Throwback: Gears of War (Premium)

Gears of War: Reloaded is available today across Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, PC Game Pass, Game Pass Ultimate, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Steam, and PlayStation 5. This is a remake of the original Gears of War from 2006. Or, perhaps more accurately, a remake of a remake of a remake of the original Gears.

Let’s take a look back to understand how we got here.

OG

Gears of War was made by Epic Games for the Xbox 360. It was announced in mid-2005 and released in late 2006 as a third-person tactical shooter set in a future world in which humanity is battling for its survival against the Locust Horde. For the day, it had stunning visuals, a cinematic single player storyline with a co-op mode, and a somewhat less successful multiplayer experience over Xbox Live.

If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend the book Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games by Cliff Bleszinski, the designer behind the original Gears. It was my top audiobook pick of 2022 and is an excellent history of the game and that time at Epic Games.

The original promo video for Gears of War, the so-called “Mad World” trailer, is also worth a watch. It really sets the mood for this game.

My original Gears of War review

The Xbox 360 launched without a major new first-party title, but the appearance of Gears of War a year later solved that problem. This review is from December 2006.

Gears of War for Xbox 360 Review

If you’ve been waiting for the Halo 2 of the Xbox 360, that killer, gotta-have-it game title, wait no more: Gears of War is the real deal, offering the best overall graphics and sound, and most immersive gameplay of any Xbox 360 game. It is, beyond question, the best overall game of the year, regardless of platform, and is quickly on its way to classic status. Gears of War is a stunning, epic masterpiece. It is everything I expected of Call of Duty 3 but often didn’t receive. If you own an Xbox 360, you must get this game, and immediately. If you don’t own an Xbox 360, get one now. And pick up a copy of Gears of War. It’s that good.

What’s interesting about Gears of War is that it embodies everything that everyone who loves and hates video games thinks about when they think about video games. To the detractors, it is mindless violence, yet another outlet for a generation of kids more concerned about their fantasy worlds than the real-life problems in Iraq, Africa, and elsewhere. But Gears of War is Art, with a capital A, a crowning achievement that proves, once again, that video games can transcend their humble technical lockboxes and achieve true greatness. Gears of War is immersive, gritty, and realistic, and it offers stunning single player and multiplayer action, a plot that’d be right at home in a first-class blockbuster movie, killer music and sound, and the best graphical presentation seen in any video game, on any system. It is available only on the Xbox 360–you can’t play Gears of War on a PC or the PlayStation 3, sorry–and it makes the 360 all the more valuable and desirable. It is, in short, the best video game I’ve ever played.

It is, of course, not perfect. Gears of War is occasionally marred by minor bugs, a fairly-short single player campaign, and the rare lockup that seems to only occur when a game pushes the Xbox 360 to its limits.

Plot

Gears of War takes place on Sera, a planet that briefly achieved nirvana after discovering a nearly endless energy source called Imulsion, which resembles highlighter-yellow radioactive lava. The discovery of Imulsion was followed by a surprise attack by the Locust Horde, an evil enemy race that had been living secretly and silently below the planet’s surface. The Horde emerged to destroy mankind once and for all, and with the war lost, mankind took its revenge on the alien race by using chemical and nuclear weapons to obliterate the surface of the planet. This almost completely destroyed the planet, and Sera’s cities now resemble gothic versions of the bombed-out cities found in Europe during World War II.

That’s where Marcus Fenix, the character you play in the game, enters the picture. A former military leader who was locked in a cell at the start of a war on trumped up charges, you are released and made a member of a four-man strike team that seeks to move deep into Locust Horde-controlled territory and, with some luck, take out the enemy at its heart. Over the course of the game, you become the leader of your not-so-merry band of soldiers and earn redemption by saving mankind. (Assuming of course you’re up to the challenge.)

There are some unresolved plot points involving a woman you’re apparently interested in and Fenix’s mysterious and influential father, and whatever involvement he had in the affairs of the past. Presumably, these issues will be sorted out in an eventual sequel, which would be most welcome.

