For my birthday a mate bought me Gears Judgement and for his, I bought it for him. Usual deal every year, but it means we can properly enjoy some coop gaming together, as a sort of birthday present to each other.
Anyway, we spent a whole afternoon plowing through the Gears Judgement campaign in 2 player coop, which is the best way to enjoy any of the Gears of War campaigns!
I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty about graphics and fiddly bits, as I'm sure they've been covered many times in proper reviews and I don't really care too much about that stuff. Needless to say they're not much different to other Gears of War games. I read somewhere that they'd made this iteration more colourful, but I didn't really notice much difference.
Game mechanics
Gears Judgement plays totally differently to any of the other Gears games. I feels like they've mixed in a bit of generic shoot-em-up (CoD, Rage etc...) into the classic Gears cover-based shooter to create a faster paced Gears of War experience. It was very strange to not spend most of our time sat in cover. I found myself using cover as I would in Battlefield or any other shooter, without needing to use the actual cover game mechanics.
To go with these changes in game mechanics the developers have also made the weapons more powerful, so you no longer need to empty a whole magazine of ammo into an enemies head to bring him down. I don't want to imply the "classic" Gears mechanics are bad, but I really appreciate this change. My friend and I really appreciated the fact that other weapons seemed to be more functional and attractive to use in different situations. I think in previous Gears games it was pretty clear that the Lancer was the best weapon and everything else was there for when you ran out of Lancer ammo.
Story
The story of the campaign revolves around a court case, where Kilo squad, led by Lt. Baird, are being charged for there previous actions. After each scene of the court case the players go through a retrospective memory sequence, playing through what Kilo squad experienced. This is the whole game basically and has a nice feel to it, but it didn't give me the sense of emersion I normally get from a Gears game. You basically knew what was going to happen from the very beginning.
The whole campaign had a very arcady feel to it, which I think progressed even more from Gears 3. The levels were great self contained experiences and I'm quite keen to replay some of them for the great game play they involved, but as an overall story it didn't really leave me feeling very satisfied.
Multiplayer
I can't really talk about this in any length, but they removed horde mode and replaced it with survival mode, where players work together to defend an objective. It really lacks the sandbox feel which I think horde mode gave players, but it feels suitable considering the faster paced action in this game. I need to play it more and see how it progresses at higher levels.
Overall
As a prequel to the first Gears of War it's ok. It doesn't give too much away and it's nice to learn a little more about the Gears universe, prior to the events of Gears 1. However, the campaign doesn't feel complete, it feels like an expansion.
I don't think I'll be getting rid of Gears of War 2, because of it's great campaign, or Gears of War 3, for the epic horde mode. But I will happily keep Gears Judgement for now, because I like the game mechanics and I look forward to exploring the multiplayer more.
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