Thoughts on Gears of War Reloaded
When I moved my Xbox 360 to the living room last summer I told my roommate that we had to play Gears of War 2 co-op sometime. And we did play through an act together! It still holds up despite it being the first time I had played a Gears of War game in at least a decade.
During that playthrough I actually realized that I had never finished the first Gears game despite owning it in high school (I lent it to a friend who never gave it back... classic!) and wanted to play it again. I could have gotten a cheapo 360 copy but I wanted to give the Reloaded version a shot, mainly for the novelty of playing Gears on a PlayStation console. Once it hit that $20 price point shortly after the new year, I picked it up and made my way through the campaign, finishing last night in about 9 hours of gameplay.
I had a great time with it for the most part. It was kind of refreshing playing something that felt dated but in a good way (Gears 1 is turning TWENTY this year which is crazy!). It's your classic Xbox 360 era 8-10 hour rollercoaster single player campaign with some really great cover and shooting mechanics. Playing Gears in this current age is cool because you really see how influential it was with things like the cover system, the minimalist UI and the perpetual co-op buddy.
Gears 1 for better or worse feels a bit like a tech demo though. You can tell how much love and care was put into things like smart contextual cover actions, how GOOD the shooting feels (getting headshots with the Longshot will make you jump for joy) and my favorite - the surprisingly strong environmental aesthetics and architecture. Especially after playing the sequels though, 1 definitely feels like a foundation game more than anything. There's barely a plot, all the boss fights are surprisingly bad, squadmate AI glitches and gets itself killed more often than helps you, and it relies too much on tedious trial and error combat where random things you don't even see can blow you up, requiring a restart. For as much fun as I had blowing through the campaign I had multiple points where I just got sick of reloading my save for 30 minutes to clear the same room (fuck the Berserkers!!) and had to go play something else.
I have mixed feelings on the actual remaster - some things are great like the extremely smooth framerate and the excellent sounding audio, and some things are not so great... mainly the weirdly smoothed out character models, oversaturated environments and the unfixed Xbox 360 era weirdness in the form of braindead teammate AI and visual glitches.
Definitely the most surprising thing about playing Gears as an adult now is the tone. I barely remember the plot of the series and I think most of the nuance went right over my head the last time I played, as I was 14 years old, this was the first M rated game that my parents let me own and I was too engrossed in the whole "wow you can chainsaw that guy in half!" thing. And yeah, a lot of what Gears is (and is remembered for) is being kind of a macho bro-y ultra violent game. At the same time though, I found it extremely campy and goofy. The overarching plot feels very Starship Troopers satirical despite being paper thin and the dialogue is surprisingly silly. All that mixed with really gratuitous gore and violence makes it feel like a classic B movie.
Also the homoeroticism!! I wrote about this a little bit way back when I first made this blog but Gears of War is a very homoerotic game in my opinion. Gears is a game about big beefy men rolling around on the ground shooting equally big beefy alien men. The main characters, Marcus and Dom, are described as being best friends for their entire lives. You do always travel with two other guys in your squad, but when paths split and Marcus and Dom are alone together the script changes significantly. Marcus is the classic tough badass squad leader but a lot of the dialogue he shares with Dom is very tender. After clearing a room of enemies at one point Marcus and Dom share a brief aside about how much they mean to each other and how much they'll always have each other's backs. It feels very horseshoe theory in the sense that these guys were most likely written as so heterosexual (Dom's missing wife becomes a main plot point in the sequel) and the world they're written into is so macho that it loops back around into feeling really gay. On top of that, there are only two women in the entire game - Anya, who isn't even seen on screen and just talks to you through a radio, and the Locust Queen, the antagonist of the series who shows up at the end to monologue. Kind of makes you think!
But yeah. Gears was one of my favorite games as a teenager and they only got better with 2 and 3. I hope those get the remaster treatment next as they deserve to be played by more people and shouldn't just be stuck on the Xbox 360 forever. I get the same feeling when I think about Gears of War though as when I think about Halo... in the sense that the original trilogies for both of those series were so influential and fun, then the original developer hands the franchise over to Microsoft who then fucks it up multiple times and it fades from public consciousness which is very sad! I did give Gears of War 4 a shot back when it launched on PC in 2016 but the plot and tone were so all over the place that it felt like a parody of itself and I ended up stopping after the first act. Gears 5 I heard was much better but by that point I had completely moved on.
I think the question though when you think about the future of this series though is will the market still be there for something like Gears of War or Halo in the current video game landscape? Are people willing to buy a 8-10 hour campaign with a fun yet basic multiplayer component that's not live service for $70? Or are these games just "unc slop" to the new generation of kids who's knowledge of Marcus Fenix and Master Chief come from Fortnite skins? I guess we'll find out. Microsoft's inability to manage its own game studios properly for years has culminated with them releasing all their flagship games on competing consoles which is still kinda crazy to me seeing as Gears and Halo were the reason to buy an Xbox for multiple console generations. I think whenever Gears E-Day or Halo Campaign Remake comes out if the games are good and are as accessible as possible then it might still have a chance... but that wholly depends on Microsoft not fucking it up which I think would be rare. But we'll see!
One last note about Gears... people talk about the Mad World trailer for the first game as being the reason they fell in love with this series but for me it was the How It Ends trailer for Gears 2 - a song that just so happened to be prominently featured in my favorite movie when I was in high school, Little Miss Sunshine. It all makes me feel very nostalgic for when you really feel like you're growing up for the first time.
(Also shout out to the Gears 3 Mazzy Star trailer too.)