Game play

Gears of War is a violent shooter, but it’s not a first-person shooter like Call of Duty 3, F.E.A.R., or Quake 4, though it shares many similarities with those titles. Instead, Gears is what’s called a third person shooter, in which the so-called camera view is behind and typically a bit above your on-screen character, who takes up a portion of the on-screen real estate. Normally, I’m not a big fan of this type of game–the most common example of a third-person shooter is the Tomb Raider series–but the developers at Epic Games pulled off quite a coup by making this system far more enjoyable than it is in other third-person shooters. They did this by pushing your character over to the bottom side of the screen by default, providing you with a similar view of the playfield to what you get with first person shooters. And when you target far-off enemies, most weapons include a sight of some kind that lets you zoom in or even use guidelines for range weapons like grenades and explosive arrows.

If you are used to first-person shooters, the Gears control system will take some getting used to. In addition to weirdisms associated with learning the third-person shooter style of play, you’ll have to deal with the fact that Gears uses a control system that is often quite different from that of typical first person shooters. That was one of the things I really liked about games such as Quake 4 and F.E.A.R.: You can pick them up and immediately understand how they work. But the Gears control system is a bit more difficult to master, though of course it’s worth the effort.

Here’s a typical example: In Gears, your in-game character can’t jump, which is sort of unheard of in a shooter. (This rather strange omission is also present in *Condemned: Criminal Origins and is equally unsettling there.) You also can’t crouch, a technique that is typically used to help you hide behind objects and fire in a steadier manner. Instead of these two commonly used actions, the green “A” button controls a number of actions which are used in their place. The most often used is Take Cover, in which you use whatever obstacle is in front of you–a rock, wall, pillar, or whatever–for cover. While firing your weapon, you’re out of cover, and can be shot yourself. But when you reload your weapon, or just stop firing, you’re considered in cover.

So I’m OK with that. The problem is that the A button does so much more, and I often found my character unintentionally rolling across the floor, moving stupidly in and out of cover, or performing other unintended actions. When you hold down the A button, for example, you can run in bursts. But sometimes when I meant to run down a corridor–to avoid an enemy or grenade–I’d latch onto a nearby obstacle instead and take cover. Grr… These games are supposed to be easy to control.

That said, the control overloading on the A button–and the lack of simple jump and crouch options–doesn’t really detract from the overall game, but it does take some getting used to. And many of the other controls work as expected, including the systems for movement, looking, and choosing and firing weapons. These are all logical.

The weapons are largely familiar as well, though I have to give Epic credit for adding a handy mini-chainsaw to the front of the workhorse rifle that’s emerged as my favorite. It’s perfect for firefights in which the enemy gets a little too close for comfort. There are various pistols, shotguns, grenades, and sniper rifles, just like any other shooter, and some interesting alien weapons (which always seems to provide little in the way of ammo). A satellite-guided Hammer of Dawn can bring down death from above on larger foes, but only when you’re outside and the conditions are right.

The Horde come in various shapes and sizes, but with lots of overlap. There are animal-like Horde that attack on all fours like rapid dogs, and gun-wielding baddies that look like something straight out of a nightmare. These guys come in various forms, each more dangerous than the last, all leading up to a final mano-e-mano match against General Raam, who uses a rotating machine gun turret as if it were a handgun. He’s tough.

Speaking of tough, as you move up through the game’s skill levels–there are three, though the third, Insane, isn’t available until you’ve completed the game on Casual or Hardcore–things get considerably more difficult on the higher levels. Enemies begin trying to flank you, which gets increasingly aggravating. Insane? I’ll get there, but a brief foray in the training level convinced me to finish the game on Hardcore first. (At this writing, I’ve completed the game on Casual and am about two-thirds of the way through on Hardcore.)

