Gears Of War: Judgment - Campaign Review

This post contains spoilers!

Gears Of War is a series I'm constantly on the fence about. As much as I love the series for it's cover-based gameplay, giant setpieces, and huge suite of modes and options giving the player great value for their money, it's not a series without some deep flaws. The characters are all cartoons, right down to their thick-necked, impossibly proportioned character models and ridiculous "ooh rah" mentality. Unless you're willing to read the novelizations and comic books, there's not a whole lot of interesting stuff going on from a story perspective. It's a bunch of war movie cliches and melodramatic nonsense that telegraphs every character moment and plot twist by signal flare.

The first Gears game is, to my mind, the only one that had the right tone: it was a romp. There were serious moments, or moments we were meant to take seriously, but it was all in service of blowing shit up. It seems that, once the first game set the world on fire, the writers never quite found their footing. They had to make the narrative more and more grandiose to match the level of attention heaped upon the game and it's never really been to the series' benefit. It certainly made for some excellent setpieces but the stubborn refusal of characters to act human rubbed against ham-handed moments so incongruous to what came before that my reaction was to sputter with laughter, not get choked up.

As a sidenote: there's plenty of people who like to act as though the narrative of the Gears games are bulletproof. Why question something so resolutely stupid? Well, for the same reason I was one of the guys criticizing the storytelling issues in Mass Effect 3: if the writers want us to take their story seriously, we have to oblige them and judge it as such. If this were Bulletstorm or Vanquish, I'd let a lot of things pass because they never wanted to be anything more than a ridiculous shooter. While Gears may have started as a ridiculous shooter, it discovered ambitions along the way they could never pull off. If you just want to shoot stuff, you can pretty much stop wasting your time with this article now. It's still really good at that.

This was all supposed to change with Gears Of War: Judgement. Developers People Can Fly, those responsible for the aforementioned Bulletstorm, are solid developers picking up a very tried-and-true series. There's no pressure to reinvent it, merely give it a twist while Epic proper works on the first next-gen Gears game. It's role as a placeholder actually works in it's favor because it means they can take more chances than Gears Of War 4 can. They picked game journalist and respected author Tom Bissell to write the game, lending a little credibility to the series and hopefully moving it beyond the Random Quip Generator it had been up to that point. Based on the hushed tones other game journalists spoke of Bissell in, I figured good things were in store.

Sadly, the campaign is only a marginal success... mostly due to the unimpeachable gory action the series is known for.

The first thing I noticed when they previewed the game was the slightly tweaked character models. While still exaggerated, they seemed a little less beefy and more realistic. As a prequel, this could either be because the characters are younger or because of a commitment to a slightly less bro-ified attitude towards the series going forward. Choosing Baird and Cole as the leads was a smart choice as they were the characters who had the most personality in the original trilogy. A game where we see Baird become the increasingly bitter and sarcastic man he is in the first Gears is very much a game I'd like to play. Turns out, I'm still waiting.

People Can Fly know their way around arcade-y score-based action games and Judgement sort of smashes together the vanilla story mode and the arcade mode from the previous games into one. The idea is to collect stars through your performance. Each area has three stars to collect depending on how well your team does. Die or go DBNO (Down But Not Out) and you lose stars. Kill your enemies in various creative ways to earn Ribbons which increase your stars. Collect enough stars and you unlock bonuses including an extra couple of campaign chapters called Aftermath which are a side story to Gears 3 and the only part of the campaign that has no Declassified modifiers. It's also the best chunk of the story in the game, partly for that exact reason.

Every significant firefight in the game has an option to be "Declassified," which imposes any of a number of different battle conditions on you from limited arsenals to increased difficulty to visual impairment which will allow you to earn stars faster at increased risk. It'd be an excellent system if it didn't hamstring narrative momentum and pull you out of the game.

By interrupting you every ten or fifteen minutes by asking you to click on a big COG logo to see what the Declassified factors are for the next fight, Judgement is constantly reminding you that it's a game. I'm a little shocked that Declassified wasn't offered as an optional mode or unlocked after beating the game. The single player wouldn't have been particularly compelling anyway but at least you'd have been able to focus on the story and the flow of action unhindered. Every Declassified logo was an opportunity for me to stop for a bathroom break or a bite to eat or a "Oh, hey, I should go back and continue my Persona 3 game... I'll come back to this later."

