exclaiming “don't mind if I do!”, which was the tagline of Futurama‘s Bender, whom DiMaggio also voiced. Turns out an older Marcus is actually quite cranky, like one beer away from "get-off-my-lawn!" cranky, which is all sorts of awesome. His complaining that robots are trashing his recently planted tomatoes is a small but funny highlight.
#GEARS OF WAR 4 SITE SERIES#
His return to the series is more than welcome as voice actor John DiMaggio is still gruff in the best way ever. Think of it as a mini-Horde moment.Įventually, (minor spoilers for those who haven't seen any trailers) Marcus Fenix shows up. It's a simple, but an effective way of breaking up with normal gunplay. Players must fortify their base of operations in a timed period before three waves of baddies attack. This leads to the first wave-based assault. The Fabricator, that item they were stealing, is a box that can engineer all sorts of tech, like a turret or an explosive barrier. You would never get a moment like these in any previous Gears game and Gears of War 4 is all the better for it. Such storms can even throw off the aiming of your trusty Boomshot. There's also gorgeously lush forests and strikingly chaotic firestorms and other natural catastrophes that make navigating the environments tricky. During this heist is quality banter between the distrustful Kait and the cocky J.D., who can't believe sophisticated military-grade tech can be undone by a tree hugger like Uncle Oscar. and crew stealing a device called a Fabricator from an official automated COG facility. One of the earliest missions involves J.D. It can be jarring to inhabit a world so clean in Gears, but I dug it. The first two acts are terrific with the art direction sporting a much more colorful, less muted look than the series is known for. This gives the team a different kind of chemistry, which is a good start. Unlike Delta Squad, who has been through hell together, this new pseudo-squad is not made up of life-long pals. Together, under the orders of Minister Jinn, they must leave the Settlement 5 to investigate the disappearances of some locals, one of which is Kait's mother. (whom the player controls), his pal Del, Kait, and her uncle, the eccentric Oscar. So yeah, there's definitely a Big Brother thing going on here.Īt the start of the campaign are four characters: ex-COG J.D. The hallways of this complex are littered with propaganda posters encouraging women to have babies for the good of the state. One of these outsiders from Settlement 5 is a woman named Kait Diaz, who's good with weapons but resents the Maternity wing of her town. They are known as "outsiders" and live in Settlements (read: 'Districts' in The Hunger Games). It doesn't help that the current Prime Minister, Jinn, is a calculating sort.Īs a result of their mistrust, many citizens opt out of COG military life. But for the residents of Old Sera peacetime has brought about suspicion of the Coalition of Ordered Governments. In an era where the Locust threat has ended, the tide of war has receded. Set 25 years after the events of Gears 3, Sera has changed. The result maybe a campaign with an identity crisis but Coalition should be commended for attempting to break the mold, even if by the end, that mold looks an awful like the previous entries. There might almost be too much ambition in the first half of Gears of War 4‘s seven-hour campaign, and for sure, too much of a feeling of falling back on what's worked in previous entries in the second half, but that's okay. Some gameplay elements might seem dated today, but at its heart, Gears of War resonated because of the way it melded addictive gameplay with our nation's feelings. Epic Games, intentionally or not, took the cultural feelings of the early 2000's infusing all that fear and anger into a campaign with massively engaging stop-and-pop firefights. ‘E-Day' would be remembered, symbolized for years to come. Marcus Fenix and the rest of Delta Squad were shaken, war ravaged people (okay, maybe not ex-football star Augustus "Cole Train"), survivors of Emergence Day, the moment that changed the world of Sera forever. Let's remember that the very first Gears, which debuted a decade ago, was a product of its time 9/11 by way of gritty science-fiction.