After being out of the game for a while now Gears of War is finally back with a new entry on current generation systems. In all honestly it feels like a decade since Gears of War 3 & Judgment, but in all actuality it's only been 5 years since Gears 3 and 3 years since Judgment. That being said, the industry has seen significant changes in the last few years so it begs the question as to whether Gears of War is even still relevant anymore. Has new developer The Coalition managed to provide gamers with a new Gears of War experience that provides a fresh perspective on the series whilst retaining what made the original games so fun to play?
25 years have passed since the end of the human/locust war (Gears of War 3) and humanity is still in the process of bringing itself back from the edge of extinction. The CoG have established dominance as the ruling governmental power, the citizens of Sera are being pressured into repopulating the planet and rumour is that people have been disappearing in the night.
JD Fenix, Kait Diez, and Del Walker are outsiders, having left the safety of CoG settlements for a life in the wilderness. When a scavenging run goes awry and the CoG accuse the trio of taking CoG citizens from settlements, they are traced back to their home and it is almost destroyed. In the following hours the settlement is attack again, but this time by creatures who kidnap the townspeople, giving proof to JD, Kait, and Del that these creatures were responsible for whatever the CoG accused them of.
To help them on their mission to find the creatures home JD enlists the help of his father, protagonist of the previous Gears games Marcus Fenix. Together the squad dig deep into the underground of Sera to find out what these creatures are and where they are coming from.
Gears 4's story is pretty weak to say the least. It lays the foundations for so much, but does very little to actually explain anything. It's clearly leaving these plot threads to be explained in later sequels, but as you work your way through the 7 hour story you begin to grow tired of things not being explained after they have been introduced. It starts strong with playable flashback sequences acting as the prologue, and then jumping forward a quarter of a century to introduce us to life as JD. But then things just seem to plod along as a pretty dull pace until the final 30 minutes of the game which is pretty much all fan service and a great set up for Gears of War 5. The characters are pretty two dimensional and the relationships seem forced. JD & Kait's romance is pretty sudden and unbelievable, plus most of the dialogue that is designed to be the trademark Gears witty humour actually ends up becoming out of place, awkward and occasionally irritating. It's clear that The Coalition wanted to remake the classic Delta Squad formula of Marcus, Dom, Baird, and Cole; but the chemistry between JD, Kait, Del, and Marcus just doesn't work the same way.
25 years have passed since the end of the human/locust war (Gears of War 3) and humanity is still in the process of bringing itself back from the edge of extinction. The CoG have established dominance as the ruling governmental power, the citizens of Sera are being pressured into repopulating the planet and rumour is that people have been disappearing in the night.
JD Fenix, Kait Diez, and Del Walker are outsiders, having left the safety of CoG settlements for a life in the wilderness. When a scavenging run goes awry and the CoG accuse the trio of taking CoG citizens from settlements, they are traced back to their home and it is almost destroyed. In the following hours the settlement is attack again, but this time by creatures who kidnap the townspeople, giving proof to JD, Kait, and Del that these creatures were responsible for whatever the CoG accused them of.
To help them on their mission to find the creatures home JD enlists the help of his father, protagonist of the previous Gears games Marcus Fenix. Together the squad dig deep into the underground of Sera to find out what these creatures are and where they are coming from.
Gears 4's story is pretty weak to say the least. It lays the foundations for so much, but does very little to actually explain anything. It's clearly leaving these plot threads to be explained in later sequels, but as you work your way through the 7 hour story you begin to grow tired of things not being explained after they have been introduced. It starts strong with playable flashback sequences acting as the prologue, and then jumping forward a quarter of a century to introduce us to life as JD. But then things just seem to plod along as a pretty dull pace until the final 30 minutes of the game which is pretty much all fan service and a great set up for Gears of War 5. The characters are pretty two dimensional and the relationships seem forced. JD & Kait's romance is pretty sudden and unbelievable, plus most of the dialogue that is designed to be the trademark Gears witty humour actually ends up becoming out of place, awkward and occasionally irritating. It's clear that The Coalition wanted to remake the classic Delta Squad formula of Marcus, Dom, Baird, and Cole; but the chemistry between JD, Kait, Del, and Marcus just doesn't work the same way.
Unsurprisingly, Gears 4 plays exactly like how you would expect a Gears game to play. It's fast paced, weighty and insanely fun. You have no idea how satisfying it was to fire off over half a clip of bullets into someone before watching them ragdoll to the floor, watching the blood cartoonishly spray out of them. How giddy I felt being able to charge up to someone and embed a chainsaw right into their neck after such a long time away from the series.
The campaign does often feel like a glorified shooting gallery with an over reliance on shoving you through room after room of meaningless battle encounters against the same few enemies that quickly grow tiresome. The loud gong that signifies the end of a battle no longer felt like it had any significance, instead it was just the signal that I would be able to have a breather for a room or two before I would be doing the exact same thing again. You could argue that the previous Gears games were no different to this, but Gears 4 is the only one I have ever noticed this over-saturation of dull combat encounters with.
