[SPOILERS] An in-depth look at the story, and how good the overall campaign is IN MY OPINION

Gears 5
1

Okay so this is a post for those who have either completed the story campaign or those who don’t care about spoilers. I will try to summarize, but admittedly I am not the best at it, those who remember me from the old forums will no doubt know this already… anyways, lets go and start with the good, as that is always nice to do in a critique or review.

The Good

Gears 5 has a nice intro if you haven’t picked up a gears game before or haven’t played gears 4 to make sure you can know whats going on, this is a nice touch.

Gears 5 picks up nicely from the previous game, it’s obvious that we have a bit of a time skip but it works well enough to introduce new characters fairly organically, some better than others but the ones they don’t do very well they make up for in added depth later in the game.

Gears 5 spends lots of time expanding on the world showing minor bits of travel during the in between moments, where as in older games you’d have a cut scene of getting on/off a KR here you’re piloting the skiff and doing some of the shorter traveling. This while can seem repetitive they do a good enough job keeping it entertaining later on in the game.

Furthering on the expansion it is cool to see more of Paduk and unravel a little more of the UIR story and mentality.

The pacing is fairly good, not too many boring sections of the game, and the ones that are, are fairly short.

The chance to go back and see things and places we have already interacted with was very nice, the details of the door being detonated, and most of the New Hope Facility was very nice, a sort of welcome home for Veteran players and for new players it may peek their interest to go back and play the original games to see what happened.

New weapons, really like the look and function of the Claw, I feel we have been missing an LMG in gears so it is nice to see one. The MK. 4 Lancer is also a nice addition. Personally I would have preferred a more direct method of grenade travel. Rather than it wasting time to go up in the air, split and come down, just impacting on detonation would suffice. Hell to make it more Gears-y have it stick to a surface or target like the frags do and then detonate ala torque bow. …In retrospect, perhaps that’s why we have the flying grenades to not be mistaken for another weapon, but still gears weapons always made some effort to be semi-realistic, and this just doesn’t feel that way to me. But that’s personal opinion so… over all new guns are cool. I know there are more than those two but those stood out to me.

Kait entering the mind of the swarm was pretty cool in the moment.

No Fabricator/Mini Horde Waves in campaign.

The Bad

Reyna… just… no one even thought to check for a pulse, or provide any medical attention? Marcus wanted to go get Dom after he got blown to ■■■■, and tried to save Carlos after he got turned into swiss cheese, AND tried to help that nameless gear who got ended up drowning in wet cement… but my son’s friends mom? Nah, she said she was dying so no hope. Kait didn’t properly bury her or handle her at all enough to notice “hey, she’s not dead!”? Makes our old characters, and the new characters seem dumb.

Grenadier’s surviving in status tanks (Along with the Matriarch/Berserker). Their DNA was changed by imulsion to create the sires, whos DNA was used to create the Locust. The game talks a lot about DNA, but fails to remember the imulsion counter measure, even if they were first generation grubs who never lived in the hollow proper… they should still have been infected and not remained as the better evil monsters of the series.

The Hammer of Dawn being used.The thing literally powered by a focused beam of imulsion, the stuff we destroyed completely in GOW3.

The rocket that hasn’t been touched since post Pendulum Wars , Which would have been no doubt powered by the wonder fuel that was, you guessed it, imulsion yet is somehow able to take off with no change or alterations to the engine after Adam Fenix’s countermeasure (which as a reminder turned him to dust, and dropped all the locust as he infected himself with lambency to study it) overlapped the whole world destroying the substance. I was half willing to buy the whole “Locust went into cocoons thing” from GOW4 but that was stretching it as far as you could. Gears 5 completely destroys the final narrative of 3.

Marcus being willing to sit and play Control while his kid and his friends go off on other missions when he knows what’s out there. …Wanting to move on to new characters is not an excuse for betraying old ones memories. I would prefer you give him a glorious death than betray his memory, and sitting Marcus Michael Fenix on the sidelines while others go out and continue fighting while he is capable is exactly that.

Kait not imminently being court martialed when defying a direct order with other officers around. if that would have been a private moment, sure JD could not report it, but everyone not caring that a Corpral just defied orders of a Captain, while a war is going on… because “It’s not about you, it’s about me” yeah… no, her ■■■ would be in cuffs so quick her head would be spinning all the way to the New Slab.

