Gears 5 PC, Xbox One
Gorgeous, gigantic and frustrating, Gears 5 is theoretically a story about people but in reality, it’s the story of their weapons. One of these is the Hammer Of Dawn, the orbital death-ray cannon from the original game. Besides continuing the adventure of Kait Diaz, now pursuing a family connection to the underground Swarm menace, you’ll spend much of Gears 5 trying to reactivate the Hammer array, a quest that takes you from a tropical island base to a vaguely Eastern European desert. Another starring weapon is Jack, the robot handyman who has been an indispensable ally ever since Marcus Fenix and co first ran into a busted door back in 2006. In Gears 5, he’s the vehicle for a set of Mass Effect- style auxiliary abilities, from shock traps to stymy rushing skirmishers and a squad-wide cloak for brief, but thoroughly satisfying, assassination sprees.
Both of these toys come with decided pros and cons. The Hammer (which, yes, you’ll eventually reactivate) lets you vapourise opponents who otherwise take minutes to kill. It’s also an incredibly overused narrative device in a universe that feels like it’s treading water, or possibly blood. The Hammer is one of the original sins of the game’s quasi-fascist ruling state. Its belated return says more about the future of this despairing world than the welcome decision to put a woman at the helm. As for Jack, his impact on the gunplay isn’t as earth-shattering as it may sound, thanks not least to generous ability cooldowns. This is felt more strongly at the level of the overarching campaign design, which has become an upgrade hunt with some appropriately roomy environments, somewhat to its cost.
Let’s start with the positives. Gears 5 has many grand moments, but it’s generally best when, like the first Gears, it lowers the headcount and confines itself to a room. Thirteen years on, and for all the imitators, there is still nothing like the intimacy and craft of a well-wrought Gears shootout. There are so many intricacies to savour: the closer spacing of certain surfaces, for example, such that agile players can pinball between them using the lock-to-cover mechanic, or the dawning awareness when capturing a position that you will have to defend it against foes using precisely the same terrain tactics.
The series probably has too many varieties of gun at this point, with some, like the Enforcer SMG or the Locust Hammerburst, picked up only when there’s no other option; perhaps wisely, Gears 5 adds only a handful to the mix. As with active reload, which boosts your shots when you tap again at the right point in the animation, the Claw rifle rewards a level head. It grows more accurate the longer you hold the trigger, but sustain the barrage too long and it’ll misfire. The weapon is unlikely to become a favourite in multiplayer, next to the easier gratifications of a new Lancer model with an underslung missile launcher – but for Gears pros, it’s more rewarding to think about. Each weapon plays its part in shaping the environments where you’ll do battle, which range from more leisurely, symmetrical antechambers through uphill struggles against turrets to elevated flanking routes where cover is scarce.
Having proven itself a master of these rules, The Coalition can have fun breaking them, introducing variables that oblige you to rethink your tactics – many carried over, admittedly, from Gears 4. Some cover points can be destroyed, among them glossy pink Swarm pods that may or may not contain bad-tempered newborns. The Pouncers – half-leopard, half-lobster, all troll – leap from spot to spot, compromising your frontline. The previous game’s vaunted weather elements recur in muted form: there are battles waged on frozen lakes, where you can shoot out the ice for a quick kill, and stormy sand dunes where lightning bolts raise jaggedy exclamation marks of cooling glass.
There are infrequent bum notes. The encounter design is over-reliant on slowly advancing midbosses, some endowed with shields by irritatingly elusive drones. There are also a few too many interludes featuring rogue Dee Bees that can be stealth-killed before they activate, given the patience to thread a level’s worth of view-cones. For the most part, though, Gears 5’ s encounters are a delight: the problem is not them, but what surrounds them.