The fragmented nature of the narrative gives added scrutiny to the story that it doesn't particularly need. In addition to much quieter, more sober iterations of Baird and Cole (not once are the words "Cole Train" uttered over the course of the campaign), your other squadmates are by-the-book cadet Sofia Hendricks and scarred, grizzled Russian-analogue Garron Paduk, who sort of becomes the game's Baird despite the presence of the actual Baird.

Paduk is far and away the best character in the game. He has a history, a point of view, motivation, a disrespect for authority, and a sharp tongue. And then there's poor Sofia. If you were thinking that a respected writer might mean a well-drawn female character in a video game... not so much. At the military tribunal, Sofia is the only one to try and pass the blame to her squadmates. Later on, it's revealed that she was schtupping an ancillary character they've been searching for, a married man and father. And at the end of the Aftermath chapter it's revealed that she moved on to sleeping with Garron and was brutally murdered off screen to attempt to add a bit of dramatic weight to the story. The Feminazis Coming To Destroy Gaming will not be amused.

The game is ostensibly about Baird's Kilo Squad trying to stop a rampaging Locust leader named Karn by dropping a missile on his head. However, Karn is a just a walking boss fight waiting to start. The real antagonist of the story is Loomis, a moustachioed avatar of myopic military arrogance. After disobeying orders and dropping a Lightmass missile on Karn's head, Loomis has Kilo Squad arrested for treason. The game itself happens in flashback. (I was hoping there'd be some element of Baird and crew as unreliable narrators but that's a bit too ambitious, I suppose.) When you Declassify a section, there's normally a bit of text about how Kilo is alleging something that runs counter to Loomis or the COG brass' intel, illustrating pretty clearly how badly the Locust were underestimated. It's an additional shade to the series I actually quite liked given how black and white the conflict has been portrayed.

By insisting on court martialing Kilo Squad in the middle of a city that's at war, with Locust literally breaking down their doors, there's no interpretation of Loomis' actions that doesn't fit the definition of cartoon villain. Regardless of Kilo's testimony, it's clear he intends to kill them for their disobedience. Between the Declassified text and putting soldiers in harm's way needlessly out of ego and single-mindedness, they spend the entire game building and building up to a reckoning for Loomis and... it all ends with Baird essentially shaking his hand and going their separate ways. No harm done.

Yeah, really, that's it. It's a moment every bit as stupid as the finale of Gears Of War 3 where they tease the idea that there's something more to the Locusts before... well, committing genocide. There's no case to be made that Loomis is just a hard man making hard choices. He's willfully doing wrong because he cannot admit that the Locust are any smarter than "animals" and because he can't see beyond hardline military doctrine. There's a moment in Aftermath where Kilo Squad comes across a statue dedicated to Loomis and I would have been fine with that as a "the real heroes never get recognition" moment if it was clear that he got the ignominious death his actions warranted.

There are action genre rules, the same as in horror. If a character is a dick in the first act, usually an officer or bureaucrat, he gets his just desserts in the third. Hopefully in a fun, ironic way that will make us cheer. Because that's what we're here for. Maybe he dies due to his own arrogance. Maybe he dies despite Kilo's best efforts to intercede, thus making them seem more heroic. Maybe he survives despite all odds and Kilo helplessly watches him leave to continue to lose the war for them, but you don't have your hero characters absolve the villain without the villain changing their ways. If you're going to buck action genre conventions, you need to make your intentions very clear as to why or else it seems as though you're wildly out of sync with the genre you're working in. Because what we got was a very unfulfilling, sour ending.

If only this were the game's only story-related problems.

The game is woefully in need or memorable setpiece fights. The only one that stands out to me is a Normandy-like beach invasion followed later by a defense of the same area, which only stands out due to how tired of a concept it still is and how it will be nakedly reproduced for multiplayer. Judgement seems to have fallen in love with wave-based hold out sequences too. There's several dotted over the course of the game which only make the absence of a proper Horde mode more curious. It also becomes a crutch they lean on by the end of the game. By keeping you penned up in one area, they don't have to generate new areas or sequences. The combat mechanics are as solid as ever but nothing stands out after you're done as being memorable as far as settings or enemy types.

