#gears v

[breadknight-likes-things]

Bread’s Game Journal 05/26/20: The Gears V Final Chapter Appreciation Post

Spoilers for the end of Gears V.

Gears V ends with one hell of a bang, playing through it again for the first time since release I see that a lot clearer now!  Not that I really had much an issue seeing “Chapter 4: Homefront” as the extremely bad-ass level it was before, but you notice so many more little things going back through this finale again!  The ruins of Old Ephyra exude so much character and sense of place, and it’s such a blast to see them as battered and collapsed as they are at this point in the franchise.  There’s even recognizable locations to be found like the Tomb of the Unknowns!  Ehpyra is such a returned to location over the years it does my heart good to see it come back just one last time before, you know, being absolutely burnt to the ground for like, the fourth time. Tonally, I think the final chapter of Gears V strikes an odd note though.  I feel like the original trilogy went to great lengths to establish The Hammer of Dawn as a really cool weapon to use, but a genuine scourge for existing at all when weighed against what it actually did to the world.  It feels a little like it betrays one of the standout moments of Gears of War 3, (walking slowly through Char and seeing the horror of a city burned to a crisp by the hammer, still haunted by the ashen remains of all the people who couldn’t make it out in time), when you just set up new beacons and the Hammer of Dawn is back to it’s Gears of War one incarnation of: “Wow, cool space laser!”.  Granted, I expect very much for this plot to be followed up on in Gears 6, there’s too many characters openly expressing their misgivings of reactivating the hammer for it to completely fall to the wayside!

We’ve seen Ephyra so many times, but seeing it in the state it’s in is such an effective reminder of just how much shit the world had to go through to get the relatively stable era they’re in by the time of Gears V.

Speaking of Gears 6, I’m extremely intrigued for the series moving forward from the gigantic story altering choice this final chapter forces you to make.  Choosing weather to save J.D or Del and being forced to watch the other one die horribly is just....heavier than I expected going in.  I knew something nasty was going to happen at the end of this game, the heavy “Empire Strikes Back” vibe was noticed from the start, but that was grim on a level even I didn’t see coming.  Hell, let me tell you, it’s not any less hard to watch a second time through!  I personally hope the sequels story can somehow pull a Wolfenstein The New Order and give us two slightly different storylines based on the choice.  In fact i’m supremely confident that that’ll happen.  If they didn’t have something like that in the pipes I don’t think we would have gotten a choice to begin with.

Look, you know me by this point, if you get me started on talking about Gears of War it’s just....not gonna end.  I just love this franchise so damn much.

Random Screenshot Of The Day:

You know, second run through and I still can’t believe that Gears V gave such a major role to Garron Paduk.  Don’t get me wrong he’s a low key favorite of mine, but even I didn’t think we’d ever see him again after Gears Judgement, let alone in such an important role.  It’s genuinely a shame People Can Fly wrote such a lazy, tropey off-screen death for Sofia, I would have loved to see the whole Judgement cast re-united one more time! 

Stray Notes:

- So uh, silly me I guess?  I could have sworn New Game Plus for Jedi Fallen Order had actually like, released already?  But I guess that announcement was just an announcement and not a surprise release?  Oh well, I’ll probably still play the game again frankly. - About halfway done with the final season of She-Ra!  Gonna miss this show when it’s over!  It’s come a long way from an okay first season and really established itself!  Wrong Hordak mvp tbh.

- Gonna finally finish The Outer Worlds!  Finally getting back into it!  I do genuinely really like that game I don’t know why I stalled out on it so hard!

[nintendoindirect-blog]

Escape looks fun...

[breadknight-likes-things]

Game Journal 05/03/20: A New Hope.....Research Facility Plot Thread.

