Gears of War Reloaded review - a compromised update of a classic shooter

It's the feel of Gears of War that matters. Marcus Fenix controls like a bipedal tank with weak brakes. He lumbers through battlefields, the screen wobbling drunkenly when he breaks into a sprint, and slams into waist-high barriers when it's time to take cover. His bullets thud into enemy bodies like an axe into thick wood, and the guns make a satisfying clacking noise when properly reloaded.

All of these sensations are what matter in Gears of War. They're what has kept the game vital throughout the years. They're what has made Gears an essential shooter, from its first appearance on the Xbox 360 in 2006 and PC in 2007 through to its initial 2015 remaster, Gears of War Ultimate Edition, and until today, as Gears of War: Reloaded.

Part schlock sci-fi plot, part broad commentary on the early years of the War on Terror, Gears of War is, at its foundation, just a story about a soldier and his friends doing their favorite thing in the world: killing monsters. The action game introduces us to protagonist Marcus Fenix as he's sprung from prison and swept up into a mission to annihilate a reptile-insect species called the Locust that have overrun the world. As in every edition, Reloaded's plot is thinly drawn, though its bleak, cartoonish setting remains compelling, with its depiction of a militarist government engaged in a seemingly infinite war against an omnipresent threat.

Everything else that worked in prior iterations of Gears works here, too. The singular feel mentioned above is maintained in weighty gun battles against Locust soldiers and hulking monsters. The range of environments, spanning the faded grandeur of crumbling stone cities and networks of shadowy, Locust-haunted mining tunnels deep beneath the earth, are well designed, keeping the consistent rhythm of one shootout after another from becoming dull. All of the campaign's best moments remain, too.

Whether alone or in co-op, Gears provides a number of outstanding scenes that make good use of the simplistic, cover-based design at its core. Reloaded replicates the most memorable parts of its source material, like the sequence where Marcus and Dom have to play a kind of high stakes 'the floor is lava' by shooting propane tanks or shining spotlights across dark city streets to avoid getting ripped apart by monstrous, light-hating pseudo-bats called Kryll.

The only significant difference to all of this is that, in Reloaded, nothing looks quite as good as the original Gears of War or 2015's Ultimate Edition.

This doesn't mean Reloaded isn't a successful remaster, in the technical sense. It does, ultimately, look more like a videogame from recent years than one from nearly two decades ago. Reloaded doesn't look as good as the original or its first rework not because it's technically faulty, but because its aesthetic loses part of its appeal when rendered in higher fidelity.

The visual overhaul here isn't as drastic as the more thorough redesign of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. But the changes Reloaded makes are noticeable. Its higher resolution textures and altered lighting techniques generally make the game appear brighter and, as a result, lighten up the moody atmosphere. The scattered corpses and pools of gore have carried over, but the '80s and '90s comic book grittiness is less present here than ever before.

The foundation of Gears of War persists, but it comes off as slightly disjointed in this new version. The cast of characters still have the same warped proportions as before, their jaws jutting out like carved rock and their outsized frames making them resemble a troop of shaved gorillas trudging along with giant rifles on their backs. It's just that these characters now seem a bit out of place in the higher fidelity warzones they move through, their gravelly remarks and the straight-faced ridiculousness of their machismo feeling like they belong to another, grimier game - a game like the original Gears of War or the more appropriately reworked Ultimate Edition.

Reloaded is a good game in the sense that it's built from the bones of another good game. Since it's the latest version of Gears of War, it's also likely to become the only choice for players looking for well-populated multiplayer matches and online co-op partners for the foreseeable future. It's not the best way to play Gears of War despite this, though, because the introduction of new technological features has had the effect of taking something vital away from the earlier, lower fidelity versions. The feel of Gears of War has survived in Reloaded, but other aspects of the original have been lost.