Del and JD not forcing her to any medbay to see a medic when her headaches are literally stopping her from moving for even brief periods of time. …Might not seem like much but combat is combat, and everyone needs to be 100%.

New Jack …while there isn’t anything wrong with this in theory… it just doesn’t feel like gears. It feels too futuristic in terms of all the things it can do. Mechanically cool, Thematically not so much, but maybe that’s just my opinion.

Fahz putting JD on blast was dumb. If what JD said was true, and they had incendiaries then they were not peaceful protesters and that’s all that would have been needed to be said, these are all people who have seen battle, they know you get seconds and if you see angry people begin lighting up molitovs and looking in your direction, pulling the trigger would be justified. Instead we get conflict to I presume only potentially impact the one choice you get in this game (Of which I must ask, is there a cannon answer to who lives?).

The Meh

Graphics. The graphics are beautiful don’t get me wrong, but Gears always had an industrial, destroyed beauty look. Gears 4 got a bit of a pass from me on this, as it was peace time, but Gears 5 being well into war again with some arguable more deadly albeit less interesting monsters, I had hope before trailers that the game would have returned to a more grounded or darker look and tone. The gore looks like strawberry jam, and no amount of adding it onto my characters armor will help (though that is cool tech).

The new Omen. Personally I hate it, but I have seen people back and forth on it so it’ll go here.

The rehashed story. Lots of moments felt pulled from GOW1, places from GOW2, and things or people you met in GOW3. …Overall the game was good, but it felt like people sat around in the writing room asking “what makes a goo gears story” and then just pulling those moments and bending them to the narrative they wanted to tell as opposed to making their own original piece. I get there is only so many stories one can tell but at least hide that veil a bit more. It did not feel original I suppose.

The final note. Almost as if to echo my last point, the third game in the new series is going to be about finding Kait’s mom, the third game in the original trilogy was about finding Marcus’ dad. telling the overall same story, with a few basic changes in the same order gets old. I really hope they don’t go that route but they kinda pigeonholed themselves into it.

Kait isn’t a character I want to follow. This is a personal preferance but she feels very flat. like they want her to be complex but didn’t give her time to grow. For instance, all of -OG- Delta could be seen as very flat in gears 1, gears 2 Dom got developed more, in gears 3 we saw the same for Cole, and books focused a lot on all of them, but especially Marcus, Cole and Baird, We saw them grow and get more layers added to their character that felt natural. Here, in both GOW4 and G5, we don’t have that. We care about JD cause he is Marcus’ kid, we care about Del because he is JD’s friend and a mostly enjoyable character, Fahz, well he grows on you like a rash you don’t quite want to get rid of, but all of them are less important as the main character and she just falls flat imo. I don’t care about her inner struggle, or the things she’s going through as a character, the only reason I play is because I want to know what happens to the characters I do care about.

I suppose that’ll about do it, if I had to rate the game just on story and nothing else:

Graphics 9/10
Story:4/10
Gameplay: 6/10

Overall: 6/10

Not a bad game by any means, but nothing special, and when factoring in the server issues and the downright awful macrotransactions (I mean 1/3rd the price of the game for some packs, come on!) I would lower it to a 4/10 as a below average game, gouging the players and then not having the servers running properly when you even a tech demo to run the numbers open to the public for this specific thing… and then you have the gall to ask for more money with the whole store. Nah, I am not gonna thank you and ask for another after you ram it up my ■■■ and spit in my face. …At least cuddle me first TC, aftercare is important!

1 Like
2

So I haven’t finished the story but just got past where you choose del or jd getting killed…umm how’s this going to translate into the next game? I hate these kinds of things so much that it just spoiled the whole game for me.

3

Continuing the discussion from [SPOILERS] An in-depth look at the story, and how good the overall campaign is IN MY OPINION:

Agreed, I would have much preferred an option to target Reyna. I mean if you can hit a single tentacle, then a chest shouldn’t be that much harder. Then you could have watched as she moved one of the two in the way and had this hardcore guilty and sorrowful moment…instead we now have to wonder if there is a cannon choice or if it will carry over into the next game, and if it does, how does that impact the narrative? It certainly means neither JD or Del can have large story beats next game as why develop them when half at best of your players will see it?

Kait is almost certainly the protagonist of next game and I for one wont be buying. She just isn’t a gripping character.

4

Reyna was dead at the end of Gears 4. In the book “Ascendance,” they even wall off the cave to make it into a tomb. But the Swarm doesn’t require living bodies to create more Swarm. After all, the humans in pods always die before they become Juvies. So the Swarm can clearly use dead bodies.

