It’s a great idea (one that we have seen variations on in the Call of Duty series, among others), but it also means you have to use the new DB weapons, which are vastly inferior to the original COG ones. The new horde mode adds an array of features to the co-op multiplayer favourite Photograph: MicrosoftĪnother new mode, arms race, is likely to inspire either fanatical devotion or total indifference, as it forces you to cycle through all the game’s weapons: every three kills, your team will swap to a new model. Plus there is the intriguing dodgeball, in which every time you kill an enemy, you allow a dead team-mate, consigned to a queue, to respawn. In versus, Gears of War’s existing multiplayer modes make welcome returns, so you can plunge into warzone (team deathmatch with a single life per short-but-sweet round), team deathmatch (in which each team has an allocated number of lives), king of the hill and guardian. The game’s real meat, however, lies online, with two major pillars in the form of versus multiplay and Horde 3.0 (the name reflecting the Coalition’s desire to register that the much-loved survival mode has been extensively revamped). It isn’t the longest, though: those in a hurry could finish it in about nine hours. Overall, the single-player campaign offers a much more varied, flowing experience than previous Gears of War games. So-called Juvies, for example, are quick and elusive but unarmed, so they will melee you if you stay behind cover while, entertainingly, Snatchers will swallow you up if you let them get too close, rendering you helpless until a team-mate shoots you out of their stomachs (you can play the campaign cooperatively, although the AI, controlling bot-based team-mates, is pretty good).
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There are, of course, boss battles, and the various forms of the Swarm force you to take a more tactical approach than in the past – although you still have to fill them full of unfeasible quantities of lead, albeit in a much less indiscriminate manner. The Coalition has also thrown in some on-rails sequences, which are less successful, though: they simply feel too on-rails. In those sequences, impressive physics let you take out swathes of enemies by bringing the environment into play, and often add a puzzle-solving element. In the quest to find Reyna and discover the truth about the Swarm, Sera’s harsh climate occasionally intervenes: ‘windflares’ often strike, pairing beyond-hurricane-force winds with deadly localised lightning. Luckily, Marcus has his old COG gear, so at last you can reacquaint yourself with the trusty assault-rifle-cum-chainsaw Lancer and the Gnasher shotgun. So JD and his cohorts embark on another world-saving quest – and the first stop involves approaching the now-grizzled (but still gung-ho) Marcus Fenix who, rather unexpectedly, has opted for bucolic retirement in a country pile. Gears hero Marcus Fenix bonds with his son JD in the only way he knows how: over a massive machine gun Photograph: Microsoft But a change-up soon occurs: after returning to the outsider village and fending off a major COG assault (which seamlessly introduces the changes the Coalition has made to Gears of War’s legendary horde mode), a new enemy, which JD and company dub the Swarm, appears, kidnapping Kait’s mother, village headwoman, Reyna, and the rest of the village’s inhabitants. The merry band – moving through a world which, at last, hasn’t been entirely constructed using a colour palette of black, brown and grey – take on wave after wave of robots, using disappointingly weedy new weapons. Along with sidekick Del and Kait, the franchise’s first properly central female character, JD embarks on a raid of a COG establishment with the aim of stealing a Fabricator – essentially a 3D printer with knobs on, which can make weapons and fortifications. You play as James “JD” Fenix, son of Marcus, who has gone Awol from the COG and hooked up with a bunch of “outsiders” living off-grid in a country village. The planet Sera has changed massively in that quarter-century the COG have become the baddies, exercising fascistic control over the populace with the help of a robotic army known as DBs, even though the authoritarian female first minister (remind you of anyone?), Jinn, begins by paying lip-service to Marcus Fenix at a commemorative rally. But Microsoft has cannily brought in a new developer, the Coalition, and it has administered a much-needed injection of fresh ideas, without compromising the core appeal.Īfter a brief nostalgic prologue, Gears of War 4 takes place 25 years after the Locust were (apparently) finally defeated in Gears 3. It’s a single-path third-person cover-shooter that pays no heed to modern demands for open worlds, and belongs to a franchise that has looked somewhat jaded over the last few iterations.
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D epending on your outlook, the fourth title in this muscle-bound sci-fi series could easily look like an anachronism.