Gears 5 is the latest instalment in Gears of War franchise. Gears had a Tech Test earlier and many gamers got to try it giving us a taste of what it to come. Now X35 Earthwalker himself tried it and off course has his own thoughts and opinions of the game. Now remember that the Tech Test isn’t the final release at all and more work will be done. It’s all in development still so keep that in mind. Let’s take a look.

The first thing we experienced in the Gears 5 Tech Test was the bootcamp which was the tutorial for the game which teaches players about aiming, shooting, handling grenades, roadie running, cover etc, all the gears of war stuff. The tutorial was done very well. It goes over the main mechanics and what you need to know in order to play and survive through the game. There’s some character based humour as we all know Baird is very sarcastic and got some jokes which works well with Del who can also be sarcastic, have jokes and like Baird likes and is good with technology. It’s good to see the relationships, connections and interactions between characters. Makes things relatable.  

The Bootcamp did show of the excellent graphics that Gears 5 is going to have. The whole area looked real good, the materials, lights and even the flying bot known as Dave looked detailed too. You can already tell that a lot of work is going into Gears 5. Even when you look at all the formations and environment in the distance it’s all detailed and does make you want to go over there and explore them, even if there aren’t any collectibles, just to take a look. The tutorial is too long though. There was a few combat instances that weren’t needed. Minor but still something.

Now the main meat is off course the multiplayer. The new things was revealed two weapons, a game mode and a few in game mechanics like kill cam replay mainly. The two new weapons in the Gears 5 Tech Test are the Talon auto pistol and Breaker Mace. The Talon auto pistol is basically a discount gorgon pistol. Yep. The talon has unbearably bad recoil and control. It’s damage is good though but what good is it if you can’t even control the thing when firing. This is coming from some who is a master with rifles including the heavy recoil retro lancer of Gears of War 3.

The breaker mace is a cool new melee weapon. Think of it like the energy sword from Halo in terms of you rush enemies or hide around corners and then hit them. If you land the hit then it’s normally a one shot kill. Like the beam sword you also sort of track the enemy when you start your swing if within range.  Even though there are multiple counters to this weapon and melee isn’t encourage at all in Gears of War nor is it successful, it still feels super good to get a kill with this weapon. The Breaker Mace execution is so far the best in the game. More on this later.

The new mode is arcade mode which is basically a regular team deathmatch except each player must select a character and each character has their own starting load outs, kill perk and weapons to unlock. As you kill you gain personal points which you can then spend to get weapons. For example Kait moves faster than everyone else on the Cog team and if she has 6 points then she can purchase a torque bow. 2 points for a Bolton and 4 for incendiary grenades. So everyone is trying to get kills to purchase the weapons they need for the fight. Sort of reminds us of ordinance drops in Halo 4.  

The new mechanics do actually change some things about the gameplay. For starters the melee is no longer a generic swing at your opponent with the current holding weapon. It’s now a swing with a knife which finally gives those knives the gears carried around a use. So whether it’s a lancer or Gnasher you will swing a knife with one button. Gears 5 finally has kill cam replays. Remember when someone killed you but you don’t know how or thought that shot missed? Well now you can watch and see for yourself what happened according to the game. Lastly rifles and some other weapons like the Snub pistol can now headshot enemies! It took the developers long enough to do this. So if the enemy has received enough damage and you then land some shots on the head, they die instantly like a headshot. This makes rifles more lethal.  

Now we can easily tell that Gears 5 has had a lot of work put into it. The graphics are very good for what we have seen so far and that’s an excellent sign. The environment like the kids, water and lands around the training grounds are look so cool. Sounds are very good but some of the guns like the Lancer sound more on the weak side. Arcade mode is definitely going to be a hit with the players and many will have fun and great moments in them. These new mechanics show that new things are being tried and areas are being explored. Things do need be taken further though. Off course the weapons we mentioned much earlier isn’t all the new guns in Gears 5. We are just sticking to the Tech Test.

