by Joseph Leray
[This is a thorough runthrough of the campaign portion for "Gears of War: Judgment." Stay tuned as we'll be covering the multiplayer side of "Judgment" later!]
“Gears of War” has always felt heavy.
Soldiers slam into cover, carried by the momentum of their weighty armor. Bodies explode in huge, chunky bits when tagged with a frag grenade, and the sawed-off shotgun kicks mightily when fired, more like a turn-of-the-century blunderbuss than the lightweight lasers that so frequently arm the heroes of other science fiction. The way Damon Baird clean-and-jerks the Mulcher onto a piece of waist-high concrete -- giving the Gatling Gun a little heave as he spins to face whatever oncoming monstrosity has crawled from the ground -- makes me feel tired.
At one point near the end of “Gears of War: Judgment,” the normally rambunctious Augustus Cole remarks that he’s running out of energy, that he can’t take much more abuse from the Locust storm troopers. The same might be said for the series as a whole: humankind’s inexorable march to victory over the enemy Locust reached its apex in “Gears of War 3,” and there’s nothing left to do but lay down one’s burdens.
It’s no coincidence that “Judgment” feels so stripped down, then. The heavy machinery of “Gears of War” has been dismantled and reconstructed by developers People Can Fly into something lighter, sleeker, more efficient, and more principled.
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