Gears 5 Review (Jess the Mess)
The game has really improved since launch, and it's fine for Horde and sometimes MP, but the campaign is just really bad and uninspired. There's some fun stuff, like the relic weapons, but that's it. Horde isn't as great as Gears 3, as even with classic Locust and Lambent added, it's mainly just drones and scions. All the interesting Locust and Lambent enemies (Kantus, berserkers, boomers, beast riders, drudges, formers, etc) are just missing, so horde just lacks variety sometimes, as fun as it can be to play and grind. Escape mode is pretty meh, and they abandoned/removed the highly advertised map creator. It's a cool idea for a mode, but is very annoying to play. You're never really given enough ammo to do deal with the enemies sent at you, and doesn't have all that interesting of gameplay.
The executions are very uninspired. They've turned many executions into decapitations for seemingly no reason, and many of them are just jokes (like playing hopscotch on their corpse). They lack the simple/gritty brutality that the previous games had, and it doesn't help that the gore looks pretty bad, even compared to the older games. People don't have organs, they're just packed with vaguely fleshy stuff. It's a shame, because the game is otherwise gorgeous.
The characters are also just garbage. I have no reason to care about any of them. Marcus has been the only remotely likable character since Gears 4, but that's it. The main cast are just whiny drama queens who get mad at each other over petty drama. All the old characters just stand around doing nothing. Gears in general are just caricatures of what normies think a Gear is. No one's gritty, they're just all hype trains trying to be Cole.
Gears 5 is fine to have Gears accessible on PC, but you might enjoy Gears of War 4 (found on the Microsoft store) more, and this would easily be made obsolete by an MCC style collection of the 360 games. The progression system, characters, and campaign just suck compared to what those games did. It's sad, because I've loved Gears since the original, so it's sad to see the franchise like this. I have little hope for Gears 6