In Reyna’s case, they likely just broke into Reyna’s tomb and hooked her back up to the tendrils. Then her dead body was preserved until they were able to mutate it into something else.

I’m tired of people saying Kait should have thrown the knife at Reyna’s head. That was Reyna’s broken machete, with no tip, and it was too wide to fit into Reyna’s eye-socket. Also, throwing knives can’t instakill even with an eye shot.

The Hammer was not powered by Imulsion. That was an idea from the scrapped film script, where they used imulsion crystals to focus the beams.

In fact, the Hammer is just a resonance beam that uses Sera’s atmosphere as a giant magnifying glass. The laser coming from the satellite isn’t strong enough to go through the atmosphere. The UIR had a lot of problems figuring out how to overcome this, and Adam Fenix figured out how to do it right.

EDIT:

Lastly, I agree that it was the wrong decision to let players choose who dies. It’s a “have your cake and eat it too” scenario. TC clearly couldn’t decide, so they took the temporarily easy route and made the future much harder for themselves.

Now they have to make two different versions of nearly every scene in Gears 6. And any future novels will require them to choose a canon.

However, Gears 1 was going to have a choice between male Dom and female Dom. So it’s not a terrible idea to let players choose their sidekick in Gears 6. It’s just… not ideal.

5

What about the rocket, then? Would that have run on whatever limited fossil or chemical fuels may have been available on Sera instead of Imulsion? Unless refined Imulsion wasn’t completely destroyed and instead just remained a harmless fuel source, which is doubtful. To be clear, I didn’t bother myself with these kinds of thoughts when I was actually playing it(or after I was done). Just wanted to enjoy the story and gameplay(or try not to get killed by all the [giant] murderous Swarm monsters, Windflares, Rejects and other environmental hazards, or rockets launching practically right ontop of our heads… or another genocidal queen forcing me to choose if I want to save the person who just tried making things better again, or the one who accompanied me on the journey).

This is unrelated, but I have some fears/suspicions “Queen Reyna” wouldn’t just accept her defeat if Kait was to ever kill her and would try to infect Kait with something that would turn her if it wasn’t stopped, before her(its?) death, unless perhaps the Swarm was wiped out beforehand, or the consciousness now in Reyna’s body, which has superceded the original Reyna, which somehow has survived and is just suppressed, but could still resurface or drive out what has taken her body over(is it unlikely to assume Myrrah has taken over Reyna’s body, or is it just Reyna, corrupted by the Swarm? until proven otherwise, it seems as if some part of Myrrah was still within the Swarm hivemind and mentally torturing Kait with acts like forcing her to witness the death of her uncle, to kill him, while being unable to do anything about it). I would have considered this kind of stuff impossible for Gears but after what I’ve seen in this Campaign, anything seems possible. Though it may still be far too early to consider any such thoughts I’m afraid that instead of accepting defeat our new Swarm Queen would rather try to take Kait with her or use her for the Swarm instead of leaving her be, if we defeat her in Gears 6.

1 Like
6

“Reyna” was definitely just the remnants of Myrrah’s consciousness, fused with the minds of a million Scions and Swarm monsters. But there wasn’t much left of Myrrah’s consciousness.

I think the rockets used solid fuel, like we do on Earth. The fuel is turned into spiky “morningstars” of what’s essentially gelatin, which allows far more surface area to burn at once. That’s the only way we’re able to achieve enough burn to thrust out of our atmosphere. And Sera is a more massive planet, which requires more thrust to escape.

I don’t think Imulsion, even with its miraculous properties, was ever developed into a solid fuel. They only had the Lightmass process. However, we do know that Sera had some quantities of oil and natural gas, which could be refined into solid fuel.

7

I’m a little confused by this. So there’s not actually anything left of Reyna nor Myrrah? But what would this… thing inside Reyna’s body then be? Because it clearly was aware of who Kait was(considering what you hear when the Matriarch connects to Kait - and makes it very hard to see - in Reyna’s distorted voice say “Kaitie…”, which is also quite disturbing knowing what we - and Kait - have just seen).

What I have actually concerned myself after finishing the Campaign was, if I didn’t hear this incorrectly, was how Kait found out or knew Myrrah’s name. She says it once, just outside the secret Kadar facility, when Myrrah seems to directly appear in front of her in one of these… visions, for lack of a better word, and Kait appears to stab her, yelling “Get out of my head, Myrrah!”, if I didn’t hear that incorrectly - didn’t have subtitles on so I couldn’t be certain).

