 Ever not like something that everyone else seems to love like a TV show or a movie or series of games I'm not talking about something like destiny where a committed group love it and everyone else hates it I'm talking about a game that everybody seems to love players influencers reviewers for example Uncharted 4 was universally praised Reviews were like gushing and I found that game to be utter garbage like so shit I have no idea how anyone could enjoy quote-unquote playing it. I suppose you could enjoy it as a piece of fiction, but That's how I felt about Gears of War in a lot of ways Granted I didn't loathe it with the same white-hot anger that I do Uncharted, but I sure as hell didn't really like it I found the universe interesting enough and when the games were new I liked the gore and the horror feel But I found the gameplay sluggish and boring and the story to be over-the-top Bro-infused melodrama when the coalition took over for Gears 4 I gave the game yet another chance and while I found it a bit better. I still thought it was basically average The story was again Ludicrous the gameplay was a never-ending series of rooms filled with the exact same enemies Gears 4 in particular is Maddening and that the game introduces precisely one new enemy type in each chapter It's just the exact same thing over and over and over So why did I even bother with Gears 5? Honestly, I planned on kind of hating it and making a funny video about how much I hated it But all my best plans go to shit after the logo Gears 5 shocked me with how good it was and it accomplishes this excellence despite only tiny changes to the formula In fact, Gears 5 is the best example I've seen recently of something that I say all the time Something that I harped on in my video on control and something I'll address in detail when I talk about Borderlands 3 next week after I finish a second playthrough Gears 5 is amazing proof that tiny little changes can be Transformative when they feel like they were thoughtfully implemented and the beauty of my time with Gears 5 is I was convinced It was going to be different. I booted the game up to find I was being forced through a non-skippable tutorial section A tutorial section that featured the same heavy dose of bro-ness that annoyed me so much about the other games Not to mention I found it more than a little ridiculous that Gears 5 would assume There's a single living human unfamiliar with the mechanics of third-person cover shooting at this point If it had been September 19th odds are good I wouldn't even have finished a tutorial because make no mistake Movement and shooting is as stiff and restrictive as ever in Gears 5 I'm sure there are people out there who will defend the combat here But nobody on earth can argue that this precise system hasn't been done better in other places The division 2 does movement and combat in a cover shooter a million times better than Gears does But I was bored and there's nothing going on and I tend to push myself through if I think I'll hate a game enough to Have an unpopular opinion and I am glad I kept playing Okay, this one took a few days to get ridden because I was deliberating how to organize it But here's what we're gonna do. There are three areas that saw significant but still fairly modest changes from the previous games We're gonna look at each of those areas and describe how these small changes add up to making a spectacularly good game one of the year's best and remember this comes from a guy who does not like cover shooters and Doesn't really like Gears Command All right, here's a good place to explain my history with the game very briefly I played the original Gears of War all the way through I thought it was decently okay But almost immediately forgot it and kind of marveled at why everyone thought it was so good I started playing Gears 2 and didn't finish I started playing Gears 3 got halfway through and didn't finish Started Gears 4 got halfway through and didn't finish Until this week when I went back to see if I was remembering it wrong and it was actually great It wasn't and I was not I've got the ultra super xbox game past thingy So there was no risk here for me I got the game on pc and xbox with their play anywhere cross save thing and gave it a go My main issue with every Gears game has been the same things Combat is extremely limiting. It's clunky and samey It's literally open a door get behind a box kill a wave of enemies Open a door get behind a box kill enemies cutscene open a door get behind a box kill enemies As I've said many times shooting things until they explode is always at least moderately fun So the games never felt outright bad Just mediocre and monotonous Gears 5 follows the same classic Gears form There was a few seemingly very small changes that take the combat from repetitive and monotonous to exciting and varied There's a bunch of crossover between changes to the combat and the levels that are improvements But we're just going to look specifically at the combat here Gears 5 has a few little wrinkles that manage to mix things up more than you would think for such small additions First of all the change to a more open-ended map with travel time to space the combat out does wonders for the monotony issue But we'll get to that later as far as the moment-to-moment combat Gears 5 brings a modest progression skill system to the game which helps alleviate one of Gears's greatest flaws By adding a few really cool skills like stealth