Matthew Cullum

If you stopped playing Gears of War after 2 or 3 like me, I highly recommend you just gives Gears 5 another chance. I'm not one to review things, but I'm so impressed with the quality of changes that I had to leave a review. So I was a huge Gears fan with 1 and 2, maybe even 3, but 4 completely lost me. I really didn't plan on trying out Gears 5, but I'm so glad I did! It feels, sounds, and looks so much better. Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with games evolving and perhaps going in a different direction then I had hoped, but I couldn't even have fun playing Gears 4 (tried several times to complete the campaign and let's just not talk about online play). Gears 5 is a good example of good evolution and branching out while staying true to its roots. It does seem to still look and feel a little different, which is good because games need to try new things, but it still feels like a solid Gears game. I wouldn't say that the open world mechanics they implemented are fantastic but they're not bad either. With a bit more polishing it might actually be a good new side or Gears. To be honest, I've only played a couple of online matches because I'm having so much fun playing the campaign. For me, Gears needs both a strong campaign and strong multiplayer, and so far, it's succeeding. There have been so many points where I say to myself, "Oh man, what he/she just said really makes me want to know more of the lore behind that!" This is not something I'm generally interested in by the way. The dialogue seems natural and interesting, not as good as good Gears 2, but still good. It makes me not as board during the walking scenes or it will make me care/want to fight for the main characters during the fight scenes. One reason why I feel the dialogue lacking just a little compared to Gears 1 and 2 is not the dialogue itself but more that I'm not as connected with the new main characters. I'm not sure if that's because of Gears 4 or what but there is a bit of disconnect there. However, like I said previously, overall it's still really good and I've enjoyed playing. There do seem to be glitches between cut scenes/scenes where you are walking out of an area and into a different one. This breaks the emersion a bit and can get a little annoying. Luckily this doesn't happen too often because that might just kill it! For example, in act 2 you're standin up on a rock in a snowy area and your looking down into a cave type area which is where you're jumping. You do the jump and then instead of landing where you were looking, you're in this area a little bit forward from where you should have been. It's as if it's cutting out part of the jump and walk scene. This creates an unseamless transition from one area to the next. This does such a disservice to the game because of how beautiful some areas are. Also, this takes away how nice the characters movements are. Essentially, instead of the game taking us through a nice well paced experience of discovering this new beautiful area, it just popped you in saying, "Welp, here you go". However, like I said before, this only happens a couple of times and it seems to be in specific spots instead or random so hopefully a patch will come out to fix that. All the other times, you'll experience a beautiful transition leaving no room for complaints. That's about it for now. I will try and update this review more later on after I've experienced more.