Judgment hands-on: how People Can Fly turned Gears into a score-attacker's paradise
Declassified missions and Defence Scenarios strike a different tone
When Gears of War: Judgment's Overrun Mode was unveiled last year, fans were simultaneously delighted and dismayed. Delighted because Overrun is essentially Gears of War 3's Beast Mode with a player-controlled COG side - or in other words, a version of Beast Mode that actually has some sort of long-term entertainment value. And dismayed because the introduction of Overrun appeared to have come at the cost of Gears of War 2's brilliant, much-revised Horde Mode, which has had almost as much impact on the action genre at large as the original's cover system.
On this front, I bring gladsome tidings. Firstly, Horde isn't actually gone - it seems to have endured in the form of Survival Mode. I've yet to lay eyes on the latter, or receive official confirmation from Microsoft, but there's plenty of evidence to this effect. For one thing, it's a wave-based affair, as these Achievements reveal. For another, one of Microsoft's product managers referred to it as "Horde Survival" during today's campaign hands-on. Reasonably watertight, I'm sure you'll agree.
Secondly, the principles of tactical self-expression that guide Horde Mode have infected the rest of the game. Thanks doubtless to the input of Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly, Judgment's campaign has shifted from the usual monolithic, checkpoint and setpiece-driven affair to something relatively fragmented, freer and more experimental. As you hopefully know by now, the storyline is told in retrospect by the characters themselves - "Lieutenant" Baird and Kilo Squad are hauled unceremoniously before a military tribunal as the game begins, and players then re-enact the events that led to their arrest. This frame narrative allows the designers to play around with the scenarios and challenges involved, creating optional versions of the same sequence of incidents.
These "Declassified" variants are triggered in-game by interacting with giant purple omen symbols - poke one, and Baird might recall fighting a new breed of Wretch in the area ahead or with the added pressure of a Hammer of Dawn countdown, hiking up the difficulty a few notches. It's not just a question of challenge factor, however. In order to accommodate Declassified missions without branching the story off in an impractical manner, Epic and People Can Fly have made the campaign design more modular - each area is now a tailored sandbox with its own combat criteria and completion star ratings, nudging the feel a little closer to a score-attacking brawler like Bayonetta.
Rather than burning through the plot without pause, you're encouraged to think about each scrap with the Locust as more of a standalone endeavour - to be replayed and mastered rather than forgotten the second it's over. The ingredients of which these sandboxes are constructed are mostly second-hand, with only one new Locust type and a couple of new semi-automatic rifles to write home about at present, but the playful savagery with which they're mashed together goes a long way.
At one point my computer-controlled comrades and I are ordered to cut a bloody swathe to the doors of a museum through endless waves of hard-hitting Boomers, the telepathic Kantus healers, kamikaze Ticker bombs and the ubiquitous but formidable Grenadier rank and file. With Oneshots pounding down from the top balcony, Kantus perpetually reviving Grenadiers right under our noses, and Ink Grenades flying all over the place, it's a rough-and-tumble fight indeed.
Later we're given the opportunity to play defensively, rigging up turrets looted from Gears of War 3 era Horde Mode to eviscerate the Locust as they push suicidally through increasingly tattered barbed wire and laser fences. As a rule, these Defence Scenarios allot you a minute or so to get your fortifications in position, but if you're feeling confident, you can always kick-start the proceedings early by hitting back button.
One of the nastiest examples pitches Kilo Squad against a double-whammy of Butchers and Maulers, with a pack of Wretches on hand to mess up our formation at the worst possible moments - but it's a walk in the park next to a later Declassified mission, which sees us fighting in a thick dust cloud. Unable to spot anything outside Sawed-Off range, we're repeatedly blindsided by Butchers and Tickers, and I'm eventually forced to admit defeat and tackle the scenario in more forgiving conditions.
If Judgment's campaign design makes Gears a more replayable, tailored experience, the downside could be that the narrative feels bitty, strung together, sacrificing coherence in order to facilitate those bite-sized encounters. In this light, it's unfortunate that the section of Baird's saga I experience is rather by-the-numbers - Epic appears to have solved the problem of how to make a notoriously sarky character tolerable as a star by sponging away his entire personality.
Still, newcomer Sofia Hendricks has a certain something to her - she's a moral-minded journalist turned member of the elitist Onyx Guard, which is pretty in-depth for a token female. Scarred war veteran Paduk - formerly an enemy of the COG - could be entertaining company too. It's probably unwise, in any case, to expect great things of a Gears of War storyline, even one woven around so involved a premise as this. Ultimately, if an anodyne narrative is the price we pay for a fresh-feeling cover shooter at this, late stage in the hardware cycle, that's a trade-off I'm more or less happy to make.
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