Gears 5

By: Patrick "TheLaw" Morris

So here we are, we've finally made it to Gears 5. If you'll remember in my E3 reaction video I briefly mentioned that I might play through the Gears games in preparation for Gears 5 and low and behold it turned out to be the series I spent my summer playing. I fell in love with Gears this summer, I learned to love the characters, got to enjoy some of the best cover based shooting in the industry, experienced some of the most ridiculous over the top macho stories video games have to offer, and even became so accustomed to the active reload system that I find myself hitting my right bumper in almost every game now purely out of habit. But after playing through Gears 5 I'm sad to say that I fear the best of the series may be behind us. In my opinion Gears 5 was a big swing and a miss, the coalition took a huge risk in changing the entire format of the series and while I personally didn’t enjoy it I applaud them for trying and hope to see other development studios follow suit.

Welcome welcome welcome everyone welcome back to LegalSpeak a ColdNorth Production. I'm TheLawMorris and this is the video essay series in which I get to talk about the games I've been playing and what I think of the medium as a whole. I played Gears 5 at launch but didn’t get around to writing a video about it until a couple weeks ago and to say that I have a less than favorable opinion on the game would be generous. It's been a long time coming so without any further ado let's talk about Gears 5.

Spoiler alert: in this video I will discuss some major plot points of Gears 5 and inherently Gears 3 and 4 as well. So if you haven't played those games and you want to you should probably stop watching this video now.

Gears 5 is the game that finally made me pull the trigger on the entire series and jump in from the beginning. I had been teetering on the edge of becoming a Gear since late 2016 with the release of Gears 4 but the build up to Gears 5 was for whatever reason the thing that got me to sit down and give them the old college try. And I'm extremely happy I did. At the core of Gears lies two thing: gameplay and characters.

Gears 5 takes that Gears gameplay that has been so well crafted and refined across five previous entries and delivers more of it. Moment to moment gameplay isn't any better or worse than that of Gears 4 or even Gears 3 just equal to it. For almost any other series this would be seen as a bad thing as part of the purpose of a sequel is to evolve and polish the formula but in the case of Gears that gameplay experience already has a mirror sheen to it and polishing any further could potentially be detrimental. For the most part the player finds themselves in similar combat scenarios fighting similar enemies with similar weapons and if I sound like I'm being negative please know that I in no way mean this as an insult. There really isn't much growth left to be done for the series in that respect. The Coalition expands on some elements by bringing some new weapons into play the stand outs being the Lancer GL and the melee weapons, and the revival of the hammer of dawn is incredibly fun but for the most part gameplay in Gears 5 is just more of what makes Gears good…for the most part that is.

Gears 5 does introduce one new element that can be considered a major game changer though…Jack. Jack is Kate's flying robot companion that accompanies her throughout the entire campaign (to be clear this is not the same flying robot companion that worked as the ultimate plot convenience for Delta squad throughout the first three games) and depending on how you play the game he can either introduce an almost entirely superfluous RPG like skill tree mechanic or he can be an entirely different way to play the game altogether. In single player Jack acts as a gadget to apply temporary buffs, health, or interact with the environment in ways to move the plot forward all while adding a completely unnecessary skill tree to the game and giving the player a reason to search for components. These mechanics almost to environmental for the series and come across as the developers adding a trendy mechanic to the game despite it not feeling at home there. But in multiplayer Jack makes for the ultimate support character. Any player that enjoys playing support will have an absolute blast playing as Jack and likely will refuse to give him for the more traditional Gears experience. Allowing the player that plays Jack full control over the skill tree and what abilities to unlock and when to unlock them gives that player freedom. The player evolves from initially being the kid holding the flashlight for dad while he works on the car to becoming the ultimate Bond gadget with the powers of a demigod. I've always played Gears with friends so we got to laugh together as we hunted down every single upgrade and scoured the game for components to make that player's experience more enjoyable. But playing solo Jack is something that I not only don’t want to handle or use but a process that I found myself wishing could be entirely automated by the end of the opening act.

And Jack isn't where The Coalition stopped taking risks. After an extremely straight forward act 1 in which I was surprised to be playing as JD but found enjoyable none the less the player is thrust forward in time and the main cast of characters that were so well established in Gears 4 have become estranged. Kate and Del have gone north in search for answers to Kate's past while JD has continued to move up the ranks in the COG. Act 2 chapter 1 starts as a fairly boring and thankfully brief exploration of the mountain village that Kate's uncle Oscar retreated to after the events of Gears 4. After a brief encounter with Oscar the Swarm invades and the player is left to do typical Gears stuff which is awesome. At the end of this encounter the player even takes over some individual Swarm through Kate's neural link to the hivemind. This particular encounter is made even sweeter when played in co-op as your partners have no way of knowing that you've taken over the Swarm or which Swarm you are which led to a really awesome shouting exchange as I yelled at my partners to stop shooting me. But after this chapter the train jumps the tracks and goes careening into a land that I like to call "every game needs to have an open world for some reason…ville."

