Gears 5: a Beautiful Buggy Mess

Gears 5 is the most recent game in the Gears of War franchise. The cover based third person shooter series was originally developed by Epic Games until Microsoft bought the franchise in 2014. Development was handed over to The Coalition, who developed the fourth and fifth entries.

Gears of War was the reason I bought an Xbox 360 back in 2006. I saw a commercial for the game and could not believe how good it looked. I immediately called one of my friends up and we went out to find a 360 and a copy of Gears. First stop was the local Walmart, the place where my friend was working at the time. Sadly, they didn’t have any copies of the 4gb 360 model, or Gears of War. After we left, my friend informed me that he had blown off work to come with me. Good thing all the Walmart employees where MIA while we looked around the electronic department.

Our second stop was the Electronic Boutique in the next town over. They had the game, but no consoles. These things were apparently a hot commodity. Luckily we were able to grab a console and an extra controller at a nearby Futureshop.

We crushed Gears in a single sitting. It isn’t a long game, but it was one hell of an experience. The multiplayer was also fantastic, and was the source of many late, drunken nights… we called it, Beers of War.

Fast forward to Gears 4. I didn’t pick the game up when it was initially released, but I did pick it up once Microsoft announced it would be an Xbox Play Anywhere title. Shortly after buying it Nvidia released a driver that broke the game on 10 series cards. The Coalition never released a fix, and I was less than impressed with the situation. In recent days I did manage to play most of the campaign, but the series had fallen pretty far in my book.

Gears 5 was a shot at redemption for The Coalition, and for the most part it improves over the previous entry in every way. The game looks great, controls better, and tells a better story.

Like previous entries on the 360, Gears 5 strives for something that looks like it shouldn’t be possible on the given hardware. The game runs at a near locked 60fps, and looks fantastic doing it. The game also feels both snappy and slower paced at the same time. The changes to gameplay elements like active reloading initially felt jarring, but over time it was impressive just how good these small changes were. You were less likely to botch reloads, which helps when you also have to manage your newest addition to your toolbox, Jack. The loveable robot can fetch ammo and use a number of different abilities.

The biggest improvement is the story. The first act follows Kait, Del, and JD in a similar fashion to Gears of War 4. The second act however radically changed the formula, where Kait becomes the main focus of the game. The game spends a good chunk of time developing Del and Kait, and you really do become attached to these characters. The character development stands head and shoulders over previous entries in the series, and is probably The Coalition’s greatest success in Gears 5. The campaign’s length is inline with older titles, coming in around ten hours or so.

The Coalition’s biggest failure is that the game was released in an unbelievably buggy state. In short, it is a mess. I had played the game completely with online co-op, and we managed to soft lock the game a dozen times. If we didn’t menu in a certain order whenever Jack got an upgrade the game would soft lock. The achievement tracking was completely broken, forcing us to replay entire chapters. There were also times where the player character would get stuck running, or walking, and a certain time were all sound refused to play. These are all things that can be fixed, but the amount of bugs in such a high budget title was very disappointing.

Gears 5 is a step in the right direction, and sets itself up nicely for the next entry. The Coalition manages to capture some of the magic of the original trilogy, but the experience is let down with several bugs that should have been caught before release.