Also, Kait seems to be abnormally tough, taking Snatcher quills and Matriarch spikes alike to the shoulder(s) but not even showing any signs of injury or that there is an injury affecting her.

8

There’s something left of Myrrah, for sure. But not the full Myrrah, otherwise the Swarm would just use her consciousness as their Queen. No, she’s clearly a fragment of herself. And Reyna is much the same. Their memories where accessed by the Hivemind while they were alive, so any Scion would have some degree of access to those memories. Especially after The Speaker met Kait in Gears 4.

The Locust were always great at psychological warfare, so it stands to reason that “Reyna” would apply psychological warfare during her encounters with Kait. Hence her use of “Kaitie” to try and weaken Kait in the fight against the Matriarch.

I just assumed that Marcus or Baird told her about the Queen in their old war stories. After all, there’s optional dialogue that proves they told her how they killed the Riftworm.

The COG uses nifty wound sealant, much the same as the UNSC does in Halo. Little spray cans have been visible on character models since Gears 1. Dom, Cole, and Hoffman all had them. Now, thanks to the “Ascendance” novel, we know what they were for.

Kait’s armor stopped the worst of the damage. The wound sealant patched it and numbed the pain. The rest is chalked up to her being Seran, and Serans are scary tough. Action movie tough.

As Dom would say, “It’s fine. Just needs a few stitches.”

9

Can you find that in Act 2 Chapter 1? If so, I haven’t found it. I admit I didn’t spend as much time as I should have poking around Riftworm Village.

For the rest, I knew that Kait’s armor(notably, her shoulder pads) would have stopped the worst of the impact. But there’s still quite a bit of blood coming out of her body. No doubt she could take some hits, and is certainly a capable fighter beyond doubt, but she also isn’t exactly a huge figure like Marcus or Cole. Don’t recall seeing mentions of this wound sealant in Ascendance though. Not sure how I missed it. But if it’s anything like biofoam(that’s the name, right?) in Halo it would explain why both Kait and Marcus didn’t show much of a sign of being wounded not long after getting hit by a Snatcher quill. Haven’t seen these little canisters on character models, though. Then again, my memories on the old Gears character models aren’t exactly fresh and I’ve only really used Kait and the Hivebuster characters in 4/5. Which I haven’t seen much more than the usual ammo pouch, some other small boxes and, in case of the Desert Kait model, what looks like a water bottle attached to her belt on the back.

Thinking of my previous post about the Queen Reyna thing, there is one reason I could imagine TC keeping Kait safe from the Swarm for, and it’s the symbolic gesture of her pulling the Locust necklace off and rejecting her relations to them. I don’t see why they’d go back on that, especially now that the Swarm already have a queen and Kait is set on killing their queen and exacting revenge on them. But if all that’s left are fragments of Reyna and Myrrah, I still don’t understand what exactly the consciousness now in Reyna’s body is. Either way, I doubt trying to weaken Kait during her fight against the Matriarch had any effect. The way the redness of this… well, I don’t know what to call it, but the way it obstructed vision to very closely until when the Matriarch was nearly dead and the connection perhaps seemed weakened and less obstructive to Kait’s vision, allowing to see the Matriarch from further away without requiring Jack’s pulse, that definitely made fighting a lot harder. Knowing that whatever Kait saw in that vision when Niles convinced her to go into that device/table was not really Reyna anymore also helped.

10

See the big pouch on Dom’s lower back? Either side of it has a little wound sealant can, in individual pouches. The nozzles stick out.

The old Hoffman model wore two of them on his chest. Sadly, The Coalition removed that part of his character model from Ultimate Edition.

Cole in Gears 1, 2, 4, and 5 also wears two of them. They’re on the back of his belt, left side.

I bet some Gears carry these things in other pouches, which look different.

11

Yeah, I see em now. Thanks. Was always wondering how our characters got back up so quickly after getting shot or melee’d down(now if only they made the animation for picking someone up a little better than just the person left standing reaching down and the other one getting up without any help… wishful thinking, perhaps, but maybe it can happen in the future, at least in PvE modes where TC has been experimenting with some different animations, though more extensively in 5 than in 4 - just a shame the different running for the roadie when not getting shot or in combat is only in Campaign).