| Xbox One | January 16th | Re-Upped 10 Times |
Finally hit re-up 10 so it feels like a good time to collect my thoughts on this game, this'll be a long one!
They definitely played it safe for the campaign, the timeskip and change of main cast is the most daring thing about it. Fighting robots for the first few missions was an interesting change, but I wish they didn't just bring the Locust back after that. Sure, they mutated into the "Swarm" so they could introduce new enemy types to fight but it meant the story was just "the Locust are back, here we go again" and ultimately that's a little disappointing. They should have fully explored what they were going for at the beginning; an exploitative government trying to strictly control a newly rebuilding world - that's by no means an original concept either but it's something different for this series. But all that said, overall it's a solid enough campaign for the first in a new trilogy. It's more Gears if nothing else.
Multiplayer is a whole other thing and in some ways very frustrating. The Coalition went with a dual weapon tuning system; a less competitive mode for new players and a hardcore tuning for experienced players with more skill. The problem is they never really got it right. They were tweaking it months upon months after release, and it only seemed to annoy players. At this point both tunings are actually pretty good, but the system never seemed to serve the purpose they designed it for and did way more damage than good.
I stuck with Gears 4 for Horde mode and King of the Hill. Horde is a fun experience with a group of friends and King of the Hill is the core Gears multiplayer experience. It's particularly good now that the hit detection and matchmaking is better.
The skill cards for horde take way too long to unlock and upgrade and achieving 10 re-ups without doing horde speedruns is just insane. Lots of people who kept playing Gears 4 were unfortunately just grinding for exp and credits rather than coming back for the fun of it, which is a shame. Those systems were clearly designed to exploit those players, and that's shitty.
I hope for Gears 5 they just scrap the dual tuning and learn from the various missteps they made. They have a much better foundation for Gears 5, so maybe it will be great from the start, here's to hoping.
| Xbox One | January 29th | Chest Candy Achievement |
Holy balls I thought I'd never actually earn all the multiplayer ribbons in this game but I finally did it. Had to play a bunch of Escalation matches to get the last couple which was cool because it reminded me how fun it is. If you like King of the Hill give Escalation a go!
I have a few more achievements I can get in this game, but now I'm annoyed because I nearly have all the original achievements, but they've added a bunch of stupid-hard new ones like "beat the campaign on inconceivable solo" and "beat it on ironman mode" which are both ridiculous. Would have been nice to 100% a Gears game. Oh well.
| Xbox One | February 15th | Seriously 4.0 Achievement |
Damn, I finally have a Gears Seriously achievement. Turns out Insane campaign is way easier on solo than co-op. Picked up where me and my brother left off and finished it in one sitting. I think I appreciate the campaign a little more after going through it again.
Now I've unlocked Inconceivable difficulty...
