Gears of War 4 (2016) (PC) (The Coalition)
0The first two Gears of War titles didn't really do a whole lot for me, even though I obviously respected Epic's genre-defining innovations to third-person gameplay and recognized that both GoW 1 & 2 were good-looking and well-produced action games. While the wonderfully muscular faux-Classical architecture of the man-made environments certainly had a distinctive style going for them, there just wasn't anything about its similarily meaty protagonists which made me care the least about what actually happened during the course of the increasingly convoluted story. By contrast, I remember thinking that the visually impressive third installment in Epic's Xbox 360 flagship series offered a much more varied and dramaturgically satisfying triple-A thrill ride, and by the end of the campaign I had almost become a fan of the franchise.
I never played People Can Fly's ill-fated spin-off Judgement, so new developer The Coalition's insertion of the Cogs into current-gen machinery feels like the logical next step from where Epic left off. There's even more variety in terms of settings and gameplay conditions here than in GoW 3, and there's clearly been an emphasis on creating more relatable characters (within the admittedly limited confines of the dude-bro action game) in order to make this new GoW saga feel relevant and worth sticking with for new players. And given that the Microsoft Store exclusives have been all over the place in terms of performance and overall polish, it was frankly a relief to discover that Gears of War 4 runs great on PC.