The most interesting–and innovative–aspect of Gears‘ gameplay is the way it handles cooperative play. While some games do offer options for two players to simultaneously work their way through a single player campaign–or, as is sometimes the case, specially prepared co-op levels–Gears handles this capability in a way that is as rare as it is thrilling. At any point while playing the single player campaign, you can allow a second player to jump in on the action and help. This works via split screen (on a single Xbox 360), System Link (with two separate Xbox 360s), or even Xbox Live (over the Internet) and is a marvel. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that Gears is the first game in which the co-op play is actually the preferred method for finishing the single player game. It is an absolutely fantastic experience, assuming of course that your partner knows his way around a Lancer Assault Rifle.

Like other shooters, Gears alternates between cut scenes, third person action, and the occasional driving sequence, the latter of which, like similar sequences in Call of Duty 3, are the weakest part of the game. (There’s even a “Temple of Doom”-like mine car sequence, go figure.) But these sequences are usually quite short and fairly easy to get through, even at the higher skill levels. The movement between cut-scenes and game play is seamless, cinematic, and first rate, and you can skip cut-scenes you’ve already viewed. (Bravo!) Best of all, most (but, annoyingly, not all) checkpoints are perfectly spaced, so you rarely need to worry about working too much before the game automatically saves your progress. This is a huge improvement over the broken checkpoint system in COD3.

Graphics and sound

Graphically and sonically, Gears of War is unmatched on the Xbox 360. This is the best looking and best sounding game I’ve ever played, and when you combine these traits with the stellar game play, involving plot, amazing play areas, and the overall presentation, you have the makings of a classic.

In Gears, Epic has created what it calls “destroyed beauty.” The theory is that Sera was a beautiful, full-realized, and idyllic world, and you can still see this through the carnage and rubble of the war-torn planet. And sure enough, Gears provides a startlingly beautiful and utterly destroyed environment that, to my eyes, most closely resembles Stalingrad at the close of World War II: Buildings still stand, but they are hollowed out, and filled with dirty, evil things. Wind whistles, rain comes down in sheets, lightning flashes, and alien snipers train their sights on you from far-off windows. There are fires burning in barrels, swarms of killer birds flocking in the night, and Imulsion bubbling in deep caverns below the planet’s surface. It is a believable place, a sad and dying place, and it makes the plight of your character and those around him all the more palpable. You buy into the world because of the rich environments, and care about what happens. It’s an astonishing accomplishment.

The sound, of course, factors into this. You can hear voices in the wind. The Locust Horde taunts you and curses you. A rocket-wielding Horde known as the Boomer actually intones “boom” as he fires his weapon, giving you a heads-up to take cover. The music is militaristic, or scary, depending on the situation. Even the in-game chatter between the members of your team is decent, giving you a realistically earthy and even humorous backdrop between action sequences. The entire presentation is top-notch, a better remake of DOOM, from a presentation perspective, than is DOOM 3.

Multiplayer

As I’ve done with Call of Duty 2 and will soon do for Call of Duty 3, I will review Gears of War‘s multiplayer experience separately in the coming weeks. But Gears multiplayer appears a bit limiting to me at first glance. Only team-based multiplayer games are available, which is sort of odd. (Though, truth be told, team deathmatch is actually my favorite shooter multiplayer format.) In Warzone, a team of humans and a team of Locust go at it. In Assassination, one player is designated the leader and must be killed by the opposing team. The Execution game type is a derivative of Warzone in which players can revive themselves. And … that’s about it. I’ll investigate this further after I’ve completed the single player campaign a second time.

Availability

Gears of War is available in two versions, a standard version in the typical Xbox 360 game title packaging and a Collector’s Edition version that costs $10 more but includes a special container tin with slipcase, a small hardcover “Destroyed Beauty” book that looks at the making of the game, and a second bonus DVD that features a number of short films and three game trailers. Whether this additional material is worth the extra money will depend largely on your status as a total fanboy. You know who you are.