and a shield and a heal and a few combat attacks that are on relatively short cooldowns Gears allows you to play much more aggressively than was possible in previous games You can still go slowly from cover to cover Or you can use the skills to flush enemies out or safely flank them with invisibility It's nothing revolutionary or overpowered They're carefully balanced so that the combat doesn't revolve around them While still having them be crucially important in the more difficult fights These skills really masterfully ride the line They aren't so important that Gears loses its identity and becomes some crappy rpg But they're enough to give something else to the game Some mechanical complexity and some variety in how you can approach encounters and because they are unlocked not through xp But by finding and using upgrade parts the game very carefully paces how they ramp up the combat By the time things get really hectic you've got the tools to make those encounters fun and fast paced in a way that previous games simply were not The second major difference here is enemy variety The first three games were pretty low on enemy types Gears 4 added some new ones, but so slowly that it takes nearly four chapters until you see the third enemy type Gears 5 uses every enemy type right out of the gate And there is just enough variety in enemies that cleverly mixing different types in different arenas with different skills Allows the game's combat sections to feel fresh and new the entire way through Replaying Gears 4 this week. I honestly had to push myself through it I'd enter a room and think jesus christ again another 20 jubies and 10 regular dudes with one big guy This is never a problem in the fifth game Boss fights are fun and exciting and paced perfectly throughout Finally nearly every encounter in every single gears game before this started the exact same way like seriously every single one You enter a room a bunch of dudes break through a door and start shooting at you Gears 5 has a very very very modest Stealth system that changes things up by sometimes having enemies already in the arena when you arrive You can slowly kill the guys on the edge or have some time to survey the battlefield and make a plan Simply having enemies already in the room ramps up the tactical approach that gears fans seem to really love Skills enemy variety and enemy spawns and stealth Each of these changes are tiny on their own and none of them are any kind of revolution to the formula But combined they take a reasonably fun if boring and repetitive combat system and make it an absolute joy I can't stress it enough gears 5 combat is the best the game has ever been by a large margin Levels and traversal Pacing in a game is different from pacing in a movie When it comes to story and cutscenes the same principles apply The games need to also pace their gameplay, which makes it even harder One of the things I most disliked about the previous gears games was how they were paced It is a never-ending string of action Broken up only by scenes of opening doors and melodramatic cutscenes as we all know Every single game ever is only a series of repetitive tasks Doom is enter area and shoot everything dark souls is enter level and kill everything But some games can keep this feeling fresh and some cannot Zoom and souls in particular keep things fresh by having frequent periods of quiet Expiration to let things calm down Gears games just don't really do that It is just a string of 20 rooms in a row each with a bunch of enemies in the door All of the games have had really nice art design and well designed arenas for the combat But it still has been paced poorly in my opinion gears 5 Changes its map and level design in a way that stays true to its action routes while finally allowing the game to have a Proper pacing to let its story its characters and even its combat breath a little Gears has historically been extremely gamey in its level design and that is not a knock per se. It's just a fact The game has always been cutting edge visually for its time and gears 5 is amazing looking And its art design and locations have always been cool to play in even when the game was extremely brown In fact that muted color palette is as much a part of gears as its arena design and its gameplay pacing While I appreciate that gears as arenas are carefully designed combat spaces I can also say it is perhaps the thing that I disliked most about the previous games And that's because the way the gameplay has always been laid out is just really repetitive I've already touched on it, but we really need to drive home. Just how similar gears has always played Enter an area with ammo spread all over and 15 waste high boxes and then fight a wave of enemies Have another wave spawn and then a third and then open a door in a qte and enter another remarkably similar room You repeat this for 45 minutes until the level ends and then you do it all again in a level with different textures It means that you really are just Constantly shooting enemies like it only stops for the door qte and the cutscenes In a way the campaigns of gears games have completely recreated the horde mode of the game But instead of a matchmaking queue in between you get a cutscene in between This is so central to the way the gears has been designed that when I heard this game would have a more open world and side quests I found that kind of impossible to imagine And to be honest the mixtures of gears