*Spoilers for Act 3 of Gears Tactics And Gears V*

The Coalition sure does love New Hope Research Facility and the truth about the Locust!  Fresh off Gears V, where they finally elucidated on the bombshell that Epic sort of ....just left lying around unfinished in Gears of War 2 (That being the Locust and queen Myrrah are both the result of failed research experiments on Rustlung and therefore created by the COG), They’ve dipped their toes in the same bombshell reveal again for the main conflict of Gears Tactics.  While there isn’t a whole ton of new information to impart (except that someone other than Chairman Prescott and Delta Squad knew about the facility) I do love the implications it brings to the table for the long tail future of the Gears universe, and the desperation it shows on the part of Prescott and the barely functional government to keep the truth about the war hidden. Naturally, finding out the COG created the very monsters that have resulted in, by the end of Gears of War 3, 99% of the human population of Sera being wiped out makes Gabe Diaz furious.  It puts why he’d form the outsiders so many years later, even after the end of the locust war, into stark perspective.  Even the new COG wasn’t keen to inform it’s citizenry of the fact the worlds near extinction (and even current threat in their mutated “Swarm” identity) was the fault of their predecessors. The same goes for Prescott, shown here in Gears Tactics to be even more quietly desperate to suppress than information than before.  The moment Gabe gives him the false coordinates for where their camp is, he immediately Hammer of Dawn strikes the mountain he thinks they’re on and obliterates any trace any human being may have left there.   It sells the level of desperation Prescott hits in the middle of Gears of War 2 that he would send anybody at all to New Hope, when here he immediately tries to vaporize a squad he personally sent on a similar mission the moment one of them mentions “New Hope” without even a shred of context.  I’ve thought a lot about Prescott, especially after reading the books and his sad desperation to hold the COG together under his web of lies.  It’s even harder now to believe that dude managed to hold anything together at all.  Said web of lies was unraveling all the way up to the end of his life, and we only learn more about it the further into the fiction we go.

Random Screenshot Of The Day:

Not a game screenshot sure, but I’ve been reading the Mark Waid run of Daredevil again, this is one of my all time favorite runs of comics, and without a doubt my favorite version of Daredevil.  It finally looks at the character of Matt Murdock in a way not defined by constant tragedy and trauma.  It’s still one of the few times post Frank Miller that this character has had anything interesting to say to me as a reader, and it says a lot in it’s roughly 50 issue run.

Stray Game Notes: 

- Aside from the story stuff, Gears Tactics continues to be a ton of fun!  I’m shocked I love a tactics game this much!

- Played a bit more Yakuza Kiwami 2, beat up a guy who claims he runs “The 16 Bit Gang”, Yakuza is weird.

[breadknight-likes-things]

Game Journal 04/28/20: I Like A Tactics Game Now?!

Gears Tactics is....really good!  Believe me I’m as surprised as anybody to be writing this, given my previously noted dislike of tactics games or....really anything turn based, but I’m having a lot of fun playing this spinoff!  Granted, Gears of War is long stated to be one of my all time favorite series.  I play all the games, read all the books, consume the tie in media and just generally love the hell out of the lore and characters, so if there was any series that was going to get me to go all in on a genre I generally don’t like, it was Gears (WoW being the other one, hell that made me play a card game, something else I don’t generally care for!) Gears Tactics, insofar as I understand, plays quite a bit like most other tactics games.  You control a small squad of characters, a mix of randomly generated and story based soldiers (and Cole, who makes no canonical sense and is just a pre-order bonus, but I’m not not going to use him), in small scale battles against various Locust units.  I’m not going to explain the nitty gritty of tactics games, but suffice to say Gears Tactics plays closely enough to the more famous ones that if you have any experience in them at all, you’ll likely feel right at home.

The important thing to note, so far, is that in spite of this games slower tactical leanings, it still feels like Gears.  Despite being based around turns, the pacing is fast.  Skills recharge slowly, but you have so many that you’re never short of something useful or cool to pull off.  Plenty of elements of Gears are present, executions and lancer chainsaw attacks are integrated really well as special moves to pull off, giving you an opportunity to gain action points and instant kills respectively.  Hell, even the story so far is classic Gears of War.  Taking place ten years before the events of the first Gears of War, Tactics starts with that grandstanding butthole Prescott’s famous speech before the hammer strikes and then rolls directly into the strikes themselves.  It’s really interesting seeing a story set so close to that event in particular, it’s such a famous part of the canon and we only ever really see it’s long term aftermath! I’m excited to play more Gears Tactics!  Really excited actually!  I went into this game a bit hesitant, a genre I don’t much care for, but a series I love.  Very happy that I’ve come out on the other side of my first impressions this positive! 

