Game Details Developer: The Coalition

Publisher: Microsoft Studios

Platform: Windows 10 and Xbox One

Release Date: October 7, 2016 (Ultimate Edition Early Access), October 11, 2016 (Standard Edition)

Price: $59.99, £49.99, €69.99 (Standard); $99.99, £79.99, €99.99 (Ultimate)

ESRB Rating: M for Mature

Links: Amazon ( The Coalition: Microsoft Studios: Windows 10 and Xbox OneOctober 7, 2016 (Ultimate Edition Early Access), October 11, 2016 (Standard Edition): $59.99, £49.99, €69.99 (Standard); $99.99, £79.99, €99.99 (Ultimate): M for Mature UK ) | Official website

Hindsight tells us that Microsoft's gamble on the Gears of War series paid off not once but twice: first, as a successful tech demo for what its Xbox 360 console could muster in 2006, and second, as an honest-to-goodness contender for the online-combat crown.

Frankly, the game didn't need to be more than a beautiful tease for the lighting and rendering effects of Unreal Engine 3 on console-grade technology, but it happened to distill the important bits of a multiplayer shooter into a gameplay system that kicked butt on an Xbox gamepad. Halo works well enough on a controller, sure, but Gears of War, with its stick-to-cover, turf-control battling system, is the rare online game that might be better with two joysticks and zero mice.

But sticking to the Xbox 360 for nearly a decade meant that the shooter series began to tread water in both of those respects. Gears of War 4, the series' first entry on a new hardware platform, seems to aim its sights at resurrecting the series' original tentpoles: compelling multiplayer combat and jaw-dropping real-time visuals. The game's overall success boils down to nailing those aspects, but Gears 4 also stands as a curious first for Microsoft.

This is a game for a console that doesn't exist.

If you own an Xbox One, you'll have a fine enough time thanks to smooth, 60-frames-per-second multiplayer combat. But the game's best performance—with higher settings and resolutions, still easily locked at 60fps—can only be yours if you have a moderately powerful Windows 10 PC. Microsoft's "Project Scorpio" hardware won't be out for about a year, but Gears of War 4 is letting impatient people sneak their own hardware into the next-gen console party. And in a way, the latest edition of this long-running series proves the Xbox team's promise for that gaming ecosystem's future.

A campaign that nearly spoils the whole package



























Before I praise the game any further, I have bad news to deliver: Gears of War 4's campaign mode might be one of the worst I've played in years. It's probably as bad as Battlefield Hardline; worse than any of the overreaching, later-era Call of Duty games. This mode is so bad, I originally dedicated this review's entire introduction to how much I hate it. I have since calmed down in various ways (soak in the tub, lots of candles, pwning noobs) to give the rest of the game a fair, deserving shake.

But this mode, I'd rather throttle. Gears of War 4 pushes the series' clock forward 25 years, and it follows new series hero JD Fenix (as in, OG hero Marcus Fenix's son) with his gun-toting pals Del and Kait. JD and Del were members of the game's COG Army a while back, but now they're not. We're never told in the game exactly why they left the force, nor why they now live in a settlement full of people dressed as if they were extras in the show Firefly. The game opens with JD, Del, and Kai breaking into a military base to steal some incredibly expensive electricity-generating gear for their ramshackle settlement, which sparks a conflict with the leader of the world's new, post-war political and military machine.

Minister Jin decides to pin some recent calamities on our three muske-Gears, and instead of trying to bring them in for a trial or a conversation, she pummels them with waves of robo-soldiers. As they fend off this logically unsound premise, our heroes uncover another threat in the form of the old games' Locust enemies. They've returned in mutated form because, er, their dead bodies from the end of Gears of War 3 were buried in a giant pile in the middle of the Earth and then left alone for decades. (That always ends well.) This spurs JD to invite his father to help with matters.

