→ August 24, 2015
Editor’s Note: We’re holding off on the final score until we have a chance to play some multiplayer matches after the game is released. We did play multiplayer in arranged matches with the developers for the purpose of this in-progress review. Stay tuned soon for the final score!
I can’t stop thinking about how refreshing Gears of War: Ultimate Edition feels. This first struck me as odd both because the original Gears is nine years old, and because I’ve played through that game several times.
When it came out in 2006, Gears was the best looking game on the Xbox 360. Its pop-and-shoot cover mechanics felt at home on the controller, and its multiplayer modes were fun and reliable when Xbox Live was still finding its feet on new hardware. To be fair, these accomplishments were relative to the technology of the time, but Gears also had one timeless trait that even today’s games sometimes fail to capture:
It told you exactly what it wanted to be, and it delivered on that promise in all the ways a game can until the credits rolled.
Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, by its nature as a remaster, shares that same great vision, and it still looks and feels excellent.
Everything about Gears is loud, clear, and simple — words that are often wrongly replaced with “stupid.” On the contrary, Gears is one of the most involved, attentive games I’ve played. It’s constantly concerned with whether the player knows what to do, and whether the player is having fun. This approach leaves no room for subtlety, but none is needed in a game so committed to raw function.
Here’s how it all starts.
Evil rock people called Locusts have emerged from beneath the planet’s surface and started killing everyone. You are Marcus Fenix, a tree trunk of a man freed from prison because, well, there just aren’t many good soldiers left. With a small band of brothers, Fenix and company must do their part to help deliver a bomb deep within the Locust’s underground home. It’s a simple and enjoyable story, well told through fun objectives, believable environments, and passionate, consistent voice performances for Marcus, Dom, Baird, and the Cole Train (baby).
Everything about Gears is loud, clear, and simple…
A note on our heroes: They sure are some dudes. They are the bro-est warriors ever, slamming magazines into their chainsaw guns using their fire hydrant-sized arms. They never just open doors, they blast them aside with violent kicks that I can only speculate are, like their guns, powered by combustion. And those guns, by the way, are named with gnarly, mechanical words: Torque Bow, Gnasher, Hammerburst. When they’re done killing stuff with their dirty weapons, the game celebrates the occasion with a chunky guitar riff. You’ll hear it a lot.
Any of these details alone would look silly — possibly tone-destroying — if Gears were less bold. But the game never apologizes for its style. This isn’t even a “fake it until you make it” situation. These bizarre characters and situations must be real because Gears wisely never offers another “normal” tone for us to consider.
Moment to moment combat in Gears is fun, responsive, and challenging. Guns roar with power, and bullets really do hurt — both for you and your enemies. A shotgun at close range will turn you into bloody beef slabs before you can yell “Reloading!” Gears looked and felt great before, but at 1080p and 60 FPS, the action is smoother than it’s ever been, even when the bodies really start to pile up. In particular, animations look nice and crisp, and your war environments, which looked phenomenal on last-gen hardware, still impress with their new coat of paint.
Taking cover grants temporary safety, but the Locust will soon move around the battlefield, flanking you from the side or taking the high ground. Some suicidally charge straight at you, which is unnerving because you have to deal with them, and to do that you’ll have to expose yourself to fire or abandon your cover. It’s a constant battle to find a safe space, and I enjoyed the challenge of reading enemy movements, responding to threats, and outsmarting bad guys who frequently outnumbered my squad three to one.
Like the original, though, the “A” button still does too much work. You press it to run. You press it to roll. You press it to take cover, to vault over cover, and to move from one piece of cover to the next. It’s too easy to try to do one thing, only to do accidentally do something that gets you killed. This is one of the few situations that reveals Gears’ age.
Dotting the campaign are several incredible moments that, unlike most modern “set pieces,” affect how you play the game. They don’t happen around you; they happen to you, and they force you to adapt. One of the best examples is the game of cat and mouse between you and a terrifying Berserker — a hulking, blind creature that tracks its prey through smell and sound, then charges at it like a rocket-powered big rig. For that fight, I had to constantly rethink my positioning so I didn’t get stuck in a corner. Suddenly those cramped hallways which worked so perfectly for cover-based battles started to feel more like a prison, and I had one heck of a cellmate.
…The “A” button still does too much work
In another level I had to stay in the light, otherwise I’d become dinner for evil swarming birds called Kryll. Their presence changed how I thought about my options in normal combat, and made for some really great and grotesque results if I ever stepped into the dark.
Five extra campaign chapters, which are new to anyone who didn’t play the old PC version, include one of the best action sequences in the game. If you don’t know about the big surprise, do yourself a favor and don’t look it up.
Ultimate Edition includes two new multiplayer game modes, Team Deathmatch and King of the Hill, to the collection of modes from the original. Its 20 maps keep the game from feeling stagnant, and offer a variety of paths to outsmart your enemies.
The best part of multiplayer is that Gears’ over-the-top violence bleeds into it. There’s no way to die that isn’t satisfying and entertaining. chainsawed in half, shotgunned apart, gibbed by a giant space lasered, head-popped by a sniper. The potential for revenge and humiliation is high, and leads to some tense, gory fun.
Editor’s Note: We played the multiplayer modes before launch, but we’re testing them again on public servers after the game is released to ensure they work in real-world conditions. Stay tuned for our score!