Beaten: Gears of War Judgment (360)

I sampled the first Gears of War game back in late 2008, but was not impressed enough to pursue it at the time, as at that point I was catching up on a lot of other XBox 360 titles. It wasn't until 2011, after beating the entire Killzone Trilogy back-to-back, that I decided to do the same with Gears of War, and beat the first 2 and any substantial DLC they had ahead of the release of Gears of War 3.

And that was plenty of COG-tastic action for awhile. When Gears of War Judgment released in 2013, I ignored it, but in April 2015 when it was available for free on XBox Live Gold, I downloaded it, fired it up, and said "Nahhh, not yet."

Apparently I was in the mood last week, playing it as my upstairs campaign (a game played on one of the consoles in the guest bedroom). The action and combat are really just more of the same as the trilogy ahead of it, but the story is that of one of the side characters and his squad, all doing.....the exact things these soldiers do in every game - defy orders to win and get in trouble for it. Okay, so the action, combat, and story are the same.

It doesn't matter, because Gears of War games are all polish.They look great, the combat controls are tight, and the game's rules are kept simple. Area after area of waist-high barriers for fun cover shooting of badass enemies is what you get. The ally AI is better than most, and they aren't a burden at all to have along. The game's chapters let each of the squad have their own testimony about the situation to share, and the player controls them at these times.

So yes, I recommend Gears of War Judgment if you want more Gears. Me, I've got a still shrink-wrapped copy of Gears 4 in my backlog already for the next time I get that itch.

Something that was a first for me in gaming with Gears of War Judgment is that I was able to start the campaign on the XBox 360 and finish it on the XBox One. Microsoft's backwards compatability push over the last few years (and hopefully ahead) gets a huge thumbs from this middle-aged gamer. Hopefully we see more and more systems and gaming architectures maintain playability for past titles going forward.