Random Screenshot Of The Day:

Not sure what the deal with Yakuza and side quests involving Dominatrix is, but Kiwami 2′s was just as fun as 0′s.

Stray Game Notes:

- Playing more Fallout 4!  Still loving it!  Now that I found a “mod” that just re-enables all the achievements after other mods disable them, I've been experimenting with more mods.  Lots of great stuff to be found even just on the in-game mod browser! 

- How did I ever live without a dual monitor setup?  Not that I use both monitors for games, the other is just for TV, but I am someone who enjoys their TV.

- Sorry I couldn’t do a game journal last night!  If you saw my quick note it was uh....not a pleasant night for me.  It’s great how at the current juncture, basically any hint of a normal sickness is now horrifying, isn’t it?

[breadknight-likes-things]

Bread’s Game of the Year 2019: Gears V

Look, there was absolutely no way that in 2019, a year with a a new entry in the Gears of War franchise, that I was going to have any other GOTY than Gears V.  Thankfully, even without that default stipulation, Gears V is one hell of a great game, and one of the best entries yet in this long running franchise.  In near every way Gears V represents an evolution for the series.  Some of those evolution’s are rough, but even those are more what I’d call growing pains, and don’t detract from an overall excellent experience.  Picking up almost directly after Gears of War 4, Gears V continues the story of the new generation of Gears of War (i.e, everybody’s kids).  This time around the main playable character (though there are a few neat surprises) is Kait Diaz, hot off the twist in Gears of War 4 revealing she’s somehow connected to the Locust Horde of old.  What follows is a pretty revealing dive into the origins of the Locust, the twisted legacy of Queen Myrrah and a world that’s not at all ready for a new war, but is preparing for one the best it can anyway.   Gears of War has never had the most complex story, but it’s always sure as hell had a fun one, and Gears V continues that in that in a way that draws heavy influence from the series past, and even manages to forge ahead with brand new characters (and a couple of old surprises!) in meaningful ways.

Much of the first half of the game is spent with just Kait and Del, and it brings a lot of fun new layers to the characters relationship. Gameplay wise Gears V continues the series rock solid action gameplay with a couple of new twists.  Some that work and some that don’t, but all that I think bring something interesting to the table.  The biggest among them is the games shift to a more open world-ish approach after a traditionally linear first act.  I say “ish” because even though there’s large areas to explore....there’s really nothing to find in them.  There’s a handful of side missions and wrecks to explore for loot and upgrades, but mostly the open worlds just serve as a place to travel through on your way to more traditional linear Gears levels.  Now if I sound down on the open worlds, i’m not.  Even though they add little to the game I’d argue the landscapes they present are downright breathtaking.  Frozen forests and red dune seas provide incredible sights that serve as small breaks in the action, but welcome ones.  Also of note are some very fun new weapons including the Lancer Grenade Launcher and my personal favorite “The Claw”, an absurd patchwork of metal and spikes that by all means shouldn’t work, but the Swarm sure keep firing them at you!  Even Jack, the lovable robot companion who hasn’t been seen since the end of Gears 3, gets a major update in this game.  Now he’s able to be ordered to provide tons of useful battlefield applications, and if one so chooses, can even be directly controlled by a player during a co-op game! Gears V is an incredible action game.  It’s full of great characters, moments and environments.  It’s impossible to separate my love of this franchise with the fact this game ended up being my personal GOTY but then, hey, it’s my list!  I didn’t have more fun with any game this year than the time I spent with Gears V.  I can’t recommend it enough to people who want a fun action adventure game, a great shooter, or a fun story and it’s easily my game of the year for 2019.

You know it’s that good Gears of War content when the throw a lab coat on a jacked guy to let us know he’s the smart one.

[breadknight-likes-things]

Gears V Finally Realizes The Series’ Trademark “Destroyed Beauty”

“Destroyed Beauty” was something I vividly remember bringing up as a design philosophy of the visuals of the original Gears of War, only I think it was fully achieved  this year with the release of Gears V, and in a big way. Sera was so roundly decimated by the time the first three Gears of War games took place it was impossible to envision it as anything other than the war torn hell it had been reduced to.  Gears V (and 4 to be fair) show a world on the mend and prove that in the absence of swarming underground creatures, lasers firing into cities from space and a general brown color pallet, Sera really did have that “Beauty” part of it’s identity on lock before, you know, the first part of the phrase took hold.

