It feels old fashioned, which may sound weird in a world where recent great shooter campaigns were reboots of Wolfenstein and Doom. This has always been the Gears way, grinding enemies down or getting up-close and exploding them into chunks of gore with a shotgun, but the end result is that you spend the most time with the least interesting guns, aiming with reticules wider than Marcus Fenix's biceps.
These guns hold precious little ammo, granting only a few kills before running dry. The new Markza rifle fires heavy rounds that seem like they should be able to take out enemies with a single expertly-placed bullet to the dome, but on Hardcore difficulty you'll still need to pump most of a magazine into the body before they succumb to the inevitable. Picking up an ammo crate won't refill the Longshot sniper rifle, for example, and the Swarm's tougher enemies will shrug off several sniper shots before they go down. Landing skull-shattering headshots makes me want to slam a Jager bomb and high-five my bros, but there's frustratingly little opportunity for them. If there's a manual of design tropes from the past decade, Gears doesn't just pull from it-it reprints the whole book. Gears of War 4 provides some fun weapon variety, but its fights are so linear, and enemies so simple and bullet-spongey, there's little opportunity for surprise or creativity. Halo gives you a freeform sandbox with half a dozen ways to approach any encounter.
Doom emphasizes improvisation and rhythm. Far Cry integrates stealth and the environment. That may sound reductive-couldn't I level the same criticism at virtually any shooter?-but so many of Gears' contemporaries offer more player expression and interesting choices in terms of how you approach their moment to moment combat. Pop up, empty the mag into the meat bag, repeat.
With no savvy AI to speak of, or larger battlefields which require creativity, the type of enemy I was shooting didn't much matter. These add variety, but unfortunately don’t deliver much in the way of strategic questions. There are other enemies too, in the form of a robot army and a few Swarm creatures that differentiate them from the Locust of old.
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