Gears 5 Review (Sirozha)
Introduction
Gears 5 is a third-person shooter. Although this is a 5th game in the series, you’re only required to play the 4th to understand the story. The game features multiple modes: story campaign, that's playable both in singleplayer and three player co-op, and a multiplayer. This review focuses on the story campaign.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
+ Beautiful graphics
+ Engaging gameplay (particularly in co-op on Hard difficulty)
+ Charismatic characters
Cons:
- Becomes repetitive after a couple of hours
- Open-World locations lack points of interesting
Story
If you haven't played previous entries of the series, Gears 5 gives a recap of the events at the beginning. It is set in a distant future, where the humanity has migrated to some faraway planet, they started draining its resources as fast as they can, which lead to prolonged wars that destroyed most of their cities. Not long after the war the new enemy has emerged from underground, the Swarm.
The story follows four characters Kait, Del and JD and their helpful droid Jack on their mission to activate the old weapon in order to stop the Swarm. During the course of the game, you get to play as each of those characters as they usually go about their missions in duos. The story wasn’t particularly interesting, probably because I haven’t played the previous game.
Gameplay
In terms of gameplay, it’s your usual 3rd person shooter, take cover and shoot enemies. The only mechanic that’s somewhat original is a droid, that can use special abilities or bring you weapons when you’re out of ammo. This might sound useless, but I’ve found myself out of ammo very often, mostly because I like the Lancer weapon and enemies don’t drop that type of ammo. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a big open area with an ability to explore freely. But there are almost no secrets and side-mission areas are easily recognizable, so it feels like a linear level in the end.
The game features a co-op mode for 3 players, though the third player is stuck playing Jack. It can be very boring for him especially in the first half of the game, when he doesn’t have any active abilities. The game really shines when playing in co-op on a hard difficulty, it becomes more of a tactical game than a shooter. You have to pick cover carefully and communicate with your partner.
Graphics & Audio
Visually the game is great, the environment is detailed, characters movement is smooth. However, there are some questions to character design, everyone looks like a bodybuilder who skipped the leg day. Apart from that it all looks great. Voice acting is good and each of the characters feels charismatic. Can’t say much about soundtrack as it blends in the background so well I’ve never paid attention to it.
Conclusion
If you’re a fan of the series or a newcomer looking for a good co-op game, then this is a recommendation for you. Otherwise, you should probably pass it, it’s not as interesting when playing solo, especially if you haven’t played the previous game.