Loomis isn't the only character in the game who has no arc. Character development on the whole just doesn't happen. The opportunity to see Baird and Cole start as rookies and move towards the characters we know from the main series was tantalizing yet is absent in the game itself. Baird has a couple of quips but it otherwise bland as can be. We're left to understand that any serious adjustments to his character were made between the end of Judgement and the first Gears, which is an utterly wasted opportunity.

The handling of Cole is even worse. He has none of the boisterous personality he's known for and doesn't show any by the end of the game. At one point Loomis tells him that he's been "uncharacteristically quiet" and I had to chuckle. Where's this loud Cole he's talking about? The only lines of Cole's I remember are him off-handedly reminding us of how rich he was as a thrashball star. Using his inside voice, no less. There's a case to be made that Cole needed to be a bit more grounded in reality but, at the same time, it wastes Lester Speight as a voice actor. Dude does not do "demure" well. There's a middle ground to hit with the character that the game has no interest in.

These are all things that could have been handled in a few lines of dialogue or a short cutscene. I'm not asking for the game to be based around it's characters, merely that it give us something, anything, to chew on while we play. The Gears series has always struggled in this respect. While Judgement represents an attempt to grow the series up, it's still a long way from meeting it's potential. It still has the smooth, gratifying gameplay we expect from the series but there's only so long you can coast on that. Mechanics get repetitive over time and familiarity will eventually cause people to move onto the next thing. However, if your characters and your world are compelling, that will go a long way towards extending the life of your franchise. Given how sober and ponderous and mishandled Judgement's story turned out to be, it's a lesson Epic is still learning.

Gears Of War is not a series that needs to be taken seriously. It just needs to be a well-written action game. Well-written action, contrary to being "dumb" as people assume, actually means being clever rather than high-minded. There's no Terrence Malick film hiding somewhere in the Gears Of War universe. There are series that can get away with Big Thoughts but Gears isn't one of them. All we need is solid action and to not have our intelligence insulted. They've long since mastered the former, now we just need them to start on the latter.

E3 Impressions, Pt. 2: Assorted Announcements & Dead Space 3 Lamentations

Continuing from my last entry running down some of the biggest and most interesting announcements from this year's E3, there's plenty more to talk about so let me just jump right into it.

SimCity is still a thing, if city building games are your bag. I haven't played a SimCity game since middle school but I'm kind of happy to know they still exist. Oregon Trail wasn't as lucky. In typical EA fashion, you need to be constantly connected to the internet even for the single player, so buyer beware. New Skyrim DLC was always going to happen but I was much more surprised to hear about an expansion for Dark Souls. Which will unmercifully kill me over and over again until I cry a little and give up. Again. The game already beat me into submission once but I'll gladly give it another go to check out the new areas and enemies. That game is no joke. I still have a copy of Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow that I never played much of but, oddly, I never traded it in either. So I guess that means I'm down to give the sequel a try. I like the fact that they're trying to rebuild the franchise into a single, coherent universe rather than the plethora of seemingly unrelated games that it has been for well over a decade now.

One of the big announcements, which certainly brought a smile to my face, was Gears Of War: Judgment which will be co-developed with Epic by People Can Fly, who gave us the very fun and very underrated Bulletstorm. I watched the E3 footage and read the cover story in the July issue of Game Informer and I have a lot of reason for hope.

For one, they've visibly toned down the beefy, superhuman character models so that the they look like actual people. For another, the game is focusing on my two favorite characters in the series, Baird and Cole. Granted, they were my favorite characters because they seemed to be the only ones in the game who had any sort of personality, even if that personality was just "sarcastic asshole" and "over-enthusiastic goofball cartoon character" respectively. (Watch the Terry Tate videos on YouTube if you want to see Cole's voice actor tackling people and screaming "woooo!" in real life. It's really hard not to like the guy based on that alone.)

If Naughty Dog and the Uncharted series are my baseline for good storytelling, Epic and Gears Of War are my whipping boy for doing it poorly. A lot of people would consider the Gears Of War series critic-proof in that it's a big, stupid action game. Who the fuck cares if it's dumb? Fair point. Most people seem to be fine with it, but looking at big, dumb action movies, there's a difference between something like The Rock and Transformers. The former is a fast, funny, action-packed rollercoaster with likable characters. The latter is a giant fucking mess of loud noises and shit blowing up.