Conclusions

I’ve rarely been this impressed by a video game. Gears of War–the single player campaign, at least–is a truly stunning and epic experience. The game is rated Mature 17+, so it’s obviously not for kids, and the violence, language, and horror elements are indeed for mature audiences only. But the overall presentation in Gears of War is unsurpassed. It is a gorgeous, fun, and highly playable game, and one I’m eager to play again and again, especially in co-op mode.

My complaints are few and all minor. The unique cover combat mode is fine, though the game overloads the controller’s “A” button to a dangerous degree. The single player campaign is arguably a bit short, though the overall story is far more complete than, say, that of Halo 2. And there are minor bugs, though nothing as glaring as those in Call of Duty 3. Multiplayer appears to be a bit limited, though Epic could easily fix that with online updates. None of this really matters. You need Gears of War. You want Gears of War. Highly recommended, Gears of War is the game of the year.

Gears of War Multiplayer Review

I did write a separate review of the Gears multiplayer experience the following March, but it’s not clear to me if I ever finished it. But here’s a partial version, at least. This was … less positive.

Gears of War Multiplayer Review

When I published my Gears of War review in early December 2006, I was euphoric: Gears, I wrote, was “that killer, gotta-have-it game title” for the Xbox 360. “It is, beyond question, the best overall game of the year, regardless of platform, and is quickly on its way to classic status,” I wrote, “a stunning, epic masterpiece.” I still believe that to be true, assuming you’re talking about Gears‘ single player experience: Gears of War is literally the best game I’ve ever played.

I wasn’t alone in my praise of Epic Games’ masterpiece. The game was routinely awarded high marks by the video game industry press and it’s been the best-selling Xbox 360 title since its release. Then, earlier this month, Gears of War took home three prestigious awards at the GDC Game Developers Choice Awards: Best Game, Best Technology, and Best Visual Arts.

If you read my original Gears review, you may recall that, amid all the praise I had for that five-star-rated title, I demurred a bit when it came to multiplayer. “Gears multiplayer appears a bit limiting to me at first glance,” I wrote, describing the small number of multiplayer game types available. I concluded that part of the review with, “and … that’s about it. I’ll investigate this further after I’ve completed the single player campaign a second time.” I’ve long since done that, and am now plodding through Gears single player on “Insane” difficulty, a task that may just be impossible in single player mode. (It’s hard but doable on co-operative if you have a good partner.) But in the meantime, I’ve been spending some time with Gears multiplayer and …

Yikes.

Yes, Gears of War is still the most impressive video game I’ve ever played. But that accolade applies to the single player experience only. I sit here somewhat dumfounded as I write this, partially because I’m surprised there hasn’t been more outrage about this problem in the Xbox community, partially because, as of this writing, Gears is still the most-often played game on Xbox Live, and partially because I’ve never seen such a wonderful game so badly bone up what should have been a no-brainer. I mean, these guys were responsible for Unreal Tournament 2004. What the … ???

Prepare yourselves for this one, game fans, because I come bearing The Truth: Gears of War multiplayer doesn’t just stink. It sucks. Oh, it sucks hard. That any gamer would put up with this level of sucktitude is completely beyond me. It almost completely destroys all the gains that Epic made with the single player and co-op Gears experiences. OK, not quite. But why hasn’t this caused more outrage?

I’ve been playing first person shooters online since you could play these games online. As I’m sure I’ve documented elsewhere, I used to gather with a group of other Scottsdale Community College (SCC) employees on Saturday afternoons in the school’s computer lab and play DOOM on the lab’s Novell network. Since then, the games and their multiplayer capabilities have become more sophisticated and I’ve grown up with them. Over the years, I’ve spent uncountable hours playing every id Software game ever made online, along with a staggering list of other games, almost all of which are first person shooters. To say I’m a fan or devotee of the genre would be an understatement. Since October 2005, most of my gaming experience has come on the Xbox 360. However, it’s worth noting that the only non-360 games I’ve completed since getting the console are all first person shooters. These include Half-Life 2: Episode I and Sin Episodes on the PC and Resistance: Fall of Man on the PlayStation 3. I don’t just play through first person shooters. I finish the games and then play them online when possible. I love this stuff.

