Gears of War 5: hilariously oversized guns Edition
Gears of War 5 is a game where all the guns are bigger than me.
It's been 25 years since Marcus stabbed the angry lady and blew up the Locust. The COG reformed and started building walled cities with clean water and probably internet. Anyone who doesn't want to live under the COG's rules are called Outsiders.
Fast forward sometime ahead, there are new bigger, angrier, sexier Locust called the Swarm who are abducting people to turn them into goo and then cute little Swarm children who will grow into big Swarm people that you shoot at.
I didn't play the fourth game, so uh. Marcus Fenix had a son called James Dominique Fenix, JD for short. JD has a friend named Del and another friend named Kait. The Swarm attack the play where Kait's mom works or lives I dunno and abducts Kait's mom. Turns out Kait and her mom are related to the Locust Queen Myrah. So the Swarm is trying to get one of them so they can work as a hive mind and make the Swarm less of glue eaters so they start using actual tactics and wearing armor and stuff.
Kait wants to sever the link between herself and the Swarm and that's where Gears of War 5 starts. Okay, you're caught up, good.
I'm not calling it “Gears 5.”
Gears of War kind of has a special place in my heart. Its one of the first Not-Launch games I bought on the Xbox 360, and its also one of the games on the system I put the most hours into. I was obsessed with it for the longest time, alongside Halo and Star Wars. Thankfully for me it came out at a time when Microsoft was dabbling in expanded universe territory something fierce. There were a lot of comics, novels, and other material to absorb like a sponge if you liked Gears of War. I even actually liked some of them, even though Karen Traviss writes like I do.
Which is to say, not very well.
It also turns out that the planet Sera is just a nightmare wherever you go. Giant pillars of ice fall from the sky in winter, there's a desert where fire tornadoes and mega lightning or a constant. Guess I'll just never leave my armored dumpster.
I'm actually surprised at how much I liked Gears of War 5's story, since I wasn't expecting to like it at all. JD and pals grew on me pretty quickly, they're not really a replacement for Marcus, Dom, Cole, Baird, and (Insert favorite carmine here), but they're still fairly likable in their own right. They have emotional episodes when you would think someone would lose their composure, and considering they haven't been through literally fifteen years of an apocalyptic end war, they actually still have the capacity to shed tears.
Dom cried. And then Dom died.
You spend the first two hours of the game or so playing as JD, but when the real story begins, you switch to Kait. I wasn't expecting to like Kait, since the trailers and gameplay reveals kind of make her come off as a foot. But Kait is actually pretty cool. Even in her circumstance she actually feels like a member of the squad, and someone who grew up alongside JD and Del. She cracks jokes, actually speaks to her friends as friends, and contributes to the environment around her instead of just being a self-insert stand in.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that she's not another Katniss, which is apparently the female character we've been mass producing for...I don't know, whenever Hunger Games came out.
There's also Fahz. I like Fahz, Fahz is cool.
Gameplay has stayed relatively the same, with some new additions. Keep in mind, I'm going from Gears of War 3 to Gears of War 5, so some of this stuff may have been in 4.
Jack, your robot friend from the first three games returns, this time as a tool you can use in battle and to unlock certain things. Jack comes with a variety of abilities such as a flash bomb, cloaking you, giving you a shield or extra health, or just flat out committing assault with a taser. For a good portion of the game I kind of forgot he was there, but as the game went on I started using his abilities more and more. Especially this freeze bomb you can unlock that just lets you do free damage on the tougher enemies like Sions or snatchers.
Gears of War's main gameplay loop is about taking cover and popping out to shoot suckers in the mouth. This, it does very well since everyone is constantly ALSO taking cover and moving around. So you want to move from cover to cover to get advantageous positions and shoot the shit out of anything that moves.
Gears of War, since the first one, also happens to be the king of crunch. Every weapon feels great to use, and gives you amazing feedback when you're transforming the guy you're aiming at from Christian Bale in The Boxer to Christian Bale in The Machinist. The Lancer, which is still probably the coolest scifi rifle in video games, now also removes limbs and skulls when you kill something, turning it's oomph into an OOMPH.
Add on to this other battle options like sticking grenades to things or people, pulling people out from behind cover and stabbing the hell out of them, doing crazy gorey executions on downed enemies, taking living shields to stop bullets from mulching your groin, and sliding over cover and kicking the other idiot in his stupid face. OR, you can rev up your Lancer's chainsaw bayonet, because it has a chainsaw bayonet, and just ice a fool stupid enough to get too close to you.
Or they can rev up their bayonet and the two of you bayonet clash. I always lose this because I'm on a keyboard and also slow in the brain.
Multiplayer is also pretty great, since I'm pretty sure (?) it's crossplay, you get some neat little interactions of play styles. There has been this time honored tradition in Gears of War where multiplayer is about leaping around one another and trying to mulch the other guy with a shotgun, so you bounce from wall to wall a lot of and slide around cover, using the auto aim to help you cap someone. But since I'm using a mouse and keyboard, I have a relatively easier time keeping up with the other guys movements, and I can usually down them with a Lancer as they're bouncing around. But at the same time if I end up getting too close, I get all flipped around and they can swiss cheese me before I can get my target back on them.
Its pretty neat to see and experience, considering how far we've come in crossplay since Shadowrun on the Xbox 360.
Gears of War 5 also has some neat things for you to look at if you're a fan of the universe. Many things that make you go “Oh hey!” and “That's cool.”
Hey, a battle tank used by the UIR. Neat!
Oh look, Pendulum War era propaganda. Cool!
This Outsider Village is built inside the carcass of the giant worm from Gears of War 2. Far out!
You can find destroyed grindlifts from Gears of War 2 in the fields a few miles from the giant worm. Pretty wicked!
Its good to know that the Coalition didn't just throw away everything from Gears of War like other developers did with games they took over.
Wow, I've said some pretty positive stuff about this game. So what's wrong with it?
Well, for one there are open world segments for no reason. For two Acts you're put on a skiff, which is like a dune glider, and sent out into the world to go from area to area to collect stuff or turn something on. This feels like padding, and actually kind of feels like an afterthought. The areas you go to in these acts still play like regular Gears of War levels, and the only reason to stop anywhere else is to collect upgrades for Jack.
The bright side is, you get some interesting collectibles and areas when you stop in areas, but it still feels like unnecessary padding, and since its basically half of the game, it kind of made me want to quit playing from time to time.
Playing on PC, the game also hard locked twice or so, forcing me to restart the game. Options for multiplayer skins is also barren as hell. They're apparently rolling them out through these things called “Operations” but other than that, you can't really earn new characters through leveling up. There's this almost free to play model involved with multiplayer, where you have to earn supply drops for new items. When you get a duplicate drop, you earn scrap which you can use to craft certain things.
Or you can just spend real money.
Can't I just, like, do challenges? There are some challenges I can't even do because two of the ranked modes are deader than Elvis. So am I just supposed to wait in the lobby for 30+ minutes or ignore the challenge or what?
Also, No Carmine character for multiplayer. How dare you?
But in the end, Gears of War 5 is still pretty cool. It feels like a Gears of War game, even though the sequels feel a bit unnecessary, they're still fun to play. Multiplayer monetization may rub some people the wrong way, which it did me, but its completely subjective to how you feel about cosmetics. There are people in the multiplayer community that can go into better detail about the problems than I can, so you're better off seeking those out.
Gears of War 5 gets 4 stars, which I can actually do because Giant Bomb has a rating system. Ya did it, champ.
The doctor who discovered that hand washing prevented the spread of disease was committed to an asylum, where he died after being beaten by the guards.