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. No, I don’t have anything better to do.
Is a man not entitled to the heat of his take? I rarely have opinions that would raise eyebrows or dislodge monocles but I’m pretty sure nobody else thinks Gears of War: Judgment is the Best One. It’s a righteous and correct position, and I’ll take it with me to the grave.
I hadn’t played Gears of War: Judgment until I started replaying these games with the intention of writing about them. I thought I’d have a nostalgic tour through the original trilogy, grit my teeth through The Bad One Which No One Likes, and then have enough perspective on the series to properly engage with Gears 4 and 5. I didn’t expect The Bad One That No One Likes to actually be The Best One Yes I Mean It Go Fuck Yourselves.
Judgment was a casualty of the gaming industry’s obsession with the new. The need to keep revenues up was simultaneously the reason for its release and the reason why was greeted with a collective shrug as players started to look towards the new machines coming later that year. No one wanted another Gears game on the Xbox 360, but there was a hole in Microsoft’s Q1 release schedule for 2013 and so we got Judgment. Whether or not this is true hardly matters.
I was so surprised by Judgment because the critical consensus at the time had tarred it with the same brush as God of War: Ascension and Call of Duty: Ghosts; board-mandated drek pushed out on a deadline to fill gaps in a release schedule while the market waited for a new generation of console hardware. Judgment is one of those games — but unlike those games, the constrained scope imposed by making the outsourced fourth game in a trilogy works wonders for a series that was starting to feel slow and bloated.
I’ve argued in this column that Gears was the successor in both aesthetics and lineage to the shooters of the late 90’s and that’s an argument that always needs more unpacking. Gears of War — especially from 2 onward — was where the move away from gun labyrinths and key cards was cemented. Action shooters were about putting big, expensive things in front of player’s eyeballs and Gears adapted itself to fit this mold even though its foundational mechanics and rhythms favoured a smaller, tighter scale.
Judgment’s levels are built around a series of discrete levels separated by safe rooms where players can elect to apply certain modifiers to the upcoming section. These have a narrative justification — we’ll get to that — but their primary function is to force players out of the tried and true behaviours that have worked in Gears past. In previous games variety was imposed on the player by enemy placement and the layout of the levels. This is all true for Judgment as well but now the loops are tighter — no section will run for more than 5 minutes — and the player is incentivised with a star rating system to enable modifiers that drastically change the dynamics of the fight.
Some of these modifiers are onerous; like needing to complete a section under 4 minutes, while others impose inventive restrictions like being limited to using shotguns, or completing the next section in near total darkness. I’m not the sort of gamesman to limit myself voluntarily, so the fact that the only way to get a perfect score on a section is to activate a modifier provides enough impetus for me to at least try to complete the next area under these restrictions. What’s great about this is that because these levels have been built around the player having activated a modifier that would undoubtedly get old over the length of a traditional Gears level, playing them without the modifier is still snappy and dynamic. They’re all designed around a single idea like attempting a D-Day style beach landing, or holding the main hall of a museum, so even without the modifiers they feel like much more thought has been put into them than the lumbering set-pieces of Gears 2 or the wide co-op corridors of Gear 3.
It’s the most frantic and reactive that the series’ signature cover-shooting has ever been. Judgment likes to overwhelm the player with multiple enemy types in large groups, while also making the best use of the Gears’ menagerie. Four games in and Gears has a huge variety of enemy types, none of which have been phased out or amalgamated, and Judgment uses them better than any game in the series yet. Oddities like the Bloodmounts are now deployed in larger groups so it genuinely feels like you’re getting charged by the lizard cavalry, and slightly ineffective enemies like the Reavers and Maulers have been re-balanced to be serious threats for the first time.
I can’t stress this enough: Gears of War: Judgment is the best a Gears of War game has ever played. Judgement makes this case better than I can because it actually includes a slice of Gears 3 in Aftermath, the secondary campaign bolted on the Judgement package that’s unlocked when you finish Judgment proper. Aftermath is straight Gears 3. It’s even set between Act 4 and 5 of that game where Marcus and the gang set off for a secret government island while Baird and Cole are off looking for help. It has none of Judgment’s modifiers or condensed levels — just the larger levels, enemies, and set-pieces of Gears 3 — and it doesn’t hold a candle to the game you were just playing. Part of that is due to the fact that it’s clearly cut content of some sort, but it’s mostly due to how slow and turgid everything feels after Judgment’s focused five-minute bouts of action.
Aftermath also tries to tie in Judgment’s new characters and story into the main Gears of War plot in a way doesn’t really pay off until Gears 5. The head writer on Judgment: Tom Bissell made a lot of fuss about coming on-board for Judgment to write a more narratively complex and mature Gears story and has worked on every Gears since. While it’s probably a mistake to attribute the things that Judgment does differently, and well, compared to the mainline games to Bissell, it’s clear that the themes and symbology of the Gears franchise are being treated with slightly more care and attention. The extremely fashy iconography of the COG is now treated as such by the story’s framing device. Baird’s squad is being subjected to a military tribunal without representation before their execution — those modifiers I mentioned earlier are framed as declassified bits of information about events that were censured out of the official report. You spend a lot of time in places called ‘The Museum of Military Glory’ and ‘Victory Parade’ and visit the opulent gated-communities of weapons developers. They aren’t being subtle about it.
Gears 4 will show how the COG would go on to rewrite history as the saviour of humanity, rather than the military dictatorship that used WMDs indiscriminately. Gears 5 would then go on to call the COG ‘fascists’ to their faces. You can see the seeds of this greater awareness of what the COG means politically being planted here, even if the story itself is about how Baird did a thing that he wasn’t supposed to do despite it being the best course of action and that’s why he has a chip on his shoulder about everything.
Let me be clear, I like Baird. A white man who lives a grievance-based existence because he knows he’s always right but will never be acknowledged or rewarded for it? That’s my representation. But the origin story of how Baird got to be an asshole — especially when he ends the game not being that much of an asshole — isn’t particularly enthralling. Baird’s development over the next couple of games arguably treats him better than his whiny ass deserves and you have to be fairly creative to link recent events back to Judgement’s lightweight plot. On its own Judgment is a very simple story told with more complexity than it needs. As a foundation for the expanded Gears universe of today, it’s supplementary reading at best.
What Judgment does for the series is refine the Gears of War into its sharpest and most focused self, only for Gears 4 and 5 to undo all that good work with design bloat and gimmickry. I will happily entertain arguments that Judgment is a step-back from the design priorities and achievements of Gears 3. That’s fine. It’s priorities aren’t the same as Epic’s before, or The Coalitions afterwards. What I won’t indulge are the arguments that Judgment is a skippable entry in the series. It is not optional. It’s also the best one. Bite me.
Next up, Gears of War enters the 8th generation with a new trilogy and a new developer, and tries in vain to reinvent itself.