With this abbreviated version of my shooter résumé in mind, allow me to wax philosophic about some of the multiplayer shooters that Got It Right over the years. We can start this partial list with DOOM, though it was hobbled by its NetWare requirements, and DOOM II, of course. There was QuakeWorld, which made up for the lag of multiplayer Quake. Duke Nukem 3D, which is still one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve had. Quake III Arena, which was all about deathmatch. And the unforgettable Unreal Tournament 2004, arguably the single greatest multiplayer shooter ever made, and the purest shooter of the bunch. It’s still excellent today, and it includes surprisingly good computer-controlled bots so you can play multiplayer by yourself, good for perfecting your skills and learning the levels. The available game types in UT2004 are also superb, as are the numerous downloadable levels.

Xbox fans like to point to Halo 2 as the apex of shooters, and there are even diehards who point to the original Halo as the one that got it right. But I’d argue that these people just aren’t experienced enough with other shooters and platforms: Until the Xbox 360, the best shooters were all on the PC. Halo 2 is only good if you’ve never seen how it really works. That said, I still gather each month with a group of 8 to 15 other games in a house up the street and tear it up Halo 2 style. These “Halo Havoc” events are great fun, mostly for the camaraderie and, let’s face it, the beer and pizza. But I’ve been pushing these guys for a while now to move along to something different, and enough now have Xbox 360s that it’s starting to happen.

On the Xbox 360, I’d talk up Call of Duty 2 and, to a lesser extent, Call of Duty 3. (Heck, I wasted half of 2006 playing COD2 online: It’s absolutely fantastic.) These games aren’t generally as frenetic as the classic PC shooters, but they add some nice stealthy sniper options, which I’ve come to enjoy. If you’re looking for classic shooter multiplayer, Prey is actually pretty good, as is F.E.A.R., though the latter game offers no system link options, which is a shame. It looks like Rainbow Six: Vegas is a decent contender too, though I’ll need to finish the Terrorist Hunt co-op games before I can investigate that further. (Curiously, id’s two recent shooters, DOOM 3 and Quake 4, aren’t excellent multiplayer games, though Quake 4 is a bit better than its predecessor.)

And then there’s Gears. Good ol’ Game of the Year Gears. What went wrong?

Everything.

Now, I want to be very clear here: Many reviewers will tell you that Gears of War multiplayer is good or even excellent. And Gears has been at or near the top of the heap for games played online via Xbox Live, meaning that people are actually playing this game, every day, for hours at a time.

These people, clearly, are idiots.

OK, I’m kidding. Maybe. But if I had to hazard a guess, the real reason that everyone is cutting Gears so much slack is that the single player stuff is so darned good. That’s not right. Because as good as the single-player experience is, the multiplayer experience is an absolute joke. An absolute embarrassment.

Students, let’s discuss one of the unwritten tenets of multiplayer gaming. This one is so obvious, you might think we’d never even have to bring it up. But the clowns who made Gears–did I mention they were the same guys responsible for UT2004, perhaps the greatest multiplayer shooter of all time, the game that gets virtually everything right?–apparently need a refresher, so it’s time to go back to Shooter 101. It’s called respawning. If you’re playing a multiplayer game, team or not, and you get killed, you get to respawn and continue the fight. The mechanics of this can vary: For example, there might be specified spawn points on the map, or perhaps a timeout period before you can come back. But you can come back. I mean, duh. You didn’t wait around in a game lobby for fifteen minutes to be shot once and then have to wait for the match to end, right?

Right?

