An extra layer of symbolism has been added to Gears of War Reloaded in its opening. 14 years after the apocalyptic ‘Emergence Day’, it sees imprisoned hunk of meat Marcus Fenix freed from confinement by his legendary bro Dom Santiago, and reinstated into the COG military (yes, that stands for Coalition of Ordered Governments, and yes, that’s Gears’ tone in a nutshell). Except this time around, Marcus Fenix has also been freed from the shackles of Xbox.
Within minutes, the PS5’s DualSense controller is shaking in my hands as I unload steaming hot lead into hordes of locusts – the underground-lurking invasion force responsible for humanity’s turmoil. Comms chatter about how to best squash these enemies comes out from the DualSense’s speaker and, more delightfully, holding melee to spin up the lancer rifle’s onboard chainsaw purrs from the device – it’s like having an incredibly violent cat on my lap. It might just be the very first Gears of War that’s leapt off of the Xbox and onto PS5 so far but no matter – Gears of War Reloaded is a reminder that this original outing is still the best.
Waist high
And sure, I’m well aware each of the sequels did bolt on improvements across both narrative scope and the mechanics of enacting brutal violence. But also, there’s a simplicity in this first outing that still makes it a cover shooter masterpiece 19 years later. If anything, the smoothness of control in Gears of War Reloaded only drives that home.
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The muscled bros that make up Marcus and his COG allies aren’t just bulky for the sheer masculine pleasure of it, or to simply riff on a Warhammer 40k-style grimdarkness (chainsaw guns and all – Gears owes a lot to Emperor’s Space Marines). As an early and definitive third-person cover shooter, their hulking frames are a design promise across both its campaign and multiplayer. These targets are not small: blast away and see the flesh fly. Get close enough, and allow the chainsaw-based splatter to commence.
In some games, you may think of heftiness as a negative – clunky controls, perhaps, or unresponsive slowness. Not so in Gears of War, which embraces the pleasure of heftiness with all the satisfaction of slapping a thick cut of steak directly onto a hot pan. There’s nothing slow here, bullets spraying forth with abandon to ca-thunk into targets, heads exploding.
Every now and then there’s a moment’s breath for more deliberate violence, a bowls-esque fling and roll of a frag grenade to seal up an emergence hole from which the targets of your ire come; the quiet joy of lining up a headshot with a scoped rifle and seeing that head simply disappear, replaced with a gushing fountain of bliss; ‘roadie running’ to outflank locusts mounting turrets, the cover-to-cover dash bringing the camera low in order to shake back and forth – a clomping rhythm that feels like a drum-fill lead-in to the violence to come.
Even the act of reloading feels like a pause on the crest of a rollercoaster, a well-timed tap of the button rewarding Marcus with a quicker reload and damage enhanced bullets, genuinely turning the tide in some tense shootouts.