Gears of War: Reloaded Review

Gears of War is a series best known for being as blunt as you can get. Beefslab-shaped soldiers rev their enormous chainsaw guns and blast through hordes of equally beefslab-shaped enemies, only the baddies have a skin condition. You’d be quick to dismiss it as testosterone-fueled tripe, but I’ll staunchly defend that the sum of its parts make an excellent whole.

A grub hole, if you are a fan of the series.

All those years ago, it was a random thing thrown into my pre-owned Xbox 360 purchase, and I dipped my toe into it with near subterranean expectations – but was soon hooked on the casual desperation on display of each meaty muscleman in Delta squad, because beneath their cartoonish proportions were some flawed and flavourful fuck-ups that quickly captured my heart.

It’s the COLE TRAIN baby

For those that perhaps missed the boat back in 2006, Gears of War introduced us to the world of Sera, and the plight of one bandana-wearing Marcus Fenix. Sera was a world not too unlike our own, until a brutal enemy race known as The Locust burst through the ground and set about annihilating the human population. In a moment of desperation, Marcus’ father developed and made use of a satellite-borne weapon known as the Hammer of Dawn to scour the surface of Sera, driving back the invading force and plunging the human world into a near-apocalyptic state. It was a bitter victory for the sake of survival, and the quality of that survival was questionable at best.

The story of Gears of War chronicles what happens next, with Marcus released from prison as part of a conscription play to bolster the military presence and set about finishing off the Locust once and for all. The entire tone is one of scrappy hopelessness, with every character marinating in a false bravado that could only be described as a coping mechanism. Everyone is pretty sure they are going to die, everyone knows that their chances of pulling this off are slim, and everyone knows that they have no choice but to keep going.

And so, Gears of War: Reloaded is tasked with reinvigorating this 19-year old tale (for a second time) to get people back on board with the long-suffering existence of Marcus Fenix, from a time before his progeny took centre stage and the entire series evolved beyond the impressive scope of its debut.

The driving section: time to shift gears (of war)

Immediately, you can appreciate the high fidelity nature of Reloaded – it’s a strange duck, being that it is a remaster of a remaster, serving as a further improvement of the Gears of War: Ultimate Edition release. It stands somewhat as an impressive example of the near-infinite scalability of the Unreal Engine, even when dealing with the older Unreal 3 incarnations. To this end, it means that the game feels like a further polished release of Gears of War – though obviously this time around touting the leap to PlayStation hardware as an official knocking down of a platform wall that no longer really exists. Colouration is a little brighter, the muddiness of both the Xbox 360 and Xbox One visuals have been dialled back a little – but the mood is still unmistakably gritty and grimy (as was the style of the time).

The issue is that this continuous visual improvement seems to have finally broken through a barrier – like hitting the uncanny valley; suddenly the jankiness of its time period is stripped of its charm and acceptability. Animations clipping together as you rapidly slide into cover, enemies falling to the ground in no less than eight enormous meaty pieces – stuff that felt right at home even in the lofty year of 2015 suddenly feels awkward to behold, like watching ultra-high definition pornography. Perhaps there are things that were best un-beholden by our eyes. Yes, it looks modern and plays in a familiar way that was well ahead of its time for 2006 – but the more you polish this gem, the more impurities come to light. And so, the clarity suffers.

With the crisp detail of characters now at an all-time high, seeing the way they oddly rotate and pivot on the spot during radio chatter moments or mechanically slide into cover with no threat present becomes jarring. You’ll likely swear a few times as your squadmates randomly stand in a doorway, blocking your progress – or walk in front of enemy fire to be immediately downed, and bark for you to come and assist them. It leaves me wondering if this supreme celebration of the game would have been better suited as a proper remake. The idea of bringing the series to the new frontier of PlayStation owners, warts and all, is absolutely an idea that sounds grand on paper – but when the finessing of the technology makes those warts seem obnoxiously bulbous, surely there is a conversation to be had.