You might think evolved Locust baddies and a new slew of robotic foes would make up for a game script laden with plot holes and logical leaps—this is Gears, not Shakespeare, after all—but the developers at The Coalition blow this opportunity for refreshed combat, at least in the campaign mode. The Locusts' new monkey-like "juvie" foes prove interesting because of erratic, bouncing movement patterns; they spice up waves of combat with pesky motions that force new tactics, and they're more fun than most games' weak "grunt" characters. (Plus, they blow up real good.) But the other commonly encountered newbies—a flying, gun-mounted drone and a four-legged, shrimp-like, acid-spitting thing—mostly exist to run players out of cover.

This might have paid off, but the level designs are so boring. The game's battles largely take place in straight-line rush rooms, where players' most interesting decisions are, "do I take the left-side cover or the right-side cover?" As a result, if a flying attacker drives a player out of cover, there's nowhere interesting to go, nor is there any cool, new maneuver to exploit. You just have to hold your gun up, spray, and pray. Even a few busy, multi-tiered scenes, with altitude and flanking opportunities to spice up the combat, would've helped a bit. Alas.

Crossplay Want to play the PC version of Gears 4 online with Xbox One friends? Every "cooperative" mode can be played with friends no matter what system they're running on; this includes the campaign, Horde co-op, and "versus co-op" (in which friends team up against AI opponents in various team-deathmatch modes), along with privately matched versus battles. Want to play the PC version of Gears 4 online with Xbox One friends? Every "cooperative" mode can be played with friends no matter what system they're running on; this includes the campaign, Horde co-op, and "versus co-op" (in which friends team up against AI opponents in various team-deathmatch modes), along with privately matched versus battles. Both platforms also support split-screen campaign modes, but none of the others work in split-screen. If only The Coalition had delivered four-player split-screen Horde for PCs! Maybe next time.

You may not die in those tough-sounding scenarios, at any rate—and you certainly won't feel challenged. The artificial intelligence systems on display are pretty rudimentary, meaning enemies show very little interest in flanking your squad, attacking from multiple angles, or even breaking out of a spot of cover if they're not getting anywhere in a fight. Gears 4's enemies do like to jump out of cover and run straight through a giant battlefield while attempting strategically unsound melee and shotgun takedowns. My playthrough of the "hard" mode included characters doing exactly this about once every other battle. (Perhaps they were as bored of these levels and arenas as I was.)

To top all of this off, the checkpoint system is badly paced. If a battle has three or four distinct waves of enemies in which the first three are ho-hum and the fourth is full of insta-kill attacks, you're almost certainly going back to square one if you get caught by a single explosive torque-bow shot. This is the way the game ramps up difficulty, by the way, because even if you play sloppily in harder modes (which I did to test), your AI squadmates will almost always revive you mid-battle if you've been "downed" and not outright killed. They'll also kill a lot of enemies on your behalf in harder modes.

Did I like anything about the campaign? It looks great, and I delighted in a few physics-driven moments in major battles. The final sequence also flips the game's systems for a kooky, one-off battle that offers more fun than the entire rest of the game combined.

Mechanically, the game suffers from awful momentum pacing and uninspired level design. Yet the worst taste in my mouth came from how lousy the characters are developed. Their banter between and during fights is wasted on one-liners, which might be more forgivable if I had any context about what these characters had gone through in the past (or if I learned anything about their personalities). Many of the one-liners are uncomfortably tone-deaf, too. Loved ones are dying and suffering left and right, and JD and Del can't stop making flip jokes about games of rock-paper-scissors. If this stuff was funnier, or if I liked the characters more, I might forgive it.

Gorgeous and scalable gibs

The only reason I persisted with the campaign, other than needing to do so for this article, was that I managed to get it running quite smoothly on my computer at a whopping 1800p resolution with almost all visual toggles maxed out. (This, like Forza Horizon 3, is an Xbox Play Anywhere title. A single digital purchase unlocks the game on both Xbox One and Windows 10 systems, though disc owners do not enjoy the same benefit.) When I first booted the campaign mode on my Windows 10 testing rig (an i7-4770K processor, overclocked at 4.2GHz, and a factory-OC'ed 980Ti), I opted for 1080p resolution to play it safe, only to find I could lock performance at a blistering 60fps with all settings maxed out.