I also was really not a fan of the attempt at blending some of the horde mode mechanics into campaign by offering up some wave based objectives where you have the opportunity to build defences at your position. Rather than being a cool way to demo the mechanics before jumping into Horde 3.0, it instead felt like it broke the flow of gameplay by trapping you in one combat area and giving you a resource limit to defeat waves of increasingly difficult foes.
With that said, Horde 3.0 is awesome. Horde was always the king of the endless survival mode craze that it helped create back in 2008 with Gears of War 2. Gears of War 3 improved the mode by adding resources and defences into the mix but Gears 4 refines them qualities to provide a much more balanced and exciting experience. Gears 3's Horde, though also amazing, always took a little too long to get going and always had a key to success once you learned what defences worked in what positions on the map. Gears 4 however makes things exciting much faster and provides no surefire way of long term success because it mixes enemy variants up so often. The boss battles every 10th wave are also a great way of keeping players on their toes, as well as providing points of climax more regularly than any previous Horde iterations have.
Multiplayer is just as great as ever. Though I preferred the launch maps to Gears of War 3 better, Gears 4's small gameplay refinements help keep it on level footing. Because of it's larger variety of weapons compared to previous entries, the mix of weaponry on the battlefield does tend to hold more uncertainty than in previous titles, whilst more frequent power weapon spawns provide short periods of frantic killing frenzies. But at it's core it's still Gears of War multiplayer so you can always just rely on your trusty Gnasher shotgun.
The campaign does often feel like a glorified shooting gallery with an over reliance on shoving you through room after room of meaningless battle encounters against the same few enemies that quickly grow tiresome. The loud gong that signifies the end of a battle no longer felt like it had any significance, instead it was just the signal that I would be able to have a breather for a room or two before I would be doing the exact same thing again. You could argue that the previous Gears games were no different to this, but Gears 4 is the only one I have ever noticed this over-saturation of dull combat encounters with.
I also was really not a fan of the attempt at blending some of the horde mode mechanics into campaign by offering up some wave based objectives where you have the opportunity to build defences at your position. Rather than being a cool way to demo the mechanics before jumping into Horde 3.0, it instead felt like it broke the flow of gameplay by trapping you in one combat area and giving you a resource limit to defeat waves of increasingly difficult foes.
With that said, Horde 3.0 is awesome. Horde was always the king of the endless survival mode craze that it helped create back in 2008 with Gears of War 2. Gears of War 3 improved the mode by adding resources and defences into the mix but Gears 4 refines them qualities to provide a much more balanced and exciting experience. Gears 3's Horde, though also amazing, always took a little too long to get going and always had a key to success once you learned what defences worked in what positions on the map. Gears 4 however makes things exciting much faster and provides no surefire way of long term success because it mixes enemy variants up so often. The boss battles every 10th wave are also a great way of keeping players on their toes, as well as providing points of climax more regularly than any previous Horde iterations have.
Multiplayer is just as great as ever. Though I preferred the launch maps to Gears of War 3 better, Gears 4's small gameplay refinements help keep it on level footing. Because of it's larger variety of weapons compared to previous entries, the mix of weaponry on the battlefield does tend to hold more uncertainty than in previous titles, whilst more frequent power weapon spawns provide short periods of frantic killing frenzies. But at it's core it's still Gears of War multiplayer so you can always just rely on your trusty Gnasher shotgun.
Visually Gears 4 is one of the best looking game on the Xbox One at the time of writing, but that does come at a price. A 30FPS cap is placed on the single player to allow for some great set pieces, but that can feel a little sluggish compared to the 60FPS multiplayer modes, and some of the other titles on this generation of consoles. Also the environments appear to have reverted back to a Gears 1 art style, and by that I mean they lack any colour besides brown or grey for the vast majority of the game. I adored Gears 3's visuals because it added some much needed colour into the series, Judgment followed that brilliantly and now Gears 4 appears to have taken a step backward.
The sound is also top notch with a great, distinctively Gears soundtrack and some fantastic performances from the characters (even if they were working with a somewhat basic script judging by the dialogue). John DiMaggio steals the show reprising his role as Marcus, bringing his classic one liners and bleak humour back, but allowing the character to feel older and wiser without being patronising to his son and the rest of the team.
As a starting point for a new chapter in the Gears universe, Gears of War 4 is an ok start. But compared to the entries that have come before it, it does feel slimmed down and a somewhat less exciting game.
The sound is also top notch with a great, distinctively Gears soundtrack and some fantastic performances from the characters (even if they were working with a somewhat basic script judging by the dialogue). John DiMaggio steals the show reprising his role as Marcus, bringing his classic one liners and bleak humour back, but allowing the character to feel older and wiser without being patronising to his son and the rest of the team.
As a starting point for a new chapter in the Gears universe, Gears of War 4 is an ok start. But compared to the entries that have come before it, it does feel slimmed down and a somewhat less exciting game.
STORY: 5/10
GAMEPLAY: 8/10
PRESENTATION: 8/10
LIFESPAN: 8/10
SCORE: 7/10
Gears 4 does provide the most refined gameplay mechanics and perhaps the best multiplayer & Horde modes the series have seen to date, but its shortcomings in the campaign hold it back from being the glorious return that developer The Coalition had hoped it would be.