I mentioned this in my [Prototype 2] review but there's an acceptable level of stupidity you can have in an action game. The more serious you take the game you're making, the less stupidity you can get away with. Lollipop Chainsaw or Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad can be as gleefully dumb as it wants to be because we all understand what we're buying. Conversely, if you're a Triple A marquee title like Gears Of War, you should probably make at least a token attempt at decent dialogue, likable characters and storytelling.

When I say that GOW3 telegraphed the Big Character Death halfway through, I mean that literally. I got a postcard in the mail months in advance warning me what was going to happen. They deserve credit for knowing enough to give you a long period of silence afterwards to digest the event but it would have worked better if they had given me a reason to care more. Let's not even get into the last second flirting with a twist on the Locust that was ultimately abandoned. Oh, and if you were able to listen to any of Tai's dialogue in the "RAAM's Shadow" DLC without either wincing audibly or laughing your ass off at it... I dunno, man. Congratulations? He's supposed to be a "tough, spiritual warrior" but ended up sounding like an steroid-enhanced autistic guy repeating shit he read in his parents' philosophy books.

As much as I shit on them, I still really like the Gears Of War games for the big set pieces, the unimpeachable gameplay, the bang for your buck that they give with different game modes and the amount of replayability they offer. If you add People Can Fly to that mix, I think we may get the best Gears game yet. Especially if they bring ex-F.E.A.R. Agent and current X-Force writer Rick Remender back to script it. Bulletstorm was definitely on the right side of stupid. It was just crass and funny and unsentimental enough to work. I doubt they'd outsource that to someone outside of Epic but I can hope.

This plays into my biggest disappointment with this year's E3: Dead Space 3. Man, where to start? I watched all the footage from E3 and read the coverage that was also in July's Game Informer and I got progressively more bummed as I went on.

I know I will be a minority here. I should probably state that in advance. I expect the game will be very well reviewed. If it gets less than an 80% on Metacritic, I will be shocked. It's clearly a good looking game made by an experienced team. It's just not a Dead Space game anymore. Let me explain.

Dead Space was always on the more action-y end of the survival horror spectrum. That's something that comes with the times. It's widely acknowledged that the survival horror genre is now a niche market. The more people you have playing games, the more people you have with no attention span and even less brains who simply won't tolerate a game where something isn't blowing up every five minutes. I've reconciled the fact that my love for survival horror will have to be confined to small, indie PC titles. (Please Silent Hill, just stop.) For the brand to survive, embracing the mainstream action aspects of gaming was inevitable. That said, you have a choice in how you embrace it and that seems to be where things are going off the rails.

There were always definite elements of old school survival horror in the Dead Space DNA: the corridor crawls, the claustrophobic atmosphere, inventory management and relative scarcity of ammo and health (on higher difficulty levels). Watch the E3 footage. Watch the 20 minute gameplay video they released. Do you see any of that left?

It's now a co-op focused game. Which means the fear factor will take a huge nosedive. It's impossible to get immersed in something when you have a friend talking in your ear. What's more, and I think this is an important fact that hasn't been talked about much yet, level design. Designing a level for a single-player game and a co-op game are entirely different. You can't do a corridor crawl with two players because you'll constantly be getting in each others way. That means big, open spaces where both characters can run around independently. That also means another drop in scares because there's no way to have an enemy take you by surprise if you have a full 360 degree view of your surroundings and room to move and anticipate them. Watching the footage, they seem to be utilizing the "dead bodies hidden by snow" trick but there's only so many times they can pull that before everyone catches on.

There will also be many more human antagonists which brings up the question how the two can co-exist in the same place. Necromorphs do not give a single shit about the Unitologists even if the Uni's believe that the necromorphs are religiously significant. Logically, either the Uni's would kill themselves so that they necromorphs could transform them, like so many did in the first two Dead Space games, or just get the fuck out. That's the problem with being a member of a militant death cult: if you don't kill yourself, you kinda seem like a pussy. Also, it will be yet another drop in scares because, as a player, there's nothing less scary than another asshole with a gun shooting at you. I'm sure this will be explained in game, I'm just not sure I trust them to give it any kind of logic.

They're also gimping inventory management by making a single universal form of ammo for all weapons. So there will be no more sweating about which weapons to bring along, you just grab whatever you can carry and shoot until your heart's content. No more will you realize that you only have a plasma cutter and a pulse rifle when what you really needed was that line gun you left in storage.

