Welcome to A COG in My Machine, a retrospective series where I take a look back at Gears of War in its entirety and try to place it within the timeline of mass culture and the medium. This is the last one (for now).
2016 feels like a fucking millennia ago doesn’t it? Back when Gears of War 4 introduced itself to us we thought Hilary was going to be president; Vine wasn’t dead; and I was still failing to get an education. Nothing was the same after 2016, videogames included. Gears 4 was already an anachronism. It was 5 years since the last numbered Gears game and 3 since the Xbox One had been on the market. The box was mature and the competitive landscape was trending away from the traditional trailer-fodder single-player plus competitive multiplayer split that Gears and others had dominated during the 7th generation. Big games were now big in the literal sense — and pivoting to an open-world format was now the move du jour for established franchises.
In software-as-a-service (SaaS) there’s a term used to describe the degree to which a platform makes its user feel like it’s indispensable and that’s ‘stickiness’. The stickier your application, the more likely your customers are to stop using other programs before canceling your subscription. Games this generation have glommed onto this ideological pursuit of stickiness through the live-service model and just being bigger than they were before. Ultimately, the more time your players spend with your game, the less time they’re spending with the competitions’. It’s this denial of ground in raw hours that determines whether players stick around to spend a little extra on top of what they already paid. Gears 5 clearly subscribes to this paradigm, and through this lens it’s easy to see why it turned out the way it did.
To be clear; Gears 5 is not some overly-monetized mess of Skinnerian reward systems and daily challenges. Its concessions to the trends of the day are so noticeable because of how tight Gears of War has been before. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, and what has been lost here is the rhythm of firefights that would propel Gears’ extremely artificial cover-shooting from one arena to the next.
This is because Gears 5 is now an open-world game. However, it feels like the kind of under-cooked open-worlds that were being pushed out around 2014 to satiate a marketer’s definition of ‘Content’. The middle acts of the game are set in large hubs where players travel to different mini-dungeons which spoke out from the hub into their own linear areas. Rather than these levels being strung together in a natural succession of escalating threat and action, they just kind of end; bumping you out to the open-world to repeat the process again. It sucks the momentum out of both the moment-to-moment play and the narrative. Gears of War’s mechanics do not facilitate exploration and/or down-time and yet a sizable amount of Gears 5 involves both. Sometimes it’s in service of building tension, but when over half a mini-level constitutes digging around for upgrade points before a turgid firefight that starts too late and ends too soon, it’s hard not to feel like Gears 5 is stringing you along. All this down-time is spent on a wind-powered skiff that’s used to navigate these hubs. While it looks lovely and controls fine, precious little actually happens in these hubs. They’re inert space replacing the forced walk-and-talk sections of the previous games, rather than a new place where where spontaneous shit can pop-off at any moment.
You can detect the unpleasant whiff of other trends that were starting to make the rounds a few years ago. There’s a light upgrade tree for your robot buddy which is filled in by completing the side missions that are scattered across the hubs, which would be a fun addition if I didn’t for get to use the little guy in most fights. While you can turn them off, the game also defaults to displaying enemy health bars and hit markers. Part of the tension of Gears has always been that you can’t really tell how many more shots it’s going to take before an enemy goes down. You hold down the trigger and hope they drop before something else gets up in your grill and ruins your day. Gears 5’s embrace of these ease-of-use features so late into the series reeks of desperation rather than ambition. It’s all functional and unobtrusive, and so it feels fundamentally unnecessary, caking the arteries of a series that used to have confidence in its structure and mechanics.
What’s so disappointing about this is that it didn’t need to be this way. Not simply because Gears of War has been better in the past, but because they included a good version of the game in the acts that bookend it. Acts 1 and 4 of Gears 5 contain some of the best Gears of War that has ever been Gears’d. The first act goes full steam ahead at breaking down the last game’s protagonist: JD Fenix by revealing that he did some extremely messed up shit in the name of doing what needed to be done. The game introduces a new character called Fahz who willfully brings out the worst in JD and loudly makes the case for the COG’s authoritarianism. Gears of War 4 ended on the understanding that Kait was the actual protagonist of the new trilogy, and while you do play her from Act 2 onwards, it’s a tremendously confident decision to ether JD’s character first. By the start of Act 2, JD has gone full fash and you cannot wait to get away from the guy.
These acts also a mostly linear affair. The first ends with a doomed defence of a settlement that JD, Del, and Fahz have history with and the is a brutally disheartening losing battle against insurmountable odds. For a series that has always cast humanity as the underdog, its mechanics don’t lend themselves to much beyond forward movement. Gears 5’s first and fourth acts realise the series’ potential to tell this kind of military sci-fi story by staging a series of fighting retreats. In these sections you are always on the back foot, always plugging holes in your defences as the Swarm overwhelm you. It’s goddamn apocalyptic. In these Acts Gears 5 feels like it’s perfecting the spectacle-driven action that the series was reaching for since Gears of War 2. It’s been over 6 months and I still think about why The Coalition chose not to make this the entire game.
Speaking of Gears of War 2, Gears 5’s story goes out of its way to spackle over the holes in the Gears lore that were left open from the last trilogy. Obvious questions like ‘why did Myrrah have a human face?’ and ‘what was that bit in Gears 2 with the facility run by a deranged AI and those failed human experiments all about?’ are wrapped up nicely. The deep dive into Gears’ lore would be more welcome if it didn’t come at the expense of the critical eye that had been cast on the human side of the conflict in the last game. That’s all abandoned by the first act. JD’s pivot to being an ultracop is also reversed because The Coalition evidently cares more about their character’s being likeable than interesting. To punish them, I elected to let JD die in the one choice that the game gives you. That choice took my breath away and not in a good way. It comes out of nowhere and feels so completely out of place in a series that has had no problem killing beloved characters. It’s a option for the sake of making the player feel like they have more ownership over Gears of War as a series, in a game that has gone out of its way to make itself less distinctive.
I’ve spent a few thousand words describing how Gears of War was good before and isn’t good now and I realise that it could come across as a touch reactionary. I do not hate new things. Judgement remains one of the series’ wilder departures and I’ll take my love and respect for that game to the watery grave. The structural changes made to expand Gears of War in this game are just bad and the game bungles the good narrative developments that were the standout highlights of Gears of War 4. They did a bad job with the video game, and I’m less sure about the series’ future than ever after playing it.
Where Gears goes from here, I can’t tell you. The Coalition have chosen to play catch-up to industry trends that are already being put out to pasture. Gears of War has a specific mechanical identity that’s iconic as it is inflexible. It’s never going to own the limelight again and that’s okay. However, The Coalition seem intent to broaden the appeal of the series with modern indulgences over the focus that they initially brought to the table. It didn’t need to be this way. Gears 5 proves The Coalition’s ability to write a better middle-chapter than Epic could, and they are still capable of making a great Gears game. Regardless of whether they choose to revert to the traditional format or keep going with this whole open-world thing, the next game needs to commit to a direction or else Gears risks becoming another breezy, stakes-free place for players to spend time and money like every other game that’s being made these days.
Gears of War is a rigid, retrograde series that probably should have ended a decade ago. I’m glad it hasn’t, but I’m always painfully aware that these games don’t need to exist. These games need to justify themselves with every release and from where I’m standing the best way to do that is for them to be confident. Playing all these games in sequence has reminded me how aggressively Gears used to swing for the fences, even when incorporating ideas from the competition. For the first time in the series, Gears feels unsure of itself and that’s a bummer for me. I love these stupid games and I’d appreciate if they loved themselves as well.
Next up, whatever Gears 6 is. I’ll probably have some feelings about it.
