“Am I playing a Gears game or Uncharted?” is a weird thing to ask yourself. And yet, within the first few minutes of playing Gears 5, I’m oscillating between wide-eyed surprise and squinting suspicion.
I didn’t expect to be exploring a vast expanse of lush jungle ruins or having witty conversations in the series that put a chainsaw — a chainsaw that cut enemies in half and sprayed alien blood from its teeth — on a machine gun.
Gears 5 is different enough to be potentially off-putting to those who might be showing up for the gore and the comfortable, expected thrills and violence. I found myself exploring a jungle, learning about these characters, and wondering whether Gears of War is growing up in a way that will stick. Is the franchise growing, and — I can’t believe I’m asking this — becoming contemplative?
The answer, from my experience with most of Gears 5’s lengthy campaign behind me, is a resounding yes. Gawking at that jungle is only the first time among dozens that the campaign upends my expectations before impressing or delighting me. It is a game intent on pushing the franchise in new and interesting directions, all of which seem like laudable goals.
The only question left is whether the players will follow.
Easing in
Gears 5 follows a group of COGs on a series of missions, some of which turn violent. No surprise there. Don’t worry if you skipped 2016’s Gears of War 4, or you don’t remember much about it. Gears 5 gives you an up-to-date refresher on the in-game universe, so even players who are new to the series won’t be lost.
Gears 5 does some very clever show-don’t-tell character introductions, particularly with Kait, a weary soldier who is trying to keep it together after a family tragedy in Gears of War 4. I accept this when she wakes up from a bad dream with a headache. I feel it when I watch her damn near kill herself out of headstrong carelessness. The cast is packed with excellent voice acting that’s well above par for games in general, not just this series.
And character development isn’t only reserved for humans. As my group of soldiers explores the landscape, a flying robot named Dave (no relation) emotes through bleeps and bloops. He’s immediately endearing, like a Star Wars droid.
Then the action starts, and I fall into familiar, comfortable patterns. Gears 5 is still a game with chainsaw guns and its own brand of combat. If you’re coming in and expecting your shooter skills from other games to translate — or it’s been a while since you’ve played a Gears game — an excellent tutorial mode called Boot Camp is there to remind (or teach) you how to play this particular flavor of third-person, cover-based shooter in maybe 10 minutes. These kinds of tutorials are usually lightly disguised very early in games. But given how Gears 5 hits the ground running, it’s better to learn it there than to make mistakes in the campaign, I figure.
Weapons in Gears 5 retain the chunky, mechanical feel from earlier entries, and the risk-reward cycle of active reloading with perfect timing causes constant joy and frustration, depending entirely on whether I screw it up while monsters try to murder me. Combat didn’t surprise me. Gears 5 feels and plays like a Gears of War title.
The game waited until I felt comfortable before it slapped me in the face.
A different kind of campaign
Gears 5’s campaign unfurls in four acts.
The first act settles into a pattern. We walk, we explore, and we fight. The world is gorgeous, rendered in equal care and credibility whether I’m trudging through ruins beneath a jungle canopy, cruising across iced-over lakes at highway speeds, or plodding through a pitch-black room lit only by a flashlight from the friendly robot hovering over my shoulder.
The spoken dialogue keeps my interest between fights because the actors are stellar. The combat strikes the right balance between challenging and enjoyable, at least as long as I remember that I need to take cover in this cover-based shooter. I’m into this blend of action, story, and pretty lighting. No part overstays its welcome, and it all delivers what I expect and want from a new Gears title, which is basically more of the same, but also kind of better.
In its first few hours, Gears 5 feels like a self-contained action film with a full beginning, middle, and end. You’re sent to do a thing, you follow a linear path to do the thing, you learn things along the way, and you kill plenty of bad guys while making a bunch of shit explode.
Gears 5 veers off into uncharted territory for the franchise in the second act, however. It’s as if The Coalition decided to make a two- or three-hour-long mini-Gears of War game to get everybody comfortable before dropping a grenade in their laps.
Evolution
You like vast open-world areas? Gears 5 has ’em. You into side missions? Check. How about skill trees? Buckle up. It’s all about to happen.
None of these things fit into my conception of what Gears of War is, and I’m skeptical — at least, until I start playing all of the stuff that I don’t have to play to continue the story, and I realize that it works better than I expect.
There’s good reason to pilot my skiff across the vast tundra, not only because it’s just fun, but because there are rewards waiting on the other side of my effort. I notice blips on my map (yup, Gears 5 has maps), and I set a course to explore an area that turns into a small five-minute quest. I discover others that are much longer. I play them all — not because I have to, but because I like them and I’m having fun. There’s much more here to do and think about than I expected.
I start seeing the shadow of other games with series-redefining transitions. 2018’s God of War comes to mind on several occasions, for reasons that I won’t spoil here.
It’s hard to talk about Gears 5 without giving away too much. These new ideas and mechanics are best found for yourself and experienced. We’ll have plenty more coverage in the coming days, including thoughts on multiplayer, but in truth, we didn’t have much time to experience the game before we were able to write about it.
For now, I don’t think many people have a clear idea about what to expect from Gears 5. God knows I didn’t. And many fans will be very, very wrong about what’s coming their way. God knows I was.
And that’s where I’m at, with the bulk of the campaign behind me: constantly surprised, and curious to see if the game can keep this pace of reinvention going.
I suspect others will be surprised, too, because Gears 5 certainly looks like it’s selling violence to meatheads — to be clear, I was happy to sign up for that over and over and over — but the people behind the game clearly have things to say, and a desire to subvert and expand that formula. They weren’t afraid to mess with what the genre is, or was, and the result is the kind of fearless change in a franchise that needs to happen if that series is going to continue finding an audience larger than its die-hard players.
Gears 5 is personal, like its predecessor, and insistent in focusing on its characters. It’s thoughtful, and unafraid to stop the action in favor of slower story beats and sections focused on exploration. And those are the parts that I enjoyed the most. There’s often a little dab of fighting, followed by a light dusting of exploration.
Except that I keep thinking that it shouldn’t work. I mean, if someone had said to me, “Gears of War, but with side quests and huge environments!” I might’ve stifled a laugh on my way out of that elevator pitch. And yet here I am, trying to convince you that it’s real and worth your time, when the most insistent thought in my head is that I want to get back to playing.
Gears 5 will be released in early access for Windows PC and Xbox One on Sept. 6, and on Sept. 10 for standard edition players. The game was played on Xbox One using a final “retail” code provided by Microsoft. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.