After the first chapter of Act 2 the player is given the open world traversal vehicle called the skiff and Kate, Del, and Jack load up to head out on their own adventure. Suddenly a series that's spent five games ushering the player down a golden path of narrow hallways and somewhat open playing fields for enemy encounters finds itself in a vast frozen wasteland that is just as beautiful as it is empty. Moving from one objective marker on the map to another the player encounters small groups of Swarm to fight off at each marker and nothing in between. And when I say nothing I really mean nothing. No packs of enemies making a camp for the night, no sign of human survivors holed up in any nearby caves or shelters, not even any significant terrain to interest the player. Just multiple hours of go here shoot 10 swarm press a button, go there shoot another 10 swarm press another button. And when it's finally all over and the game gets back to the classic Gears experience it lasts for all of about an hour and a half with some really awesome story telling and character development before thrusting you into an even less interesting, even more empty, and even worse desert open environment.

Where the open world areas went wrong is in how they brought the pace of the game to a nearly complete stand still. Two major portions of the game left me feeling as though nothing of any significance was happening and after all was said and done they came across as though they were just filler content to pad out an unnaturally short run time. The tundra in the second act could have been forgiven had the writers capitalized on the naturally solitudinous atmosphere created and given Del and Kate some moments in which they exposed themselves to one another and became temporarily emotionally vulnerable. Honestly when no one but Del accompanied Kate I fully expected that to be the direction in which they were headed but it never came. And when it came time for the second open area in the desert and JD and Fahz tagged along not only were the developers facing all the same challenges from the second act but they had done away with any potential for redemption of what was in my opinion a truly horrible design choice.

Like I mentioned last week the story in Gears 4 was well measured and displayed a shocking amount of restraint but the second chapter of a trilogy is when that restraint can be put aside and the story can be ramped up so as to head into the conclusion on a major high. Gears 5's story felt as though they were completely unconcerned with moving the story forward in any significant way until the fourth act when the Swarm kraken invaded the city and really elevated the stakes of what was happening. Throughout the vast majority of the game the characters are working towards bringing the hammer of dawn back online despite all Baird's warnings that no good can come from this action. And as that story progresses it becomes apparent that the hammer of dawn story is really just a charade to let the player explore deeper into Kate and her dealing with her heritage. Which is extremely interesting don’t get me wrong, Kate is without a doubt the best character of this new generation of Gears but after playing Gears 5 it feels as though the balance between Kate's personal story and the human Swarm conflict story skews a bit to far in favor of Kate.

After spending the entire game with Del and getting next to no redeeming action from JD the game presents the player with a choice. At the end of the game the player chooses if Del dies and JD lives or if Del lives and JD dies. Like I mentioned before I have just spent the entirety of both Gears 4 and 5 with Del at my side. And not only that but at the end of the first act JD goes from the extra vanilla high school quarter back template that he somehow reverted to after the end of Gears 4 to a war mongering asshole for which I have no sympathy and am given almost no reason to forgive. I'm not sure what choice The Coalition intended for me to choose but this was the single easiest choice I have ever made in a video game. JD died and I didn’t have to think twice about it.

But what concerns me about this choice that players make at the end is the ramifications it will undoubtedly have on the future of the franchise. The Coalition is going to have to choose one choice to be canon and despite my liking Gears 5 the least of all of the games thus far I'm still invested in my choosing Del and watching Marcus' heart break when he realized his son was dead. To me the fourth act of Gears 5 was the most enjoyable because not only was it back to classic Gears style gameplay but it was also an exciting finale that I have come to expect from games in this series. Had that choice been written for me and I wasn’t left to worry about whether or not The Coalition would be honoring the choice I made Gears 5 could have ended on a similar high note to the one it began on. But that choice lingers over the fourth act like an office chair full of old farts that puff out whenever anyone sits down.

Overall in all my Gears of War excitement this summer it ended with a whimper. I completely respect The Coalition for taking an established IP and attempting to inject some new life into and modernize it in a way but almost everything they did fell flat and left me yearning for the Gear of old. If you have gamepass then sure go ahead and play Gears 5, if you're a massive Gears of War fan and you just cant get enough, well then you’ve probably already played Gears 5, but if you’ve never played Gears before and you're looking to get into the series, well…look somewhere else because this aint it chief.

So now that this script has gotten way out of hand and is way longer than I was intending it to be why don’t you tell me what you thought of Gears 5 in the comments down below. Don’t forget to see everything we do all in one spot over at ColdNorthPro.com. I'll be back next week talking about Luigi's Mansion 3 if I've finished it by then so until then just go play some games.