Gears of War: Reloaded PC Review
Summary: Updates to the backend and visuals as well as cross platform play and progression make Gears of War: Reloaded the true 'Ultimate Edition' of Gears of War.
4.5
Excellent!
Initially released in 2006, Gears of War was a watershed moment for 3D action games in the industry. It, along with 2005’s Resident Evil 4, massively impacted the trajectory that 3rd person shooters took over the next decade or so, for better or worse.
Almost 20 years later, Gears of War has been re-released in a new, updated package. Not only for the Xbox brand that spawned it, but for the first time in the franchise’s history, on PS5.
Gears of War: Reloaded isn’t the first time we’ve seen the game re-released. In 2015, The Coalition released Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Xbox One and PC. This was a remaster of the 2006 game, bringing it onto a newer version of the Unreal Engine and remastering the vast majority of the game’s assets. Multiplayer was tweaked, offering a levelling system similar to that seen from Gears of War 2 onward, as well as bringing the PC exclusive content from the much-maligned Games for Windows Live PC release.
Now, Gears of War: Reloaded effectively remasters the prior remaster (and highlights why you should probably never call something ‘Ultimate Edition’), bringing even more updates to the game, as well as the first release on PlayStation and bringing the game to Steam for the first time.
At its core, this is essentially the 2015 Ultimate Edition version of the game, with a host of updates to bring it more in line with the current generation.
Gameplay is thankfully largely unchanged. This is still the same 3rd person, cover-based shooter that it has always been, that sees Marcus Fenix and his allies seek to end the threat of the Locust that threatens the planet daily. Movement always felt a bit on the clunky side in Gears of War, especially so in the first entry in the series. Movement feels heavy and stiff, and the camera shakes violently while charging into cover and getting hit. No doubt done to emphasise the fact that each soldier is wearing armour that wouldn’t look out of place in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It always kind of worked, however. Thanks to aiming itself being relatively smooth, and actions like getting into cover always feeling effortless.
Combat was always extremely visceral and still is. Getting a headshot with the sniper rifle or reducing an enemy to a red cloud with the Gnasher shotgun is incredibly satisfying, thanks to the perfect blend of audio and visual feedback.
So, how does Reloaded differ from Ultimate Edition aside from it being available on more platforms?
Resolution and framerate have been upped for the console editions, 1080p to 4k, and 30fps to 60fps for the campaign, and 60-120fps for multiplayer. I played on the Steam version, so this didn’t really factor into it as the game can be played at up to 240fps on PC. Proper HDR support has now been implemented, though it’s relatively subtle thanks to the game’s colour palette and minimal use of bright lights in dark environments. Lighting and shadows have been improved overall, but again, it’s a subtle change that I needed to see side by side to notice any real difference. With that said, anyone who skipped Gears of War: UE and is coming at this from the 2006 original will obviously notice huge improvements. I just have a case of rose-tinted glasses; this is how I remember it being, rather than how it actually was.
One great addition to the campaign is the removal of loading, for the most part. After the initial loading of the game, play is uninterrupted in this respect unless the player dies. Be prepared to wait a while if you do die, though. Loading times aren’t exactly quick when returning to a checkpoint after death. Upwards of 30 seconds in some cases, and on higher difficulties, be prepared to die a lot.
Gears as a franchise has always taken on difficulty in the most boring possible way. Higher settings tend to just increase the amount of punishment enemies can take and reduce the amount of damage the player can incur. It’s… fine, I guess, it’s just the least interesting way possible to make things more challenging. I don’t remember this being too much of an issue back in 2006, perhaps because most of my time back then on higher difficulties was spent in co-op, but this time around, I spent a lot of time looking at that loading screen, waiting to try a section again.
This was mostly down to the friendly AI in this game being abysmal. I don’t remember it being this poor back in the day. It was never amazing, but this is worse. My teammates frequently broke and inadvertently led me to have to restart sections. For example, in the final act of the game, you’re on a train and tasked with getting from one end to the other. At various places throughout, there are no guard rails, and players can just walk off the edge and die. On more than one occasion, Dom (the primary support character) decided he’d had enough with the war and ran straight off the edge of the train, necessitating a restart.
I’m all for a challenge, but this doesn’t seem like intended behaviour to me. Reloaded was littered with instances like this that made me really wish I was going through the game in co-op. Due to this being written before release, it’s still very possible that a patch is put out fixing it, and hopefully that happens, because on Hardcore and Insane difficulty, this massively impacted my enjoyment of the game.
Multiplayer is largely the same as it was in Ultimate Edition. Each of the 19 maps has returned and has received the same visual improvements, such as 4k textures. With the game being pre-release, I never managed to find any active multiplayer games, so I’m unable to comment on it beyond what I saw in the multiplayer beta a while back. The short version, however, is that it’s basically the same as it was in Ultimate Edition. There have been some updates in the backend, a 60Hz tick rate along with more data centres to ensure as smooth an experience as possible, and anti-cheat has been added to the PC version.
Multiplayer is also fully cross-platform for both play and progression, allowing Xbox, PC, and PlayStation players to all play together. Hopefully, this keeps the PC version of the game active online for a while longer, as Ultimate Edition’s multiplayer dropped off in a relatively short time. Xbox Live account linking is entirely optional, though it does grant access to Xbox achievements and friend lists if you’re already established on the platform.
Gears of War: Reloaded is still a 2015 console game at its core, and as such, runs beautifully on modern PC hardware. I ran the game at max settings at 1440p, and the game rarely dipped below the 165 fps my monitor is capable of outputting. It ran similarly well at 4k also, with framerate never being a problem. Cutscenes are locked to 30fps, which, when transitioning from gameplay to, felt like someone had hit the brakes on my eyes, which was a little jarring but otherwise completely fine.
Steam Deck
Performance on the Steam Deck is equally great. The game automatically picked settings that are appropriate for the hardware, and while it wasn’t a locked 60fps, it was good enough, and with plenty of room to tweak settings to get it locked or raise fidelity at 30 or 40fps. I played through a chunk of the game on Deck and had a blast with it.
Multiplayer worked fine here during the recent betas, so presumably it still does. Linking an Xbox account on Steam Deck doesn’t require the use of the onscreen keyboard or any popups, either, which is a nice touch.
Final Thoughts
Overall, Gears of War: Reloaded is great. It brings Ultimate Edition up to a slightly more modern standard and finally sees it released on Steam and PS5. Aside from the AI issues that I faced, I have no complaints about the game per se. It’s still as aggressively grey/brown as it was in 2006, though there’s thankfully a lot more colour around to accent things now. Its gameplay is very one-note, but everything it does, it does exceptionally well.
Whether you’re a fan of the series or a first-timer, Gears of War: Reloaded is definitely worth a look, and now that the franchise has been brought to an entirely new audience, I hope that Microsoft and The Coalition bring the rest of the games to PC and PS5.
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