The obvious choice to me would have been to completely segregate the single-player and co-op experiences, a la Portal 2. Let them share locations but give them both entirely unique areas as well. Tell two different stories with two sets of characters that intertwine so that you get the whole story. Make the single player more of a classic survival horror/action game and make the co-op more action packed. They seem to be trying to think around that problem by making the co-op drop in/drop out but that really doesn't help. It's still a co-op designed game, you're just playing it solo.

Which leaves the most annoying aspect (to me, at least) of this new co-op focused action game approach they're taking: all the blatantly obvious storytelling and character choices. The character of Issac Clarke was a total cipher in the first game, which worked in context. The second game notably gave him a voice and the beginnings of a personality but he was still very much a cipher. It was a success mostly because they didn't screw it up. He was still a lowly engineer massively unprepared for all of the shit he was forced to do. They also introduced Ellie Langford, a pilot and new friend as confused and unprepared as Issac who was a good foil for our quiet, contemplative man of action. In Dead Space 3 we get Issac Clarke, Generic Action Hero.

If Ellie were your co-op partner, I think that would go a little ways towards making a game that skewed a little closer to the survival horror/action mix they had already established. Neither of them are trained soldiers which allows for a sense of danger in combat situations and allows for controls that are a little heavier and less responsive to illustrate that. That's always been another aspect of survival horror: slower controls make you more susceptible to attacks and force to to try and think ahead. Plus, from a visual sense, having a woman in one of those exo-suits Issac wears could be a really cool visual. As it stands, your co-op partner is a soldier, so they'll have to adjust the controls to make things more responsive to the action. They've definitely already added things like dodge rolls (In a heavy exo-suit? Seriously?) and cover-based shooting so you can probably expect other standard action game controls as well. (If you're still keeping track, that's another notch in the "not scary" column.) And, really, Ellie couldn't be your co-op partner because Ellie is a woman and women are icky. Besides, as we already established in my last entry about the Tomb Raider remake, all men are really dumb and can't project themselves onto a female character. We certainly would not want to ruin some guys' post-game high five by making one of them play a girl. We also don't want to acknowledge female gamers at all because... well, we just don't.

Let's talk about our new soldier friend, by the way, because he really pisses me off. He's indicative of everything I hate about this new direction. His name is Carver. Because we're dumb and all military types need really obvious on-the-nose names to show you what a bad ass they are. (Why not just call him "Killerberg" or "Murderstein?" At least then he'd be Jewish which would be some kind of atypical trait.) He's also gruff and scarred and doesn't much care for Issac because, as I said, we're all dumb and every male co-op game relationship needs to be a carbon copy of every buddy cop movie you've ever seen. "Oh, the Captain just made them partners... but, oooh, they have a personality conflict and don't get along... but, hey, they bond over mutual enemies... then, awwww, they come to an understanding and develop a mutual respect." There's roughly following basic literary tropes and then there's using them as a crutch and a time-saver. Carver is the latter. There's also nothing scarier than traveling around with a stone cold, tough talking killer with a gun. One more for the "not scary" column.

Everything about Dead Space 3 feels like Visceral Games is taking the easiest possible approach. They could take any aspect of the complaints I've mentioned thus far and twist them somehow to make the fresh. Instead, they seem to be dragging along every sorry cliche they can find in search of mainstream success on par with that other third person co-op action series (and license to print money) Gears Of War. Hell, the swallowed-by-a-giant-monster-and-you-have-to-fight-your-way-out scene from the E3 demo was something that featured prominently in Gears 2.

Dead Space 3 is not an evolution, it's a regression into an entirely different genre. Either they're going to have to market Dead Space 3 as an action game with some horror movie window dressing or risk the backlash when long time fans like me realize that the game just isn't what it was. If they try to market it as a horror game, they're shooting themselves repeatedly in the foot. They're trying to have it both ways and that almost always ends up in a muddy, unfocused project that fails at both. It won't matter to me either way because I've just cashed out on the series. Aliens: Colonial Marines is coming out within a couple weeks of Dead Space 3 and that looks much more interesting. It'll be an co-op action/horror shooter just like Dead Space 3 but at least they won't have completely compromised themselves making it.