Gears V not only gives us an excellent look at the world on the mend, with grand cities like New Ephyra evoking what it must have been like to live in the monolithic Jacinto of old.  It also manages to make the places still in ruin look like downright picture-esque memories of the past.  The two best places of note for this are of course, two places we visited in previous entries of the series:  New Hope Medical Facility and the ruins of Ephyra itself.

New Hope is frozen solid, something the people who worked there likely wouldn’t really mind given it’s history, and the area in which it’s found is almost completely transformed.  In Gears of War 2 New Hope was in a fairly open area, with mostly flat plains and a smattering of trees bordering the facility.  Fast forward twenty something years and New Hope is smack in the middle of a new growth Redwood forest in the middle of a harsh winter.  Nature moved in and reclaimed the area around it, highlighting the devastation inflicted on this isolated place via the immense natural beauty surrounding it. The Ephyran ruins on the other hand, don’t have the benefit of natures contrast.  Long since deliberately sunk into a crater in the events of Gears of War 2,  Ephyra lacks the beauty and color pallet to be found in the more nature oriented sections of the game, but highlights the concept of “Destroyed Beauty” incredibly well.  The sheer increase in fidelity that the Xbox One allows over the 2005 launched Xbox 360 allows for so many more small details to be present.  Mausoleums sit unattended, streets have crumbled into nothing and navigating what used to be this ultra modern city is a nightmare of twisting alleys and fallen buildings. This place feels like it was a paradise to be it at one point it’s history, but is now nothing better than a hole in the ground, and somehow that doesn’t stop it from being a breathtaking sight.

[breadknight-likes-things]

Gears V Final Thoughts

I’m a huge fan of Gears of War, both as a series of games and as a franchise full of characters and lore, and Gears V is one long love letter to both these aspects.  Picking up a month or so after the end of Gears of War 4, Gears V follows the story of Kait much more closely, but it doesn’t abandon 4′s other new characters by any means.  All in all it makes for an almost perfect package of a campaign for me, only held back by one very odd design decisions that lead to prominent pacing issues at a couple points.

The Good:

More Like “Gimmie Myrrah This Story”!: Gears of War 4 had a simple but effective story, it was more concerned with showing the world of Sera bounce back even as it slides into another conflict than anything else.  Gears V is much more in depth, analyzing it’s existing characters to great effectiveness, introducing more fresh faces that get far more fleshed out than you’d assume and, this is the big one for me, clearing up a plot hole from Gears of War 2 that’s been bothering me since 2008. To say too much about the story would give too many spoilers, but suffice to say it’s easily the best one Gears of War has ever had. Stop And Pop Still Won’t Drop:  Gears of War’s gameplay has always been excellent, even the first game with it’s terrible writing and limited selection of weapons still plays pretty damn well today, but it’s refined to a science in Gears V.  There’s just the right amount of weight and speed mixed in with the movement controls, the changes to the shooting to add more recoil to the guns is a little odd at first but makes you wonder how it ever worked without it once you get used to it, and enemies are even more aggressive and intelligent in finding ways to flush you out of cover or keep the pressure on in the games immaculately designed firefights. There’s only a handful of new weapons, like the Lancer GL (Grenade Launcher, and believe me, it rules) and the Swarm’s “Claw” machine gun (that looks like it’s held together with nails and tape and fires as erratically as you’d expect), but all of them serve to introduce some great variety into your combat options.  Most of all though Gears’ shooting gameplay still just feels good, even if every other part of this game had bombed, and failed miserably to achieve what it was going for, if the shooting was still the same I’d probably still be singing this games praises to the end of time.

