I also liked the game. It has good gameplay and a pretty decent story but it wasn’t all great.
Gameplay wise it got rather repetitive nearing the end of the game. There wasn’t enough variety in the side missions to keep me really interested. Also nearing the end I got a pretty powerful team which made the missions often pretty easy (I obviously wasn’t playing on Insane but still).
Story wise it was good but there are a lot of things that I didn’t like to much lore wise. I’ll try to refrain from spoilers but what got me the most is the lack of destruction from the hammer strikes. The game starts just hours before the hammer of dawn strikes and then continues in the days/weeks/months afterwards. In the books by Karen Traviss the destruction is enormous. Probably comparable with a couple of nukes across the globe except for the radiation. In the weeks after the strikes the air was filled with ash and toxic fumes and there where fires everywhere. None of this is visible in the game or even mentioned. There is destruction visible but not on the scale it should have been.
Another problem is the use of the chainsaw bayonet which should not have been invented yet. But I can understand gameplay wise they put it in and also for the recognisability of the Gears franchise.
This one is more spoiler sesitive:
In the game they discover that the locust are definitely a human creation from the New Hope facilities. Sid used to be stationed there. This means that the locust can’t really be that old and that is pretty hard for me to believe seeing the ancient underground structures in Gears 2. Also the huge number of locust. I can’t really believe they could reproduce that fast. Probably there are a lot of ways to explain most of it. Kantus being really old and not of human creation and maybe cloning or something to create the huge numbers of drones. But still it’s not my favorite explanation for where the locust originate from.
Last problem I had with story was the way Prescott is handled.
Yes he is an ■■■■■■■, but he’s a political ■■■■■■■. I don’t believe he would have handled Gabe, Sid and the others the way he did by trying to kill them with the hammer. He made tough decisions but he wasn’t a cold blooded murderer with no conscious.
I haven’t read Bloodlines yet so maybe there is more explanation there regarding the relationship between Diaz en Prescott.