Well, that’s exactly what happens in every single multiplayer mode in Gears of War. (Well, with one exception: On April 9, 2007, Epic released a free multiplayer add-on for the game via Xbox Live that adds a game type called Annex, where, get this, you can actually spawn in-game after being killed. What innovation!) In Gears, you see, you die, and you stay dead. You get one life per round, and you can’t play again until the level is won, generally when there’s only one man or alien left standing.

Hey, it’s fun watching other people play games while you twiddle your thumbs, right?

Moving away from this obvious and glaring issue, Gears Multiplayer is still a stink bomb. Despite the beauty of its graphics, the levels are almost uniformly uni-dimensional: You can’t climb up into a tower and snipe because you always play at or right above ground level. The characters, human or alien, are completely interchangeable, with no discernible advantage to playing on either side. And instead of walking, running, and jumping, you can only shuffle close to the ground, agonizingly slow, with infrequent bursts of “speed” that only approximate the normal walking speed in other games. Put simply, Gears Multiplayer is boring, slow-moving, and claustrophobic. It is a joke, a sad joke Epic is playing on gamers everywhere. And I don’t understand why there’s no outrage about this very clear problem. Gamers deserve better than this.

By the way, Epic is using the same gaming engine behind Gears to make the long-awaited UT2004 sequel, called Unreal Tournament 3 (which is curious, since there have already been at least three UT games.) A pure multiplayer shooter, UT3 will ship first for the PlayStation 3 and PC in late 2007 and then for the Xbox 360 in 2008–apparently this staggered release was an apology to Sony for making Gears Xbox 360-only at launch. (PC and 360 versions will ship at some point, however). Let’s hope that UT3 is frenetic, fast, and fun like its predecessors, and not boring, slow, and plodding like Gears of War. You should still buy Gears for the superb single-player campaign. Just forget about the multiplayer silliness.

Gears of War multiplayer fails where the single player and co-operative experience excel: There’s no replay value or variety there at all, and instead of being impressed again and again, I come away surprised, again and again, by the limitations and lack of the features that are common in so many other shooters. The sheer ineptitude of Gears multiplayer is all the more shocking when you consider that its developers were responsible for Unreal Tournament 2004, which I consider to be the greatest multiplayer shooter of all time.

Furthermore, Gears single player and co-op are so good–so damn good–that one gets the feeling that multiplayer was simply an afterthought. Look, Epic could still fix this situation by tweaking the game with various updates, and the release of a handful of add-on multiplayer levels suggests they might ultimately make things right. But at this time, Gears of War multiplayer is a joke, and one of the sorriest experiences I’ve ever had. I’m outraged by this, and if you care at all about online gaming, you should be as well.

My rating: 1/5 Pauls

Games … for Windows LIVE?

A few years later, Microsoft rediscovered the importance of Windows gaming and launched its Games for Windows LIVE program, an Xbox-like experienced aimed at making Windows games as seamless as possible. It launched alongside Windows Vista, which offered gaming-related technologies like the Games Explorer, DirectX 10, and even compatibility with Xbox 360 peripherals.

A new version of Halo 2 was the marquee title for Games for Windows LIVE, though Halo 3 was coming soon thereafter on the Xbox 360. But as big, to me, was a new version of Gears of War. Which I reviewed in November 2007

Gears of War for Windows LIVE Review

This will be the simplest review I’ve ever written, though I’ve certainly spent an astonishing amount of time using the product in question, this time Epic’s Windows version of Gears of War, the hit video game that was released a year earlier on the Xbox 360. The reason this review will be so easy to write is that I’ve already written it: If you refer to my previous review of the Xbox 360 version of the game, you’ll discover almost everything you need to know (well, that and my preview of the Windows version. That’s because the PC version of Gears of War, with a few exceptions, is almost identical to the Xbox 360 version. And depending on what we’re talking about, that’s both good and bad.