In a first for the series, Gears 5’ s second and third acts are open-world environments, explored by Kait and her allies using a sail-powered skiff. Here you can complete optional missions for Jack upgrades while following the main story thread. The scenery is mesmerising: one open area is a glacial valley, and it’s a joy to hear the slither of different grades of ice under the sled. They aren’t too exhausting as open worlds go, either, with three to five side-missions per act. But set against the tightly wound and organised spaces of the first and fourth acts, they come off as rather vapid.
The supporting narratives, which range from tracking down lost Outsiders to restoring water pumps, are nicely fleshed out in dialogue, but always feel like excuses to hunt for spare parts. You can ignore them – Jack’s core abilities are unlocked as part of the main story – but you’ll be missing out on around two to three hours of a 12-hour campaign.
In a smaller way, the perpetual search for Jack accessories steals thunder from the game’s astonishing locations. Gears 5 is perhaps the most handsome game of the generation, far more colourful than predecessors and host to an astonishing play of lighting effects. The upgrade hunt verges on recasting all of that beauty as interference, to be filtered out in your search for telltale yellow lockers.
It’s generally best when, like the first Gears, it lowers the headcount and confines itself to a room
Kait, at least, is good company, whether you’re looking for upgrades or carving away at the mystery of her ancestry, but the narrative as a whole lacks complexity or purpose. Among the more engaging twists is that her rise to protagonist status accompanies another character’s fall; this leads to a binary choice again redolent of Mass Effect, though the game doesn’t put in enough groundwork with the people concerned to give their sacrifice much power. Beyond that, we’re following a well-worn groove. There are too many segments that try to instil reflection by forcing you to walk, and far too much Whedon-ish banter in dialogue.
If Gears 5’ s campaign feels a little all over the place, it’s more so in multiplayer, an avalanche of PvE and PvP modes that is as confusing as it is engrossing. As a versus game, Gears still sings. It’s woven once again around the rivalry between the Lancer rifle, used for mid-ranged suppressive fire and chainsaw executions, and the Gnasher shotgun, used for shock tactics and punishing those who try for Lancer executions. If the Lancer sets the tempo for most encounters, the Gnasher is what sorts the wheat from the chaff. It’s the basis for a peculiar form of jousting, where you somersault under an enemy’s aim and swivel for a point-blank blast fractionally ahead of your foe.
The maps are elegant and sizeable, with moving parts such as passing trains to worry about while hurrying to scoop up the loudest weapons. The competitive modes, ranging from the weapon-shuffling chaos of Arms Race to the mincing machine that is King of the Hill, do a fine job of drawing out their possibilities. As regards co-op, the returning wavedefence Horde mode now sees players shifting their base around to take advantage of power taps that confer buffs, but is otherwise much as in Gears 4: you’ll place lines of barbed wire and turrets, scuttling out to gather building materials between onslaughts and keeping beefier guns in reserve for bosses. The multiplayer does a fair if rather suffocating job of catering to all tastes. Notably, there’s a sensible split between Arcade multiplayer, where players earn Call of Duty- style rewards mid-fight, and Ranked, where such mainstream frills aren’t allowed.
Other additions aren’t quite as successful. The new Tour of Duty progression ladder consists mostly of cosmetic unlocks such as weapon skins, and feels deeply pointless. There are now classes of a sort, each character having an Overwatch- style ultimate ability such as a cloak or dome shield, but these rarely prove decisive and only spark conflict in lobbies, as players squabble over characters. The new Escape co-op mode, in which squads of Gears also-rans blast their way out of Swarm nests against the clock, has its moments, but the associated maps feel bolted together and charmless (there’s a level editor, if you think you can do better). As with the campaign’s innovations, far too much of the multiplayer suite seems only to cloud the appeal of the weapons and mechanics.
If Gears 5 were one of its own combat layouts, it would be an absorbing if jumbled affair. There’s a dependable cluster of routes and hidey-holes through the middle, but at times the layout balloons inelegantly, throwing you out of rhythm. There’s a lot going on here, much of it captivating, some of it just for appearances and some of it annoying.