levels and pacing with open world garbage sounds like a recipe for a hilarious disaster But like everything else with gears the change to the more open world format is done But only very gently There are still large levels that feature the classic gears pacing Except this time all of them work because this open world format breaks these up into different bite sized chunks In this gorgeous open map you will spend some quiet time exploring and listening to the characters banter Mixed within these maps will be several large dungeon type levels that are kind of typical gears levels Then there'll be several medium sized wave type combat encounters and several small little areas of interest with upgraded materials and a quick combat section or a boss And the open world areas aren't huge ridiculous sprawling monstrosities Think the smaller areas and borderlands one It takes maybe two minutes to get from one end to the other They are almost perfectly sized to make traversal and exploration fun and never tedious They're small enough that going off the beaten path means never traveling more than a minute each way Gears is still mainly about shooting things until they explode into a puddle of gore But you appreciate that splatter more when you get a little breathing room in between This small change and how gears deliver to the content works absolute wonders And it's the single biggest reason this game works so damn well Every time you start getting bored with something it ends and you spend five minutes walking or sledding around taking in the sights Before stumbling on something else Not only does it work wonders for gears is pacing it works wonders for its characters and story development It is hard to absorb character or plot when you're getting into a 10 minute firefight every 30 seconds This very minimal map traversal is a revelation because it's a solution to the game's problems in a really elegant way And a solution that works far better than I would have believed If you'd asked me why I didn't like gears games I would have given all my reasons if you'd asked me how to fix it I doubt I would have said making an open world game And yet these quiet moments which almost never happened in the previous games are so cool Because the map is just simply freaking beautiful and because del and kate are such likable characters And because the new skills that the game is introduced are so fun to use that it's a pleasure to hunt down the upgrade parts in the area's side missions The coalition had a lot of pressure to make gears games still be successful And that means changing things enough so that each game feels fresh and necessary But not so much that the people who love gears get pissed off and stop playing The coalition made these small but significant changes to the formula this time around it Every single one they did is a success. It is quite the achievement story Alrighty if you're like me by which I mean a snobby asshole You probably have strong opinions on the difference between a good action movie and a bad action movie If you're not a film snob, you probably have the same opinions without really having thought about why If that's the case allow me to bore you for a moment Michael bay is a stupendously successful filmmaker while also being someone that film snobs despise This is because his movies are terribly paced and fairly stupidly plotted in general They're successful because bay is a master of production and epicness His movies are less a well paced narrative than a never-ending sequence of over-the-top action set pieces And this isn't simply the transformer movies Although those movies have taken bay's general formula to a whole new extreme But right from the start bay's movies have had this similar structure from armageddon and bad boys and teenage mutant ninja turtles to the absolutely dreadful pearl harbor Bay's movies blend ridiculously high production values state of the art effects and constant action only interrupted by soap opera level dramatic scenes These movies work and are successful because they beat the viewer into a state of submission The sheer insanity of the action mixes with the bluntness of the drama to create a film that never stops beating you over the head The first four gears games were the video game equivalent of a michael bay film I mean, maybe that's not totally fair because the gameplay of gears was new and interesting when it was released But by gears 4 the cover shooter was not something exciting anymore In the background here, I'm going to put several of the cinematic action scenes from gears 4 up And I think you'll see what I mean. It's not enough in this style of film or game to narrowly escape death The characters have to jump from an exploding helicopter and grab onto a power line while fire billows behind them Unlike bay's films, however, gears has at least always had a consistent and interesting universe to place its narratives in The cog is a militaristic totalitarian type of state Its rivals the uir were stand-ins for the old soviet union and the general story of those two entities Fighting brutal wars that totally destroy their civilizations only to then have an even greater outside threat emerge That's a great backdrop for a game world The universe of gears has always been ripe for really interesting stories and it's always had very entertaining characters It's never risen to being truly excellent only because it is consistently reveled in its bro-ness Everything was