On the good news front, the Gears single player experience is as strong as ever: I awarded the Xbox 360 version of the game 5/5 stars, and certainly the PC version is just as good. Despite a year of time between the releases, Gears single player holds up today as a great combination of storytelling, plot, action-oriented gameplay, and the PC version even throws in several new levels, which I’ll discuss below.

On the bad news front, Gears PC multiplayer is just as bad as it was on the Xbox 360–which is to say, horrifically, unbelievably bad–and since there aren’t many people playing the game at all, you can almost never find online matches (cooperative or multiplayer) online anyway. Gears PC also loses some points for setup complexities that are common to the PC platform and non-existent on other platforms. It just doesn’t play as well on a PC as it does on the 360, even with pretty modern gaming PC hardware. Gears PC is a big leap forward.

OK, let’s jump right in.

Gears PC single player

I’ll assume by now you’re familiar with Gears of War. If you’re not, again, please check out my review of the 360 version. In the PC edition of Gears, you’re presented with a superset of the 360 game that features five additional levels, or chapters. The game is structured just like the 360 version, with five acts, and the new levels occur right at the beginning of the fifth and final act. These levels revolve around a humongous creature called the Brumak, which is a Godzilla-like monster with a rider and mounted guns and rocket launchers. Before the 360 version shipped, Epic produced a promo video featuring this creature, but it was never really part of the game. In the PC version, you finally get to fight the Brumak, and it’s a nice addition.

It’s also clear from playing this game that the Brumak sequence was intended from the beginning: This is no throw-away add-on tacked on to the PC game to make it more interesting for repeat players. My guess is that Epic couldn’t get the sequence working properly in time for the 360 version, or perhaps there simply wasn’t enough space to include it. Either way, it’s well done, integral to the plot, and actually adds some interesting information about the interactions between the lead character (you), Marcus Fenix, and some of the other people in your crew. It also explains why you’re late getting to the train in Act 5, where the final showdown occurs as a result.

If you play the game with an Xbox 360 controller, you’ll discover that it looks and acts identically to the 360 version, and since I’m now comfortable with this setup, that’s how I played the game. You can also choose to play with mouse and keyboard, of course, and if you’re a dedicated PC gamer, you might find this preferable. One advantage of the PC version, of course, is that you can bump up the graphical resolution and quality, assuming you have the proper hardware. There’s even some DirectX 10 optimization. But the game runs dog slow even on the nicest hardware, and it stutters and comes to a stop occasionally, like rush hour traffic. This is no seamless Xbox-like experience.

One nice touch: If you’re an Achievements junkie on the 360, please note that not only does Gears PC offer up a full 1000 points for your enjoyment, it does so in addition to the achievements you can earn on the Xbox 360 version of the game. So you can actually double your points if you don’t mind doing everything twice. You can’t, however, mix and match between the PC and 360 versions via cooperative or multiplayer play.

Epic also dropped support for split screen, so there’s no way for two gamers to sit in front of the same screen and play the game cooperatively, as you can on the 360. You can, however, player cooperatively over your home network (with two or more PCs) or online, though again, I never saw very many people available for this. And that’s a shame, because some of the achievements require you to play cooperatively as Dom, a secondary character in the single player campaign.

Overall, the Gears single player campaign is as good as ever and while the cooperative play is effectively useless, the addition of the Brumak chapters pretty much makes up for it. Gears single player is still the best single player game this side of Halo 2.

My rating: Five Pauls

Gears PC multiplayer

Multiplayer, sadly, is another story.

I can’t stress enough how horrible Gears of Wars is as a multiplayer game. What’s really odd about this statement is that, for the longest time, Gears 360 was the most frequently played game on Xbox Live. I have no idea why so many people were playing it for that long, but Epic showed their appreciation to gamers by adding a number of maps and game types over time, and generally improving things as they could. No matter: Today, as then, multiplayer Gears is a joke. It is truly one of the worst online gaming experiences I’ve ever been a part of.

