Beaten: Gears of War 4 (Xbox One)

 Finally, game designers with the philosophy "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". After beating Gears 1-3 back to back I thought I had had enough of the repetitive cover-based gameplay, but last year I fired up Gears of Ward Judgment and had a blast. It was exactly what I expected - more of the same - with a great story involving a side character from 1-3, great action, and polished graphics and gameplay. 

Gears of War 4, I feared, would suffer from the design philosophy where they think fans of the game want it to evolve, to become more complex, to be more like this game and that game. I was dreading things like crafting, or levelling up player attributes, or multiple choice conversation trees being added to the game.

To my surprise, the game is a perfect and polished continuation of the series and its plotlines, showcasing the next generation of heavily armored warriors fighting through varied areas of cover-based shooting. The locust threat from the previous games has been replaced by killer robots and a new threat in the form of locust 2.0, and that's all good. There are little guys and brutes and bosses as in the previous games, and their movements and tactics are a lot of fun to fight.

The graphics are gorgeous, and in some of the ruined old brick buildings I felt that Dark Souls vibe as my squad worked their way through those areas. I forgot the scale of difficulty on Gears of War games and played on normal instead of hardcore on this run and it was relatively easy but still challenging at times.

Story wise, it all comes together really well, and some familiar faces from Gears 1-3 show up to help out the next generation of Cog (or former Cog) soldiers.  It was a long enough campaign to be entertaining without wearing out its welcome, and with Gears 5 already in my backlog, I'm sure I will return to the series at some point in the future, this time without the fear of bad design ideas muddying up the perfect and polished formula that Epic Games has established with the series.

Some games do need to evolve and grow and it's great to see in subsequent releases. Other times, however, designers add too many unnecessary bells and whistles and it adds nothing to the experience (a good example is that Assassin's Creed game awhile ago that had tower defense segments). Gears of War is a simple and fun formula that ain't broke, so I am grateful that Epic choose the wise path and didn't fix it.