Forget your war face, that is Marcus’ ‘chainsawing’ face

Not all of these bulbous warts are simple machinations of the game either, some just feel like strange missing occlusions of game mechanics – like the many times I would see enemies simply appear out of thin air, I assume because I had been so aggressive in pushing up the game didn’t expect me to see through that particular doorway. Some enemies with environmental movement, like running on ceilings, would transition between surfaces at a speed that felt unnaturally difficult to track – made all the worse when you find yourself manning a stationary turret that has your screen shaking like a Hilux heading over a cattle grid. Thankfully this was only a random occurrence, because that may well be the closest I have come to a motion sickness headache in a video game.

Madly vibrating Troika turrets aside, navigating the world and dispatching locust feels great. The overtly gory executions that defined the series look pretty stellar in HD, with a great emphasis on character expressions as your chainsaw bayonet cleaves some deformed schmuck in half – but the same uncanny valley weirdness creeps in as goofy positioning makes it look like you are sawing thin-air while your target mimes their bifurcation – another thing that was far more charming in the days of old. It’s many of these oddities, stuff more tolerated during the yesteryear of exciting, trailblazing potential, that leave Reloaded consistently feeling tonally strange.

Raam is such a fantastically brutal villain

Gameplay wise, it is what you would expect. For me, the cover-based schtick of Gears of War was perhaps the only incarnation of that particular gameplay loop that felt comfortable, with a slick and sticky cover system and generously dim enemies that let you active-reload your weapons in peace. The brutal, industrial-grade weaponry of the Gears series thuds and grinds with the best of them, brought to life through the obvious audio improvements – all while your squadmates continue to mill about and feel mostly like liabilities. Two person co-op is absolutely the way to go.

It may well be my imagination, but the gunplay did feel quite snappy during my PC-based gameplay experience. Zipping from cover to cover has always felt intuitive and direct, but in Reloaded the feedback felt a little sharper as I plunked heads with a Boltok handgun in ways I had only ever dreamed. This may be a placebo from the blisteringly high framerate, but if The Coalition has jiggled weapon ergonomics a little, kudos to them. If this is not the case, my Gears skills are clearly aging like fine wine.

While I am right at home with the core expectation of Gears of War, I am again bummed out that there isn’t a little more sauce to make tweaks in Reloaded. The classic ‘roadie run’ is deeply intrinsic to getting from point A to point B, but the camera shake and rough FoV shift during it has always left my eyes tired – and Reloaded seemed a perfect time to add a camera shake slider, or even a toggle to help my poor, tired eyes. Alas, no such thing exists – similarly the difficulty options within the game are non-existent. Some sliders for incoming enemy damage could have gone down a treat for people unfamiliar with the impeccable need for cover-hopping, if only as a learning experience. Even the menu design, which harken back to the Xbox 360 era, still reek of that brutalist utility – all function, and no form.  But hey, they got colour-blindness options!

Doesn’t matter the setting, green glowing goop is never good

The classic gameplay really starts to sing when you lace up your boots and jump into the meaty multiplayer offering. It’s a shooter experience like no other, where knowledge of maps goes well beyond simply knowing where ‘the big gun’ spawns. Knowing what cover is where, and how to chain your movement between these places is something unseen in other games – and you could easily write it off as a shitty barrier of entry for the multitude of modes, but in reality it’s so quick to grasp and get up to speed on, you’ll be hard pressed to not enjoy it.

Some changes have been made in this area, simply by way of adding some modes that were absent in the previous releases of Gears of War, but were present in sequels. This is likely to tide people over as they wait for the next Gears title (now announced to be coming in 2026) and serves well as a compelling reason to give Reloaded a burl, even if you have zero interest in replaying the campaign for the umpteenth time.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of words here, particularly for a game that I have played twice already. I do very much love Gears of War, even if I consider it one of the weaker parts of the series – it is elevated by its station as the origin of the narrative. But with two generations of visual improvements under its belt, it is left feeling a little like a home that has been over-renovated – some of these walls really need to come down, load-bearing or not. The experience on offer is unreplicatable, but modern sensibilities and sanity checks on things that don’t really pass the sniff check in 2025 would have done a lot to change this from ‘yet another remaster’ and instead cemented it as the truly definitive way to start your Gears story.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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