To bolster the PC version of Gears, Epic added three new (and exclusive) multiplayer maps to the 16 that previously existed on the 360 version. There’s also a new multiplayer game type, King of the Hill, which should be immediately familiar to anyone who’s played any first person shooter online over the last decade.

And none of this matters. If anything, Gears PC multiplayer is even worse than on the 360 because, with the 360, at least people were actually playing the game and you could get into online matches. I’ve never seen an appreciable number of people playing the PC version online, and as of today, it’s a ghost town. And this, finally, is as it should be. Maybe PC game players just have more common sense than console players.

In addition to the single-player campaign and multiplayer, Gears PC includes a level editor, which allows gamers to create their own multiplayer levels. This would be interesting if Gears multiplayer was any good, but of course it’s not. So it isn’t.

My rating: 1 Pauls

Final thoughts

Averaging the two scores above, you will arrive at an even three out of five stars, but I feel that Gears of War is valuable enough as a single-player title to warrant at least four out of five stars: The campaign really is that good, and if you’ve never experienced the Xbox 360 version of this game, you need to do so on the PC. I don’t feel that the lack of PC/360 integration is a big deal, though I’d point to the inability to play cooperatively on a single PC as its one main drawback. Well, that and multiplayer. Regardless, Gears of War is as much fun now as it was when Epic shipped it for the Xbox 360 back in late 2006. Unless you’ve beaten the 360 version to death and just aren’t interested, you’ll want to give this one a shot. Highly recommended.

Fast forward

The next several years saw many changes to the Gears of War series. Epic shipped Gears of War 2 in 2008 and then Gears of War 3 in 2011, completing the original trilogy. Then, Microsoft acquired the rights to Gears from Epic in 2014, and created a Microsoft Games studio, The Coalition, to create more games in the series. Gears of War 4 was the first, in 2016, but this and future Gears titles were, to my mind, a lot less successful than the original game or trilogy.

But like George Lucas and the original Star Wars movies, Microsoft couldn’t stop tinkering with the original Gears. And the Gears of War: Reloaded we got today is a direct descendent of that work.

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition

Ten years ago, in August 2015, Microsoft shipped Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Xbox One, a remastered version of the OG Gears, allegedly, but really an updated version of Gears of War for Windows LIVE. It supported 1080p graphics, new features, the ability to mix and match single player with co-op, and some other changes, but it was a pretty straightforward update.

In March 2016, Microsoft released Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10 as a Microsoft Store title. This was a remastered version of the original game with support for 4K graphics, unlocked refresh rates, Dolby 7.1 surround sound, dedicated multiplayer servers, new Xbox Live achievements, and other improvements.

Then, two months later, Microsoft updated Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10 with customizable V-sync, a frame rate limiter, anisotropic filtering, an FPS display, and other new features.

And then that was it for a while. Until this past May, when we learned that Gears of War: Reloaded was coming across multiple platforms.

Back to the future: Gears of War: Reloaded is here

Available today across Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, PC Game Pass, Game Pass Ultimate, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Steam, and PlayStation 5, Gears of War: Reloaded is a free update for Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. So if you own that title, you’re getting the updates for free. Otherwise, the game costs $39.99.

Gears of War: Reloaded is natively optimized for each platform, and it supports cross-play and cross-progression across all platforms, along with remastered 4K textures and other assets, up to 120 FPS in multiplayer, and two-player co-op with no loading screens.

And because we are coming up on the 20th anniversary of Gears, the Coalition is planning a new prequel entry in the series, Gears of War: E-Day, that will ship on Xbox Series X|S and PC at the very least, and most likely PlayStation 5 as well.

For now, I’ve installed Gears of War: Reloaded on the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Aura Edition 16 I’m reviewing, and its powerful RTX graphics let me play the game at native resolution with the graphics on high settings at over 110 FPS. I can’t recall how many times I’ve played this game straight through, but it’s easily a dozen or more. And I may just do it again. It really is that good.