Game News Report:I had my suspicions, but it was around the time Gears of War's new hero JD Fenix rides along the spokes of a ferris wheel-sized gear that I knew for sure—Gears of War 4 is not a subtle game...
I had my suspicions, but it was around the time Gears of War's new hero JD Fenix rides along the spokes of a ferris wheel-sized gear that I knew for sure—Gears of War 4 is not a subtle game. Perhaps the first clue came 10 minutes in, when JD casually suggests he's an expert at avoiding the watchful eyes of security robots and then is immediately spotted by one, kicking off a whole lot of combat. Maybe the real giveaway was when I shot down a giant airplane while riding a motorcycle in the inevitable on-rails take-a-break-from-your-regularly-scheduled-gameplay interlude.
In hindsight, the chainsaw gun might've been the first tip-off.
Gears of War 4 is no grand rebirth for the series in the vein of Resident Evil 4—it didn't enter a cocoon a grizzled, linear third-person and emerge radically, or even subtly, changed. This is Gears almost exactly as we know it, following the 2006 template of big-budget shooter design to the letter. I kept waiting for Gears of War 4 to surprise me at any point. Hoping for it to surprise me. To give me an objective more interesting or nuanced than "pull this lever," combat arenas open enough to approach with multiple strategies or angles of attack, bombastic setpieces less predictable for anyone who's played similar games or watched any Hollywood action movie made in the past 20 years.
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I was still hoping when the credits rolled. Gears of War 4 is a slightly newer, much prettier version of a game I've played a dozen times before. It's an expensive-looking, well-made toy that I'll completely forget in a few months.
Gears 4 sticks to its same one-button cover system, big meaty bodies magnetically slamming into protective concrete from a meter away with a single keypress. The Locust, back again but now mutated into some extra nasty bug men called the Swarm, still soak up full magazines of machine gun fire. The sound design still delivers the telltale grinding metal that means your shots are landing, and that sickening pop when a Locust head explodes into pulp.
There are other enemies too, in the form of a robot army and a few Swarm creatures that differentiate them from the Locust of old. They adds variety, but they unfortunately doesn't add much in the way of strategy. With no real AI to speak of or large battlefields to approach with ingenuity, the enemy I was shooting didn't much matter. Pop up from cover, empty magazine, repeat.
That may sound reductive—couldn't I leverage that same criticism at virtually any shooter?—but so many of Gears' contemporaries offer more player expression and interesting choice in how you approach combat. Far Cry integrates stealth and the environment. Doom emphasizes improvisation and rhythm. Halo gives you a freeform sandbox with half a dozen ways to approach any encounter. Gears of War 4 provides some fun weapon variety, but its fights are so linear, and enemies so simple and bullet-spongey, there's little opportunity for surprise or creativity.
Precision weapons are rare. Landing skull-shattering headshots makes me want to slam a Jager bomb and high-five my bros, but there's frustratingly little opportunity for them. Picking up an ammo crate won't refill the Longshot sniper rifle, for example, and the Swarm's tougher enemies will shrug off several sniper shots before they go down. The new Markza rifle fires heavy rounds that seem like they should be able to take out enemies with a single expert headshot, but on Hardcore difficulty you'll still need to pump most of a magazine into the body before going for the kill. They hold precious little ammo, granting only a few kills before running dry.
This has always been the Gears way, grinding enemies down or getting up-close and exploding them into chunks of gore with a shotgun, but the end result is that you spend the most time with the least interesting guns, aiming with reticules wider than Marcus Fenix's biceps. It feels old fashioned, which may sound weird in a world where recent great shooter campaigns were reboots of Wolfenstein and Doom. How can Gears, only a decade old, feel more dated?
Perhaps because the structure of Gears 4's campaign is identical to the first three—and so many other big-budget games—made over the last 10 years. Hallway, open courtyard, firefight. Door closes behind you. Pull lever to open door. Hallway, courtyard, firefight. Thing you shot conveniently explodes and opens the path forward. Binary path choice that soon reunites with the rest of the squad. Firefight. Pull lever to start generator. Hallway, courtyard, firefight. Vehicle intermission. If there's a manual of design tropes from the past decade that gamers find familiar, Gears doesn't just pull from it—it reprints it wholesale.