Jacks Back, Jack: Jack is an odd part of Gears of War because he really never did all that much, being the little invisible robot friend who followed the squad around waiting for someone to say, and I quote, “Jack, rip that door!” before he decided to do anything.  Well in Gears V not only is Jack back, he’s a fully featured mechanic to be used in single player and a full playable character on his own in co-op!  Jack can retrieve weapons and ammo from the battlefield, lay traps, pulse the world to reveal enemies and even mind control select bad guys to fight on his own.  It might sound like he’s a little too much of a Jack of all trades (NOW I GET IT), but using him in the heat of battle never stops being fun and useful.  Also, he occasionally still rips some doors, so don’t worry, you purists out there.

The variety of locations is top notch, including a few nostalgia laden surprises you definitely won’t expect.

The Bad:

Lets Ruin The Paci-Er Uh, Get Back To The Skiff!: (To Preface this point let me just say, I’m glad The Coalition tried....but....) So Gears V made the bold decision to have the bulk of the game set in two large open world areas, one you navigate via a skiff vehicle with a handful of side missions doting both the open worlds you can stop to inspect in-between the main story missions which all both function as and feel like traditional Gears of War levels from series past.  This open world style simply doesn’t work.  The side missions are so few and far between that they truly don’t add anything meaningful to the game except for a handful of generic firefights.  The open worlds are gorgeous to look at and the Skiff is fun to drive, but both end up being utterly pointless 5 or so minute roadblocks to continuing the story of the game.  Again, I’m glad The Coalition tried something new, but this is about the defition of a swing and a miss.  They didn’t lean into the open world enough to re-define what Gears is, but they did lean in just the right amount to cause friction between what they thought they were making with these sections and what the rest of the game actually is. The open world sections were a great idea, and expanded upon I think could work with some refinement, but as they are here only serve to ruin the story pacing with odd roadblocks and travel times that feel like just enough of a chore to be annoying.

[breadknight-likes-things]

The Unexpected Reason Why Health Bars In First Person Shooters Are A Universal Good

Health Bars are a universal thing in gaming that we've all come to expect, but it is weird to sometimes see them in a context they aren't common in, in today's case First Person Shooters.  Seeing a health bar in such games isn't a new thing by any means, it can be traced a long way back to games like Borderlands and Destiny but those examples slipped under the radar due to the fact those games also heavily leaned into RPG systems, another genre where health bars are the most common sight, so at the time those just made sense.

Recently though, I've seen the concept of health bars pop in games that have historically not had them, and don't really have much of an RPG element excuse to feature them anyway.  Just this year I've seen Far Cry New Dawn, Wolfenstein Youngblood and soon (if previews are to be believed) Gears V, all fairly straightforward action games from franchises that have never concerned themselves with things like stats or loot, suddenly featuring big visible banners of health telling you just how much you've killed that bandit, Nazi or monster in front of you.

Is it weird? Yeah a little.  Is it good though? Here's what I want to talk about, because for me the answer is an emphatic yes.  Modern shooters can often have something of a problem with visibility.  Not that the games aren't being seen, but that in the actual game itself, when everything is moving fast and furious and all you really know that you're doing is firing a gun, it can be hard to keep track of the action. Sometimes I'd probably not even be aware a fight was over or even had begun if it weren't for the common musical cues these games usually employ. This is where, for me, health bars come into play as a visual reference that I find to be a universal good.  Having them on screen ends up giving the player a visual anchor to where the action is and where their focus should be directed at any given time. It's something I don't see many people talking about, but think is rapidly becoming an important feature I look out for.

I personally can easily trace my fondness for it back to games of the recent past.  Anytime games would offer some kind of "enhanced sight" option to me that, say, outlined the bad guys in red (Black Ops 3), or put a dot on their head(Most Far Cry Games), I'd always take it.  The excellent visual reference of where the enemies I'm supposed to be fighting far outweighed any concerns I could have had about reduced challenge. The health bars superimposed on the screen, while not the most elegant solution, feels like an extension of that in a way I like, and think is genuinely helpful.  It allows the action to go on as fast and furious as before, but also deals out more visual information that before we might've easily lost track of.

It's a small feature for sure, and who knows if this has even been thought of by the people putting it in games.  For all I know it could just be an industry trend chasing Destiny, which is still arguably the highest profile shooter to have implemented health bars as a normal part of the visual information during gameplay.  Whatever the case actually is, I'm happy about the change and the trend, maybe not for the reasons they intended, but definitely for the benefits it's created.