If only the people who write about games aged this well…
Sometimes our memories of a distant game can be about as reliable as a concrete parachute. We all have favourites that we remember looking incredible, stunningly realistic. They’ll never top that, we think. But booting up an old classic is almost always a nasty slap to nostalgia. We may claim to look past graphics if the gameplay impresses, but 99% of us can’t get through an early Xbox game without our eyes wanting to be sick. That’s the Coalition’s greatest achievement – it’s given us the Gears of War we remember, and then some.
Gears of War is the story of Marcus Fenix, a gravel-voiced solider imprisoned on the planet Sera. Once a pleasant, human-populated planet, Sera has been devastated in a war with underground monsters called the Locust Horde. For at least nine years, humans have falsely remembered Sera as a nice-enough-looking destroyed world, but one that relied a bit too much on grey. They’ll be in for a shock when they see how it looks on Xbox One.
Fenix and his allies have to battle the Locust with a weapons arsenal that’s aged beautifully. There’s the Boltok Pistol, a handgun with the wallop of a cannon blast. The Torque Bow, which shot explosive arrows into foes before it was cool. There are also the usual shotguns and sniper rifles, but the real star of the show is the Lancer Assault Rifle – a machine gun with a chainsaw attachment, perfect for punishing drones who get too close by slicing them clean in half. The controller shakes and limbs gyrate across the screen as screams boom out of your speakers for a properly new-gen kill. We won’t judge you for enjoying one of 2006’s guiltiest pleasures just as much today.
Locust come in many forms, but the most common you’ll fight are Drones. These are armed soldiers, somewhat humanoid in appearance but made just monstrous enough for you not to feel bad about chainsawing their faces off. Typically you’ll face them in groups – surrounded by wrecked cars, concrete slabs and pillars, with Fenix always just a button-tap away from snapping behind them for cover. Ducking out to shoot is as simple as an analogue-stick nudge, and leaving cover is just a tap of the same button again. Simple, intuitive and easily mastered, it set a new bar for console controls and is unmatched to this day, giving us some of the tensest face-offs in any shooter.
If you don’t want to get into cover then we suggest getting into a body bag and zipping it up instead, because you’re not going to survive. Health regenerates, but bullets blow it off much faster. You can take a few hits, but leaving cover never feels safe – tricky, as that’s the only way to finish off wounded rivals. This risk/reward mechanic is the heart of Gears of War, still inherently playable nine years on. It’s clear why the sequels didn’t deviate far – Epic Games got it right first time.
Not that this Ultimate Edition is repetitive. There are multi-floored stages where you have to defend yourself from above while covering your squad below and a weapon that relies on open skies, forcing you to lure enemies out into the open. The Nightfall section remains a favourite, as deadly Kryll swarms destroy anyone foolish enough to step into the darkness, forcing you to create pockets of light, while still defending yourself from Drones (not that they’ll survive a wander into the dark – Gears is nothing if not fair).
Twists like these keep the fantastic campaign feeling fresh, even if a few dud ideas still underwhelm. A lame driving section at least has the decency to be brief, and also seems more forgiving in this incarnation. Could we suggest just taking it out entirely for 2025’s Ultra-Ultimate Edition? Sections such as this fall flat because they deviate too far from the team vs team, peekaboo-with-heavyartillery that is Gears at its finest. Boss fights suffer the same problem: they’re either far too easy, or irritating bulletsponges that take ages to kill.
These are minor issues, however, a tiny percentage of an otherwise great campaign that now includes several once-PC-exclusive stages. Far from the padding we feared, they’re welldesigned and make the single-player more substantial. A common complaint of the original was that the campaign felt too short. No longer such an issue.
The extreme violence could come across as unpleasant, but the tone of the game turned out to be our first major memory lapse. Nine years of bad Gears of War knock-offs had led us to remember this as the overly serious story of gruff space marines in a tragic (i.e. pretentious) space war. Actually, Gears rarely takes itself so seriously. “This is going to be awesome!” is one of the game’s first lines. Characters openly admit they’re having great fun, ridicule each other, and make lame quips after kills. Short of saying, “Can we skip the vehicle section?” they talk just like the average player. The battle music also has a fun, ‘John Williams in Star Wars mode’ sensibility. The game may look gritty and harsh, but that’s the coating on a B-movie romp full of cheesy one-liners and OTT action.
There are four tweaked difficulty modes – casual, normal, hardcore and insane. Play on casual or normal and a lot of what makes Gears special is lost. Drones take far fewer shots to finish off, with it possible to play dumb and still survive. Including a new, wimp-friendly difficulty is welcome, but it feels like the balance is off. Normal lacks real challenge, whereas encounters on hardcore initially feel like too big a leap up in difficulty. It’s perfectly playable once you’ve spent a few hours acclimatising, but it’s a shame the perfect difficulty setting still seems to have eluded this remake.
Playing the whole campaign in co-op is still the ideal way to experience Gears of War. It gets a bit easier – you can revive each other when down, and your partner is (hopefully) smarter and more responsive to your demands than the AI. Few things are as satisfying as saving a friend from a fatal Drone attack with the ol’ ‘chainsaw to the back’ routine. There’s a slight visual downgrade to keep it running at a smooth 30fps, but co-op or not, Ultimate Edition never falls short of looking magnificent.
This is no upscaled port of an Xbox 360 game: it’s one of the best-looking titles on Xbox One. Every penny spent on this remake has reached the screen. Sera finally feels like an actual planet. Ruined architecture no longer seems like background – more like real buildings that could collapse at any moment. Grey skies have been rubbed out, replaced with stunning landscapes and rich sea views. Remembered and ridiculed as a game overly fond of grey, Ultimate Edition only wants for colour if you’re not playing it properly.
Slaughtered Drones send blood and gore flying, coating the screen in violent red. Lambent Wretches explode in a splash of neon yellow. Golden sunlight beams down on vine-draped ruins. Black ink trails flow behind flying foes, swimming through burnt-orange skies. Whenever the campaign does leave you in the dark, there’s always something to stare at, some detail we couldn’t have noticed on last-gen. Besides, it only makes the moments when you do return to the light all the visually sweeter. Cutscenes particularly impress, with subtle facial animation making characters expressive in ways that were impossible on Xbox 360.
But as outstanding a visual update as this is, the best surprise is seeing how well the game itself has stood the test of time. In fact, we kept seeing ideas and features that we wish more games had stolen. Active reloading (well-timed button-presses will halve reload times, a perfectly timed press adds a damage boost) is as fantastic an idea now as it was in 2006, so why haven’t more shooters copied it?
It’s not like games have been shy in stealing elsewhere. Few of the copycats managed anything close to Gears’ quality, but a glut of coverbased shooters did a great job of poisoning its legacy. Fact is, the reason this is to blame for a whole generation of me-too shooters is because it was done so brilliantly here. We remember the gameplay being rock solid and, for once, nostalgia hasn’t failed us.
We urge you to play the original Gears first. The shock will be nasty, but good for you. Flat textures, grey skies, dark environments and stiff animation jar with memories of this being the best-looking game in the world. The original isn’t the Gears of War we remember stunning us in 2006, but now it doesn’t have to be. A whole generation of gamers are going to grow up with Ultimate Edition as their first experience of the first Gears of War. As for the rest of us, we can’t wait to make new memories.