Gears Of War: Judgment
You might say that I'm a bit of a fan of Gears, having attended the midnight release, got early access to the Overrun Demo, wearing my own COG tags, and reading through the novels.
But Judgment is split between Epic Games, the original creators, and People Can Fly, the makers of Bulletstorm. So how does this affect the actual playing?
Well, the campaign (which was designed by People Can Fly) allows you to play "Declassified" versions, which add new challenges to the campaign. These vary from you can only use select weapons, to altering basic concepts of the game such as your health doesn't regenerate or you can't see properly.
This is a wonderful twist, and some of the declassified missions really challenge your skills. I'd like to see more of this in future instalments, perhaps with a choice of what it changes.
Unfortunately, because of the Declassified missions, the campaign chapters are very short. They miss the "epic" feel of the original story. It's a bit more of a story told piece by piece than a tale of survival.
Overall, it feels fresh, but a little lacking. In my opinion, this is better than rehashing the same old thing.
You also get a taste of what Gears 3 would be like with the new controls in an unlockable extra called Aftermath. It's a welcome blast from the past, but it highlights the weakness of Judgment's story. No declassified bits though.
Multiplayer was handled by the Epic team, and they've done a major change which is immediately obvious to anyone who's played previous Gears games. There's no Locust (Except for Overrun, but more on that later). Both teams are COG soldiers. While you can customise the Armour and Weapon skins of the characters, it feels very boring shooting your character in a different colour skin.
While Team Deathmatch is the standard multiplayer option, Judgment introduces Free For All to Gears for the first time. It's ok, I'm not the greatest but I can manage a second or third place on a good day.
Overrun is the only Multiplayer mode that you can play the Locust in, and it's a combination of Horde Mode (from Gears 2+3), and Beast Mode (from Gears 3). You take turns to play the COG (and protect the objectives) and Locust (where you aim to destroy the objectives). It's great fun, and definitely my favourite mode. But I do think the balance favours Engineers and Maulers a bit too much. But tweaks might change that to make it a bit fairer.
Survival, on the other hand, puts you as the COG facing 10 (increasing difficulty) waves of Locust on the Overrun maps. Compared to Horde, it's very boring. It's also bugged in that if you want to play it split screen with someone on the same console, you must be offline, which disables achievements.
So, overall: Short and snappy campaign but it's over too quickly. The flashback fills in some of the blanks for Gears 3. Multiplayer is still good, but feels a bit more generic with the lack of Locust. Survival is quite lacking compared to Horde.
Verdict: 85% A new spin, but some changes are unwelcome.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.