Last month, my feature-length Gears 5 preview hinged on the game’s sales proposition: that Microsoft has positioned this shooter sequel to be immune to a standard game-review treatment. It’s a living service. It’s a four-in-one entertainment package. It’s a no-brainer add-on for the Xbox faithful.
Those statements are true enough if you already pay for Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass service, which currently costs $10/mo on Xbox consoles, $5/mo on Windows 10, or $15/mo combined. Thanks to a bullish promotional campaign, you can test the subscription service for less. Gears 5 lands this week as arguably XGP’s first perfect storm of polish, breadth, and newness, so it’s no surprise to see the game and the service holding hands, petting each other in public, and whispering into each other’s phones at night: “No, you hang up.”
That’s the good news. If you’re already enjoying an XGP subscription (and some people got a super-cheap path to this), Gears 5 has at least one great reason for pretty much any gaming fan to dive in. Or if you want to buy into XGP for two months, then Gears 5 is a perfectly fine $20 (or less) Trojan horse to get the service onto your PC or console.
Binge-worthy?
The bad news, then, is that Gears 5 as a standalone game resembles the comfort-food proposition that has become standard on video subscription services. The polish is immense. The feature depth is ridiculous, as if Microsoft dumped a full season of a star-studded TV series in order to bewilder fans with a binge. But where some game series fill their sequels with a cool mix of boundary-pushing risks and familiar delights, Gears 5 sees fit to cover an all-too-familiar core with a bunch of tinsel and accoutrements. I have enjoyed Gears 5. But everything that makes it a clever XGP add-on seems to simultaneously make it a shoulder-shrug in the “is this worth $60-and-up?” department.
Gears 5 breaks down into a few discrete modes: a plot-driven campaign, which can be played alone or with two friends; an online-versus arena, which includes a hearty variety of newbie-friendly and “hardcore” variants; the “Horde” mode of old, in which friends group up to battle wave after wave of AI monsters; and a new “Escape” mode, which simplifies the Horde PvE formula for better and for worse.
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