here for a compelling and intimate story and instead we got good enough stories More concerned with being badass than with being powerful narratives Gears 5 is a spectacularly well-told action story It's so good. I was literally shocked I can't recall the last time a game had a moment that made me say no Out loud and gears 5 has several powerful emotional moments mixed into its unbelievably well-paced action tale Now listen, this is still an action movie gears 5 is not citizen came But it is much closer to aliens or raiders of the lost ark or mad max fury road than it is to bad boys or the transformers We've already talked about how changing the design of gears of war's maps Meant that the gameplay achieves a pace as good as any other game But the change in design does the same thing for the story With so much quiet time in between gunfights and perfectly acted and written dialogue between kate and del You become very attached to these characters very quickly It's totally impossible to tell a compelling story if you don't really care about the characters When the characters are only stereotypes and not people you do not empathize with them Gears 5 tells the story about a quest An important and deeply personal quest of kates It's also the story of friends drifting apart because they can't confront tragedy that came between them Now gears 5 still has some things that are a little trite It still has a bunch of cliches because the action genre needs those cliches It's better to think of them as motifs actually But the best fiction in any genre works with its cliches to subtly subvert your expectations and gears does that repeatedly It hits on every interesting human emotion that's worth exploring in an action film Fear shame courage comradeship loss and hope Gears 5 isn't just a great game. It's one of the best action movie stories You will ever experience in any medium It is a master class in pacing character plot and chemistry And with that we're going to have a small section of spoilers because I don't think it's really possible to do it Just as without examining two crucial plot points to separate this game from most video games you will play I generally don't do spoilers sections because it is so fucking rare that a video game has anything remotely good enough to spoil But gears 5 does if you haven't played it you should skip ahead to this time Here And after you play come watch this Spoilers All right Like I said, it is pretty rare that big budget games have anything that even deserves the spoiler tag And it's like super rare that a big budget action title actually surprises me like ridiculously rare So rare I honestly cannot even think of an example Gears 5 had two moments that surprised me so much I sat up the entire plot hinges on a quote unquote mystery Of why kate is having visions and what the swarm really are This of course is no mystery at all. In fact, it's so obvious what's going on. You can't help but thinking. All right Seriously guys, you had not figured this out yet Still even though this mystery is totally obvious the level that reveals what's going on is unbelievably good The cutscenes lighting and horror vibe as well as the clap-trap like ai robot is creepy and engaging It's one of the very best levels of the last few years with a pretty damn fun boss fight at the end It's one of the game's many highlights, but none of that was all that surprising Gears 5 surprised me twice once at the beginning and once at the end The first surprise comes in the first chapter You start out playing as JD like you did in the last game Now JD is a likable character and things go basically exactly as you'd expect in a gears game There's a simple plan Shit goes wrong and then bug monsters come from everywhere Things look like they're hopeless until the character you're playing says to hell if you're red tape. I'm going to save those people This is such a trope and action games in movies that it is impossible to generate suspense Early in a game when a character tries to do something impossible to save innocent lives What do you as a player expect? There are two possibilities It all works out and the powers that be thank you Or it all works out and the powers that be punish you for being a maverick Even though it all worked out and you were right The game is clearly relying on your decades of experience with this genre They know what you are expecting When JD runs into middle of a battle with the hammer of dawn to kill the huge swarm monsters You are not even remotely nervous You're watching it passively waiting for the cutscene to end The fact that things play out differently isn't even the most brilliant part of this It's the execution that is masterful Instead of surprising you by having JD fail the game keeps things as expected JD does in fact kill all the big monsters with his risky move the hammer of dawn Saves the day They even do the classic shot where the camera tries to generate suspense about the hero Before he emerges from a pile of smoke and rubble exactly like every single action movie or game ever Saved the day And then after a couple of seconds pause the hammer of dawn goes out of control It starts randomly striking everything around JD runs to save his friend and the civilians and at that moment It strikes the bus killing everybody I was sitting next to my wife and I said oh Oh, shit This is a game playing with your expectations in a way that is exceedingly rare And it's the game's way of saying