Now for the negatives of Gears 5. We have a lot. For starters Gears 5 is taking up after the multiplayer gameplay style of Gears of War 4. This is a mistake the Gears of war that had the best multiplayer gameplay was Gears of War 3. Even to this day there’s a good number of players who are still playing Gears of War 3. We even know of a mother of three children who tried Gears of war 4 multiplayer but instead went back to 3. The developers want a faster paced, quick everything multiplayer which isn’t the best for a Gears of War game. Gears of War is about taking cover, not dashing everywhere. Even the golden rule of the Cog is “take cover or die”. This highlights the other major issue of the game. Gears 5 based of the Tech Test has no actual counters to the Gnasher shotgun. That weapon has ruined the game for many players. It’s still the dominate weapon in the game. In Gears of War 3 even new players could play the multiplayer and stand a chance because there were weapons they can use to give them a fighting chance against a crazy wall bouncing Gnasher shotgun user. In Gears of War 4 we have seen new players try and then leave because they had no fun being completely destroyed every single match. We remember one player who stayed for four matches (Gears of War 4) in a row and tried their best only to get a heavy negative result in each match and until finally leaving. We know for a fact they aren’t coming back.

In Gears of War 3 you could use hammerburst, sawed off and the retro to counter and force Gnasher shotgun players to change their strategy. In Gears of War 4 Gnasher worshipping players kept complaining until their daddy (the developers) hushed them down bu removing retro lancers and making hammerbursts a power weapon. This is going to be the problem in Gears 5 and we can feel it. The developers need to learn from Gears of War Judgement which easily had the best weapon balancing of all the games. The rifles dominated at mid range AS THEY SHOULD! How is a shotgun beating rifles at mid range in Gears of War 3 and 4? HOW?! Halo understands… at mid range the shotgun pretty much does nothing and that’s a shotgun from the year 2557… the future. The Talon machine pistol is a discount gorgon pistol and it’s crazy recoil doesn’t help to stop the Gnasher. The enforcer feels better and seems more effective but doesn’t compare to the retro but just you wait, the Gnasher worshippers will complain about the enforcer and cry for nerfs. We have so much to say about this but we have to try and keep this short. Lastly Arcade mode suffers from players abusing the weapon system. X35 Earthwalker once entered late into a match that was horrible. The enemy team were all camping up in a high place on the Training grounds map. One player had a sniper and never moved from his spot. The other tea mates watched the entrances to his location. X35 did what he could and even destroyed half the team but couldn’t reach the sniper. X35’s team were clearly new at the game and kept going into cover and then standing up taking their time trying to aim at the sniper who would snipe all their heads off, getting multiple kills and continuously purchase snipers to keep going. Eventually three of the players had snipers and the whole team camped in their spot. Talk about lame. X35 Earthwalker left the match… Something needs to be done.

Overall we found Gears 5 multiplayer to be disappointing. It it stays the same or is like Gears of War 4 then we know it’s not going to be great. Changes are needed and the developers need to take into account that different experienced, skill and style players will be trying the game. From what we can see so far we are looking forward to Campaign, horde, Escape (new) and Map builder (new). Trust us when we say we are big Gears of War fans. We played every Gears of War game, beat every single one in insane difficulty concerning the campaign and found every collectible. We have made Gears of war videos on Bitchute and Youtube and even streamed the games but sadly we aren’t excited for this game. We are looking forward to it but not excited. When it comes out is when it comes out. The multiplayer we already know what time it is (how it’s going to go down). Don’t get us wrong, Gears 5 is a very good game. Looks great, works well, responsive controls, the mechanics work, the voices are good, new weapons modes and you can Cleary see that a whole lot of work went into developing this game. So overall it is a very good game. We are just disappointed with the multiplayer especially when we compare it to Gears of war which we enjoyed s much that us and many others are still playing after all these years. We even had more fun playing Gears of War judgement multiplayer over the Gears 5 tech test. Honest feedback is honest feedback. If you want to know more about what we think concerning Gears of War 3 then check out our previous blog post here and over here. So we do like the game and looking forward to it but not the multiplayer.