Gears 5

My first few hours with Gears 5 felt like a comfortable lie. Act I funnels you through corridors, chainsaw-bayonet first, Swarm popping from cover like they always have, and you could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about. Then Act II opens up a vast, skiff-traversable frozen tundra and the game stops pretending it is content being a corridor shooter. Whether that pivot fully pays off is the central argument around Gears 5, and it is worth having. At its core this is still the third-person cover shooter The Coalition has been refining since taking the franchise from Epic. You carry one light weapon and two heavies, grenades sit on a separate slot, and the Lancer Assault Rifle with its operational chainsaw bayonet remains one of the most satisfying tools in action gaming. Active reloads still reward timing. The difference here is Jack, the floating combat drone who accompanies you through the whole campaign. Jack can be controlled by a third co-op player, or run as AI, and his skill tree lets you shape him toward aggressive play (a shock trap that snares Swarm, an invisibility cloak for flanking runs) or support (armour buffs, enemy pings, reviving downed teammates). Hunting upgrade components becomes a genuine reason to poke around the open-world hub areas rather than just sprinting to the next objective marker. The campaign is Gears 5's strongest argument. Kait Diaz, rather than Marcus Fenix's son JD, sits at the centre of the story, tracing her family's connection to the Locust Horde across biomes that swing from snow-dusted glaciers to burnt-orange desert storms. The visual variety is real and the PC port handles it well, running at a clean 60fps at 4K on hardware that was not cutting-edge even in 2019. Critics broadly praised the campaign presentation and sheer amount of content while noting the story loses momentum after Act II and the open-world segments, though visually impressive, feel thinly populated with meaningful decisions. That criticism sticks. The quasi-open areas are scenic but lack the density to match the tighter, set-piece-driven sections surrounding them. Beyond the campaign sit Horde mode (now built around hero-shooter-style character abilities and a base-building layer), competitive Versus (King of the Hill, Arms Race, and several other types that feel comfortably close to classic Gears), and Escape, which tasks a three-person squad with planting a bomb inside a Swarm hive and surviving the sprint back out. Escape also ships with a map editor, which is a genuinely unusual inclusion. The multiplayer grind, however, was a consistent complaint at launch, and while the progression systems have been adjusted post-launch, the underlying structure still feels like it was designed to manufacture playtime rather than reward skill. That mixed Steam score (71% positive across a large sample) largely reflects that frustration combined with a fanbase divided over the campaign's story choices, particularly a late-game decision that generated strong reactions. For newcomers to the series, Gears 5 is an easy recommendation as a technically polished, generously sized action package. For returning fans, it is the best the franchise has played mechanically, even if the story stumbles at the finish line and the open-world additions are more scenic detour than structural leap forward.

Alex · Scout Team

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