From there, I went straight to Gears of War 4's impressive benchmarking utility for a delightful dive into the world of settings min-maxing.

The Coalition clearly wanted to show off how well it had optimized Unreal Engine 4, so the engine's two CPU-bound refresh rates are monitored at all times, right next to the GPU-bound refresh rate. Two gameplay sequences play out in the 90-second benchmarking demo, with the first showing off a standard, simple gameplay scene and the other recreating one of the game's most taxing visual moments (complete with explosions, particle swirls, and a prolonged test of the game's physics and collision systems). Once the test is over, users are shown a dot path defining the demo's frame rate at all times, along with your system's GPU and VRAM usage maximums. It's all displayed next to every visual toggle you've chosen and a basic summary of your system specs. As you can see above, this is a very readable interface for screenshotting and sharing.

HDR? I have yet to acquire a screen with HDR-10 support, a fact I hope to remedy soon. In the meantime, however, The Coalition was kind enough to demonstrate Gears of War 4 to Ars on its own HDR-compatible monitor, which it did by having half of its LG OLED screen displaying HDR-ified pixels and the other half not. I noticed increased vibrancy, but not by much, and only one object actually looked like its color or brightness depth had been dramatically increased. I asked the game's tester (I wasn't allowed to play this part) to move the camera around, at which point I realized, no, the thing I saw looked the same on a non-HDR display. I certainly didn't feel compelled to rush out to buy an HDR-10 set as a result of the test. I have yet to acquire a screen with HDR-10 support, a fact I hope to remedy soon. In the meantime, however, The Coalition was kind enough to demonstrate Gears of War 4 to Ars on its own HDR-compatible monitor, which it did by having half of its LG OLED screen displaying HDR-ified pixels and the other half not. I noticed increased vibrancy, but not by much, and only one object actually looked like its color or brightness depth had been dramatically increased. I asked the game's tester (I wasn't allowed to play this part) to move the camera around, at which point I realized, no, the thing I saw looked the same on a non-HDR display. I certainly didn't feel compelled to rush out to buy an HDR-10 set as a result of the test. A Coalition representative confirmed that the LG display we were watching had a brightness rating of about 3,500 nits—which is more than the 1,000 nits that non-HDR screens typically max out at but far less than the 10,000 nit maximum that users can expect from HDR-10 displays. Additionally, The Coalition confirmed that Gears of War 4's Windows 10 version will not support HDR-10, and the company was not able to definitively answer whether we should ever expect that to change.

Toying around with this, I found that my 980Ti will never play nicely with this engine while targeting a full 4K refresh. If I want to run Gears of War 4 at 60 frames per second, my system simply can't get there at 3840x2160 pixel depth, even with every setting turned down to "low." By reducing my resolution to 3200x1800, then turning most settings (and there are a lot of settings) to "high" or "ultra," I'm back in a mostly 60fps domain, with the benchmark demo's final portion always bringing me down somewhere between 52 to 55fps.

I'll take that slight interruption on a higher-resolution, higher-settings system over the Xbox One's locked 1080p/30fps campaign mode any day of the week. The Xbox One edition handles many of Unreal Engine 4's best bits pretty admirably, particularly in terms of material-based lighting and how well the game's geometry renders through giant clouds of dust and other particle effects. However, the campaign's textures are just outright muddier on Xbox One, and those are tough to return to once you've seen the PC version handle those in an "ultra" setting—especially at double the frame rate.

Shiny robotic enemies that explode in shrapnel, buildings that fall apart, believable facial expressions, shimmering bursts of light in dark rooms full of little dust particles—they all look damned good even on a 1080p display with cranked-up anti-aliasing (or an easy-to-toggle super-sampling setting, if your GPU has the headroom). The more pixels you can render on your display, the cooler all of Unreal Engine 4's tricks look. Gears of War 4's aesthetics are a far cry from the series' original "brown, gray, and more brown" visual reputation, and both the campaign mode and the multiplayer arenas derived from it shine with sprawling view distances, diverse terrain, and enjoyably gross effects in the "slime, blood, and guts" category.

Listing image by Microsoft Studios