I finished up Gears 5
Where Gears 4 was very much just another Gears game, 5 makes a lot of minor but collectively meaningful changes, refinements and additions. Namely, the "open world" sections, and the Jack robot.
Jack is a little robot that follows you around, but it comes with a selection of activatable abilities, and you can order it around to pick up weapons and ammo for you. The abilities range from a wall hack, to temporarily turning an enemy into an ally. One of my favourite abilities was the invisibility, which increased its duration after every kill, which meant that you could quite easily chain a number of stealth knife kills before or during every engagement. It did sort of trivialize a lot of encounters, but it was still a lot of fun.
The other addition are the open areas. You get to use this wind skiff to navigate the icy plains of Act 2, or the red desert of Act 3. You are shown your primary objective, and then there are a few secondary objectives scattered around the map. These usually manifest as small engagements, where the rewards are often extra Jack upgrades and heavy weapons - they're well worth doing.
If I had to point out a weird criticism though, it would be how ammo works. When I was playing Gears 4, ammo crates would only replenish the ammo of basic weapons - pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles. If you wanted to replenish the ammo of power weapons, you had to find another of that power weapon to scavenge the ammo from. In Gears 5 though, ammo crates replenished power weapon ammo too. Whilst obviously super convenient, this limitation in Gears 4 encouraged using lots of different weapons, because there was never a guarantee that you would come across more ammo for that gun anytime soon, whereas in Gears 5 I was always lugging around an empty sniper rifle, because I knew that there would likely be an ammo crate around the corner. It just meant that I used a lot less of the sandbox that I probably would have liked.
In the end, it is an enjoyable game. Though with Gears E-Day on the horizon, and not Gears 6, I am curious to see if we are ever going to see a resolution to this plotline.
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Next up is Gears Hivebusters. This is the DLC campaign for Gears 5.
This is a standalone story that basically tells you how the game's Hive mode exists. In this DLC you can pick one of three different characters, each with a different ultimate ability, but other than that, it is mostly just your standard Gears of War fare, without too much to spice things up.
I thought it was okay, but it leans really heavily into that trope where these three characters go from not really caring about one and other, to being inseparable "family" after about two hours. It also focuses really heavily into the series' equivalent of Māori culture, and their various rituals etc. Never really cared for that kind of stuff, so I wasn't bothered about it here either.
Also notably, whilst this DLC is called "Hivebusters", you never actually bust any hives. Obviously there is a whole mode for that, but I would have liked one as the final mission.
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Now im playing Ryse: Son of Rome, and I'm about half way through it now.
Right of the bat, this game looks great. CryEngine games have always looked really impressive, and stood the test of time, but sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind me that this is a 10+ year old game, that launched on the Xbox One, and not something that came out within the last year or two. It looks really great.
One big criticism about its presentation though, is that this game quite possibly has the worst UI/UX experience of any big-budget game that I have ever played. Honestly, it feels like a all of the UI and menu assets are just placeholders, that they decided to ship with. It just makes the game look incredibly cheap whenever a menu or UI element appears on the screen.
The combat is also quite enjoyable, though very simplistic and repetitive. It does the DOOM 2016 glory kill thing, where takedowns give you some kind of resource, but this kind of mechanic is really dependent on having a deep pool of animations to keep that from going stale, and i've just about hit that point.
Honestly the most difficult thing about the game is trying to rewire my brain from Batman Arkham controls, to Ryse's button layout. The functions are exactly the same, but the buttons are different (and un-remapable on controller!) for *reasons*. Namely the Counter being on A instead of Y is really fucking me up. But im getting used to it.
The saving grace though, is that it appears to be very short. I'm pretty sure the game will wrap up before it really overstays its welcome.
