam bellmeyer sam weinstein excuse me sasha ya savannah jones savannah kestrel scott scott dick scott lynch sean sean cullen bensinger john hanson sean murphy sean yoon stella sergeant qq sergio alejandro estrada sergio proxy shane sean sovie shield wall shiny wolf simon littleburn sky jensen smith 754 snow hole saab also known as dhaka soldier hawk sophia naylor soso maso soy sauce spooderman spot stephen love dance steve bellgaard stephen pine stickman grit stimpson sneed stuart jackson stuka blayot super deluxe swirly gig symmetry master t.j heman ted cooper an actual dragon tizer vicarian ted cara tech texas dan thaddeus wojack thatchy odin the nikka four offs the rambling bard the spade the bloke the dark soul ii the last great opium den the soul james thomas thomas georges thomas vavassur thomas watkins thomas whitty tiltz tim featherson tim froelich tim marsh timothy timothy demer timothy lee peterson timothy rebidue tin foil pancakes chess and tens 13 tj michael toad heart tom painter tom rowerdick tom webster tor highlander trevor schnenkes trevor white trinet turgius tyler baldwin tyler hughes tyler king tyler r smith tyler rouch tyler vetter tyson cox uranium coffee urtext vedim flax bonjour pejovic vegard blindheim venetian red visual stories vitor tumuli vivek raghuram voyager vivi wanderer warren d well-tempered clavier vernal herzog whitman shawn why are you locked in the bathroom will dobbins willem klein willem william david johnson william paverde william tom wolf in white van woolley drool wyatt hahn yaro12 yeah you do you noah zach ehrlich zachary brent zachary leonard roper zachary zieman zack b zed supremas zero promises silverbolt malproximate wavend gearberg lucas greslick christian frata connor dwegan jason lee keffel out of context noah gervais stuffed wombat bernardo ribiero carl cerras sherlock stefan kess one player alexander shushanek anatha andrew emerson andrew venus dennis capps dominique gary lyman hieronymus god ids custers isa vds it's one of these days carl nordstrom ken clara krautman massey edge matush mauricio fontes alexandra milo javerus paul bartley pio pasquel hernando peter flower peter o'brien peter it robin robin sebastian schaefer siegfried panzer sjr skl sorcia dubigal tim rozenski david cryer jack hogg joshua piercy barry lafoy connor savage curly danny david jackson euphemia wilson gavia gravesplender jacob geller jamie wallace john hughes kevin aunkey christian whitfield logan matheson mark fazer mark wales michael anger omni shambles eight roberticus 1992 sam hogden scott postelwick sauron felix roberts two thousand ish matt durant john doe deadhead yates jareth seinfeld colin barnhouse drake pliskin thanks for hiring an editor chris connor butler stephane ivey shamrock daniel faustino ariel echo alexander a non-follower and many more who donate a lesser amount on patreon it's your donations that keep it going and i'd also like to thank nate green who does audio editing and general producing for the show now have a good one

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 297,798

Keywords: Gears of War, Retrospective, Critique, Review, Explained, Analysis, Coalition, Raam's Shadow, Judgement, Hivebusters

Id: 2-gQCZL8VA8

Length: 217min 14sec (13034 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/hopecanon]

Gears of War is one of those rare franchises that somehow managed to run entirely on complete over the top insanity with the chainsaw bayonets and giant worm monsters, while simultaneously managing to actually get people invested in it beyond the constant over the top insanity.

I fucking cried multiple times playing these games because i genuinely loved these characters and seeing them suffer and die was horrible. That is hard to pull off when the average character in your setting is the size of a steroid infused linebacker encased in metal.

[u/TheBountyHunterIX]

Still hard to believe Gears 1 is relegated to the MS Store, and 2 and 3 aren't even available on PC without emulating. Would love to be able to play the three games in a single collection like the MCC. Such a shame...

[u/YHofSuburbia]

Can someone tell me why Gears is so huge in Mexico? I'm pretty sure it's more popular than even Halo over there.

[u/Grammaton485]

The Karen Traviss novelizations of Gears of War are pretty good. They happen in between the games, as well as detail some events pre-Emergence Day.

However, they went a little overboard with tying the plot of Gears 3 to the books. The events in between Gears 2 and 3 are all detailed over a couple of books, and there are a couple of major plot points that simply pop out of nowhere in Gears 3 that are simply continuations from the books. If you read the books and play Gears 3 it will feel fine, but if you don't read the books, Gears 3 story is extremely disjointed.

[u/Biggoronz]

Gears of War AND Noah Caldwell-Gervais??!

I thought Christmas already happened!

[u/JakalDX]

I miss the Kryll. I know it was unpopular, but I loved the mechanic of ducking from light pool to light pool, and it reminded me a lot of Pitch Black, one of my favorite movies.

[u/pmmemoviestills]

Played the first Gears campaign in one night on co-op with a friend and his copy. The next day I bought it and couldn't stop multiplayer. It's the only multiplayer FPS-type game I got really good at, especially with the sniper. Gears 5 was really great too and I believe the franchise has achieved, for the most part, decent consistency. I wish MP was more popular as it was back in the 360 days, but it's still relatively healthy with a big population.

Gears 1 was more important I think then people give it credit for.

[u/Twiftoil]

This reminds me that Gears 3 is easily one the games I've played the most because of the offline horde and multiplayer.

And then I got Gears 4 and couldn't even play it because of the way the Xbox One was designed around internet connection and so I couldn't play co-op and since then I haven't played or been following this series.

[u/Galaxy40k]

Excited to give this one a watch later! I've always found it weird that Gears never really got any real good "video essays," at least as far as I was able to find. I know "bro multiplayer games" aren't as suited as well to this as MGS, Dark Souls, Zelda, etc, but Gears was even behind Halo and CoD.