New Gears, old war
Gears 4 does genuinely try to humanize its cast of new youngsters and returning veterans with heaps of banter. It's almost more Tropic Thunder than it is Transformers, which is goofy enough to be endearing. I like these characters, despite them really only being sketches of human beings. I know almost nothing about them, except that Marcus Fenix's son JD and his friend Del, COG army deserters, like to play rock-paper-scissors to see who walks into a gaping hellmouth first.The actual plot is threadbare—you spend most of the game trying to find your scavenger friend Kait's mom, and then Marcus, and then Kait's mom again. There are repeated references to why JD and Del left the COG but no explanations, and no satisfying answer to why it's being mentioned to begin with. There's an entire storyline with the head of the COG, who sends hundreds of robots to kill you over a big misunderstanding, that goes nowhere in the end. It all seems like setup for a sequel or book series or some expanded universe something or other, tantalizingly interesting bits of worldbuilding that never get enough time in the campaign.
The same goes for Gears 4's few new ideas. The planet is now ravaged by massive windstorms (think Mad Max: Fury Road) that spawn roving arcs of lightning and send debris careening across outdoor battlefields. It's an awesome graphical effect, seeing steel pipes and chunks of concrete go flying and turning unlucky enemies into pulp (which then also goes flying), but battles are so linear and so staged there aren't nearly enough opportunities to use the weather to your advantage. These storms should've been embedded deeply into the core of Gears of War, but instead they're sprinkled on top.
Two of its new weapons also don't get enough play, but when they do show up they're some of the most fun guns I've used in shooters in years. The Overkill is a vicious close-range shotgun that fires once on mouse press and once on mouse release. When you're in a tight spot, hammering the mouse absolutely unloads it on whatever's in front of you. It also gives you the option to fire, quickly hone your aim, and fire again, which I did for a sickeningly bloody headshot more than once. Even cooler is the Dropshot, a sort of rocket launcher that fires an explosive charge in a straight line. Hold the trigger and the charge keeps flying; release, and it hurtles to the ground and detonates everything around it.
It's such a creative gun, but you'll pick it up only sparingly and only get four shots. Broadly, the way Gears limits you to two primary weapons helps create tension in battle and emphasizes the (still fun) active reload system. But man, guns like the dropshot make me wish for a less rigid system that let me swap between multiple weapons at will and spend more time playing with these fresh ideas. Instead, I fire off a few shots, run out of ammo, and it's back to the ol' lancer.
Gears of War 4 looks absolutely wonderful while it's going through the motions, and in a first for an Xbox One-to-PC Universal Windows App, it runs beautifully on modern GPUs. I played on a GTX 980 Ti and a 980 at 2560x1440, maxed out on Ultra on the former and set to a mixture of Ultra and High settings on the latter. The framerate stayed above 60 fps with only a few brief drops or stutters across the campaign, and this was with dynamic resolution scaling off—with it on, the game would've temporarily dropped resolution to preserve the framerate.
The PC version also includes a feature we recently praised in an article about optimization—it tells you how a setting will impact your GPU or CPU, making it easier to dial in your settings.
I just wish this game with the polish and particle effects of 2016 didn't play so much like a game of 2006. Gears of War 4 needed bolder ideas or bolder execution of its good new ideas to be an interesting singleplayer shooter in 2016. Four player co-op is a great option, for sure, and playing in two-player was definitely more fun. But not because it significantly changes how Gears plays: James and I co-opped about half the campaign and the only real difference I noticed is that enemies are more aggressive about killing you when you've been downed, at least on Hardcore difficulty. Our added fun came from being able to laugh together about Gears' silliest moments.
I'm holding out hope that multiplayer is where iteration really benefits Gears of War 4's dedication to the same cover shooter mechanics we've seen so many times before. Gears multiplayer on consoles was an intense experience, and one of the first examples of an Xbox game I remember really requiring active teamwork over voice chat.
Gears 4 has several versus modes, and a whole new Horde mode, that I haven't had a chance to dig into. I'll be playing more of those modes when the game goes public, and looking out for performance issues on other hardware, before finishing my review.
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