Wednesday 19 October 2016

Gears or War 4 


Gears of War 4 came out on October 11, 2016 and lots of people were hyped up for this game and a lot of those people were also worried that it wouldn't be up to the quality of the previous entries in the series. Gears of War 1 is a classic, and I bought the game 3 times. First on its initial release for the xbox 360, then I bought the windows port and lastly I bought the PC version of the Ultimate Edition.

I loved the game each time and really loved the multiplayer. I didn't like Gears 2 as much. I don't know what it was but I think that for the most part the levels were bland and boring. I didn't even play much of the MP is part 2. Gears 3 though, I really liked. Lots of it was outside with some great looking graphics. They brought in a bunch of new characters and integrated them really well into the story and gameplay. There were enough new features to make the multiplayer fresh, but kept it similar at its core.

Lots of Gears of War fans really dislike Judgment though. I personally really like it and still play it online. I thought the campaign was really fun and the multiplayer felt like it could have been a new mode in gears 3 but stood on its own really well.


Now for Gears of War 4 (PC)
There aren't many video games that I get excited over anymore, being 35 I have played many, many games. I have always been excited for this series though. When Gears 3 came out I was at work counting the minutes until I could go home, pick up my copy and go play. Same for this one. The second midnight struck I loaded up the game and went straight into multiplayer.

I felt right at home with this game. It controls just like the previous games but the weapons after some play felt more balanced than previous games. I felt like given the right amount of distance, the lancers were very good against opponents using the gnasher, as opposed to other games where the gnasher would pop heads from far away. All the old weapons are back , including the snub pistol, the boltok, the Hammerburst, the Retro Lancer and the Longshot. There are a bunch of new weapons now as well. The Embar is a new sniper rifle, there is an Overkill which is a crazy powerful shotgun, I think its called the Enforcer, which is like an Uzi, and there are even more weapons to use. Though in Multiplayer the go to weapon is still the gnasher.

All the game modes are in there like Warzone, King of the Hill, Team Death Match, and Guardian, along with new modes Dodgeball and Arms Race.


There is customization where you can choose which characters to use in multiplayer and what gun skins to use as well. I find the character choices really lacking compared to the previous games. For the main characters JD, Del and Kait you have their outsider version, their armored version and then you have these weird color blast version where they look like they got nailed by tons of paintballs of different colours , and then they each have a day of the dead skin. Also each main character also has a zombie version...

There are skins for Anya. There is a version of her from E-Day, and one called Tomorrow Anya which is her in the outsider looking clothes. There is a male and female V-Day Gear, a male and female E-Day gear, old Baird , old Cole, E-Day Minh and even a zombie Dom.

There are a couple others as well from the story but the campaign has young Dom, and it even has Bernie in it as well as a bunch of other characters which would have made great skins for multiplayer. If they don't add them in via DLC then that will be a big missed opportunity.

In my opinion a huge miss step was the decision to have you unlock skins by buying Operations and Elite packs. You can buy them with credits you earn in game from multiplayer matches, or you can buy them for (Canadian) $2.50 for the Operations pack, $6.50 for Elite packs and horde and versus boosters are $1.29


The coalition made the amount of credits you earn very low. It costs 3,500 credits to get an elite pack but you get about 75 credits per match. It can take a lot of time.  And when you get a pack there is no guarantee what is in it. Its random. You can even get doubles. Leveling up doesn't unlock anything, so it doesn't feel like there is much point in the leveling system. I'm not even sure that  you get anything when you re-up.


Multiplayer is still really fun though but I just cant get on board with this type of thing in video games. I know companies want to make as much money as possible , but this is the sleaziest way to do it and ruins a great gaming experience.

The campaign was something I was afraid to start. I didn't want to play it and be disappointed in it so I put it off for a while. I beat it the other night though and was really impressed with it luckily.
Let me say though, that the new characters don't have the personality and charisma that the main characters from the previous games had. For the most part I even forgot that Del was even there. I wouldn't call the interactions between characters through the campaign banter because rarely was it witty or fun, it was just talk. "This looks bad."
"yeah, very. Lets keep moving"

Though near the end there was a funny joke about kings and wizards, but I cant think of any other time I enjoyed the dialogue between the three main characters.

The graphics looked great. The weather effects were awesome and I really liked the design of the levels and the pacing of the battles. I was hooked and pretty much played through the campaign in two sittings. I loved it. I was disappointed in the story though. I know they are trying to set up future games, but all the story consisted of was pushing forward to find people.


First, Kait's mom gets taken, so we need to find her. So you go for Marcus for help. He gets taken and you spend a bunch of time trying to get him back. You do, then back to tracking down Kait's mom. Then you call in some help. Baird and Cole show up , you find Kait's mom , game over.

You do learn some stuff , like the locust are back and using people to create more of them. You also learn something I thought was cool and wonder how it will play out later but I wont mention it here, you will have to play the campaign to find out, or watch my gameplay videos on Youtube of the campaign which shows what I'm talking about.

So, overall the game is really good. I haven't mentioned Horde mode but its similar to previous Horde modes. Its fun if you have people you know to play with.
You can get a lot of entertainment out of this game, it's just unfortunate that The Coalition decided to go the way they did with unlocking skins.




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