GEARS OF WAR 4
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the cogs of war
“I KNEW YOU’D BE BACK, probably with your ass on fire.” Growled in a voice that could both dig up roads and re-lay them, it’s a line that’s appropriate for both the character it’s aimed at, and the Gears franchise itself.
This isn’t a series that has traditionally made its home on the PC, with Gearsof War4 confusingly the fifth game in the lineup, but only the second title to be released outside of the Xbox 360. There is a GearsofWarUltimateEdition available on the Windows Store, though, if you’d like to catch up with the plot.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t. This is a story about sacks of meat with chainsawguns going into battle against monsters from underground, who’ve brought giant crab-spiders with them. We’re not talking Steinbeck here. It’s a slow-moving thirdperson cover-shooter, that asks you to lean out of safety for long periods to use its most powerful weapons, while the urge to get up close and use the chainsaw means it frequently devolves into shotgun duels that wouldn’t be out of place in the files of Police Squad. So far, so Xbox. But the Gears series has frequently been used as a showcase for the abilities of the Unreal Engine, all the way back to an Unreal Engine 3 trailer, before we’d even heard of GearsofWar, that used cog-shaped statues and the kinds of ruined buildings we’re now used to in the game. Back at the release of the first game, the developers even released an artbook, DestroyedBeauty, to show off their wrecked walls and pulverized plazas.
There’s more of the same on offer here— Gears4 is an extremely handsome game, with full 4K support, if you’ve got the PC to handle it. The night sky, in particular, with its looming moons, deserves a pause to appreciate. Extreme weather effects are new to the game, making life difficult for both sides in what’s either a heavyhanded metaphor for the dangers of climate change, or a genuine attempt to do something new. It’s quite a neat mechanic, affecting enemies and the environment as much as it does our glorious troops, and is tied into the cover system, so you hide from the worst of it, and vault over low obstacles to make faster progress. Weapons receive plenty of ammo; a good thing, considering the lack of accuracy from the most common one, but shots for the special weapons— sniper rifles, grenade launchers, Unreal Tournament’s sawblade gun—are rationed, and only refilled from dropped enemy guns.
Those enemies can, of course, take a large number of bullets to the head before dropping, both sides having sent their linebackers into battle, with the robotic bad guys who form the opposition during the earlier portion of the game being particularly dull and uninspiring to fight. They’re not a great introduction to the Gears series for anyone playing it for the first time on PC, and are constantly replenished by airdrop, but go down fairly easily in a hail of bullets. A prolog of flashback scenes means you get to fight some big beasties and handle enormous weapons early on, before it settles down to the metallic grind.
Things change, however, when the Swarm turn up, the original games’ Locust reimagined by AlienResurrection’s creature designer on a day when he had a particularly runny nose. Their origin,
along with a squelchy kidnapping, form the main thrust of the game’s plot. Levels are almost completely linear, with only an ammo crate or occasional collectible as a reward for exploring. Your push through the catacombs and caves echoes the first game in the series, something we suspect is completely deliberate. FORCE PLAY Just as The Force Awakens was a letter to fans from JJ Abrams that said “I got this,” so Gears of War 4, in the hands of new developer The Coalition, is making the same statement. It’s not trying anything new, short of a gentle shakeup of enemy types, and explicitly refers back to them during a trek through a museum in an eerily empty ruined tourist attraction. A motorbike sequence might as well be on rails, and reminded us of Japanese arcade games, as a giant airplane, with turrets that needed to be shot off, swung across our view.
What it is, with its clean-cut young new heroes, is almost sensible. GOW2 featured a giant worm that undermined entire cities until you chainsawed your way through its guts. Here, robots and Swarm have many of the same units with a skin-swap, and you’ve almost certainly fought similar types before. They come in waves, the Swarm’s equivalent of the airdrop being a hole in the ground that can be sealed with a grenade, and use cover intelligently (most of the time—suicide charges toward your lines, which make more sense when it’s a robot about to explode doing it, mean long battles of attrition rarely take place), and attempt to shred you with turret guns, flanking maneuvers, and ravenous creatures that jump on tables while firing quills from their tails.
The entire campaign can be played with a friend in co-op, and a team of AI troops makes a decent job of helping you out when you’re solo. A buddy was always along to revive us, even if it meant running straight into a Swarm drone’s melee attack. There’s further co-op slaughter in Horde mode, which takes the enemy waves of the campaign, and tasks you with defending against them, but we’re sad to see that Beast mode (the same thing, but with you playing as the bad guys) hasn’t made it over from the previous games in the series.
So here’s Gears of War, returning to our beloved PC with its ass on fire, looking to make a name for itself in Windows 10 with its good looks, grimly serious shooting, and guns with chainsaws on them. The campaign is a thrill, co-op giving it plenty of replay value, but the whole game is shot through with a sense that the developers are holding back.