hey things are going to be a little different this time It's one of the best gaming moments. I've had this year and it's not even really the best moment of this game Now let's get to the other big surprise Having a character have to choose to save one person or another is a common trope as well So when you've got to choose whether to save JD or Dell, it's easy to think this is a cheap way to drum up melodrama But the way this choice is implemented is so brilliant that that would be really unfair to how masterfully this is done I am willing to bet that the vast majority of people are going to choose to save Dell here It's a hard choice for sure And if you've played the other games at all, there's a lot going on This is the character you played in the fourth game as he is a likable everyman and a decent human You spent the last chapters reconciling with him and watching as he tries to work through the tragedy you played in the first act Beyond even that this is marcus and annas drowd's son So there's a ton of history with a JD character enough that this is a hard choice I totally did not expect to have to make this choice and when it happened. I said out loud what no what? Still the game gives you some time to decide and it's very very hard not to choose dell here And there's a reason it's hard to not choose dell The pacing that we've been talking about This choice here simply would not work in the previous games But in gears 5 there's just enough downtime to make it feel like an actual journey Again, it isn't the witcher 3, but it is precisely enough to pull off what they need to pull off Dell is blameless. He is unambiguously a great guy He's funny and you spent the last 15 hours fighting with him But also just slowly walking around the map with him. You've talked with him about JD and how he's changed He supported you the whole time. He risked his life to come with you to begin with That doesn't mean you don't feel bad The game is quite brutal with how it handles JD's death. It's not gory, but it's powerful You get a close scene of JD choking which lasts for several seconds So that in your head you start thinking that actually JD is going to be saved at the last minute And it'll cause an emotional rift between the three But then in a quick violent moment His neck is broken and his corpse is flung down at your feet where you get a good look at his horrified death mask The game rightfully takes some time for genuinely excellent acting from the two characters as they weep and grieve before making you move on And here's where the second brilliant bit of pacing comes in This is a powerful moment But the game only gives you a little time to grieve just like the characters have before you are back to the crucially important plan You'll walk with Dell and hear their forced banter and get into a couple of fights After you clear a few more rooms the power of JD's death has basically faded You've had time to come to grips with it. And if you're like me, you're feeling pretty confident with the choice you have made And then you come around a corner and the game immediately goes to a cut scene It's marcus phoenix center frame and a close-up. It is an unbelievably well-executed gut punch It makes you immediately feel like shit for starting to feel better It makes you question how you didn't even consider what you would do when you saw marcus And the response of kate in the cut scene wordlessly captures exactly how you feel ashamed Devastated terrified of what marcus might say or do and right when that tension gets uncomfortable You're pushed into the final battle. I can't praise enough the way this was handled This is the kind of stuff that in a lesser game would feel like cheesy silly melodrama that makes me mad If the game hadn't succeeded in making you care about these characters None of this would be in shit But it has made you care about all of these guys with its new map and pacing and its focus on quieter moments rather than constant Michael bay explosive action It's why gears five is the game version of a spielberg movie while gears four isn't wrapping up So needless to say I was blown away with how much I enjoyed this game All these little changes add up to a transformed game in many ways Even though the reviews are basically fairly consistent and many of them seem to say hey, it's gears and it's good The truth is this is an amazing job of taking a hugely popular game from a legendary developer And trusting themselves enough to bring something new while still saying true to the most important parts It is without a doubt the very best gears game by a large margin in my opinion And it's easily one of the year's very very best games. I cannot recommend it enough It's the rare game that leaves me with basically no complaints. And if you're watching any of my videos, you know just how rare that is All right, guess what i'm playing now Yep, borderlands 3 in fact, this video is a bit late because I had been toying with the idea of combining this And my borderlands video See while gears five makes small changes borderlands makes almost no changes And I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast them But this video is already pretty long and the more I played borderland the more I thought it deserved its own long write-up Anyway, if you have the xbox game past thingy, you should play gears five You don't need to have played any of the others to enjoy it. All right. See you next time. Thanks for coming. Bye