I’m going to just do a review of the campaign from my point of view, most people seem to be saying it’s good or they at least “liked it”, so I’m curious on how people feel and why.
Starting off, the story is fairly intriguing, it starts setting up issues with Kait and some drama involving JD’s leadership skills. Act 1 puts us into a more dire situation than the meandering story of Gears 4, the level design is competent, Lizzie is a fun character and the writers use her effectively to set up a shocking death that ties into JD’s issues and the growing distrust that Kait and Del have of him. I was so ready to get more on that later on.
Then came Act 2, which was the plotline that sold me on this game from the start; Kait’s bloodline, the definitive origin of the Locusts, and how the two tie together. I liked Kait’s hallucinations throughout, and the sequence where Myrrah forces Kait into controlling the Swarm blew my mind. There was so much intrigue and drama at this point that I was hooked, and very interested in Kait’s journey to the old research facility.
The first “open world” section was well-handled and should be the minimum standard for these open levels if they continue putting them into Gears; It’s big but not frustratingly large, there’s tons of variety in the side locations/architecture (Icy caverns, an old-timey mining facility, an area with massive trees, COG encampments, and the laboratory), and you’re getting important story progression at a decent pace.
Finding the lost settlers was an okay side mission, it was foreshadowed in the previous chapter if you paid attention and these types of open worlds benefit from side missions that tie together and reward the player’s exploration. Going back to the lab from Gears 2, talking to Niles, going deeper into the creepy facility was all handled wonderfully, but the end of Act 2 is where the game began to decline for me.
They introduce the Matriarch, which looks like she’s going to be a major figure in the story until Kait and Del just kill her. The boss was fun, but it’s at this point that we stop learning about Kait, and she becomes stoic and boring now that her visions have stopped and the Locusts no longer want her as a queen. What follows is some of the worst game design I’ve ever seen.
Vasgar takes everything that was fun about the northern region and completely ruins it, turning the open world concept into an annoying chore that painfully overstays it’s welcome. The locations are repetitive (absolutely everything is covered in red sand, and all the buildings are either generic “Russian” facilities or half-buried ruins), the map is insanely large to the point that it becomes annoying to traverse, all the side missions are useless fetch quests, and the pacing is awful.
The story screeches to a halt so that Delta Squad can run around putting a rocket together for the Hammer of Dawn to work, something they basically already did in Act 1. JD and Fahz show up out of nowhere, and just when you think they’re here to add tension and drama, they don’t really do much of anything the entire Act and everybody’s just friends again.
There’s this dumb repeating gag where Paduk’s men speak Vasgari and nobody can understand them; It was neat at first, but got old extremely quickly, especially because the Vasgari people are all just clones of each other with the same faceless models and handful of voice actors. It was also super frustrating to have a guy on the team who is of Vasgari lineage, but can’t speak it whatsoever, just so the dumb gag can keep happening.
Anyway, we launch the UIR rocket and a giant Dune worm comes completely out of nowhere with no foreshadowing (Gears was always one of the best games at foreshadowing massive monsters). The Dune worm boss is boring and feels like an inferior version of the Leviathan.
Act 4 is just a boring slog through a battlefield, not much goes on story-wise until Kait’s mom pops up out of nowhere and for whatever reason, the Coalition decided it would be a good idea to randomly insert a branching choice about a major character death into a long-running series of linear games, a choice that was not properly built toward and feels more like it robs Kait of her agency by giving it to the player.
The Dune Worm shows up again, you do the same lame boss fight again, and Jack, the only good character in this game, blows himself up to kill it. By this point, my brain had turned into mush and was leaking out of my ears, and the story didn’t really “end” so much as it just kinda stopped abruptly.
TL;DR - The campaign starts off with some of the best storytelling in the franchise, but the plot loses steam halfway through and turns into a boring mess of bad pacing and worse game design. Easily the worst Gears campaign I’ve played.
My controller almost wanted to learn to fly. At least I didn’t have to do the Windflare again.
