mycarisorange

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

You pay $60 for a single player game and you still need to buy crates to progress in the game? When are you all going to get the hint? Your fanbases aren't standing for this any longer. Double the cost of the game if you have to but give us a game that (a) actually functions as intended and (b) doesn't nickle-and-dime your reputation into nothingness.

Get better, EA. You haven't done a thing to address troll goalies or AFK skaters in EASHL and the years have added up. The loyalty you earned in the late 2000s and early 2010s is all but dead amongst the players who used to buy it every year.

I wasn't going to go out of my way to tell them they're a terrible company with a terrible product, but they paid Amazon off to only allow verified purchases for reviews on there. As such, I'm cranky enough to go blow the doors off of every ratings website that matters. Get the message, EA: you can neither sell victory nor mortgage skill.

Gears Ultimate looks absolutely stunning, but there are still issues that weren't fixed. Some things were changed from the original, too, and that's equally as annoying. The graphics, though, are insane. Absolutely beautiful in 60FPS (online; 30FPS campaign) and the movements are smooth enough to make you completely forget about roadie run glitching and weapon sliding from back in the day. Graphics get a 10, bar none. My issues are mostly online but also somewhat with regards to the campaign. The campaign, to start, doesn't have 60FPS and that's odd to me. Online, you would think, would need so much more physical memory and processing power that you'd expect this to be flipped. The campaign still looks cool, but gets somewhat choppy during hordes and rushes. They had a chance to completely blow things out of the water and missed it with the 30FPS, in my most humble opinion. Additionally, I don't remember the AI being as useless as they are in this game. I'm sticking to co-op so that Dom has a pulse, but Baird and Cole frequently let enemies walk directly past them without even standing up, let alone shooting at them. They are somewhat cognizant of picking up DBNO players, but their lack of wherewithal throughout the majority of the story is troubling. As a side note, I'd gotten stuck at two different junctures because AI enemies didn't spawn properly and wouldn't move from cover. They both happened in Act II, where you must stay in light or be eaten by Kryll, and they prevented me from moving forward with the mission. It's easy enough to just die and reload, but it's still annoying to have the issue. Multiplayer is a majority of my gripe with this game. I played Gears 1 religiously. To this day, almost a decade later, my gamerpic is still Seriously, so I know full well what this game used to be. Much like Halo, it was a power weapon hogging, NAT closing, host-shotgunning clusterluck of a morose mix of aggravation & passion. This online experience is nothing like the old game. I think they did something to make it feel more like Gears 2/3, both of which I hated, and I think it really takes away from the original feel. You used to be able to melee directly out of a run, shoot immediately after tumbling and pick weapons up while in cover. None of these things are possible anymore. Shotguns are curbed, melee stuns are instant death sentences and lancers to the legs somehow do more damage than to the head. It's not impossible to get over these issues and still have fun, but, considering the game is branded as a remake of a classic, it needs to be said that it's totally different than what old gamers are used to. More problematic, though, is the matchmaking process. There's apparently some sort of difficulty algorithm built into matchmaking to make the game as fair as possible, but I haven't seen it work properly once. After the first 10 or so games (which are apparently enough to establish this figure and thus ought to be enough for it to kick in), I was still being placed against full teams/clans who were 70+ levels higher than me. I have enough muscle memory from Gears 1 to not play pitifully, but it's a total wash when you're alone and you're put against a stacked team. The conventional answer is to just run with my own team, but it's still the point that this would immediately throw a new player off Gears for life. Too many games are gimmes for established teams. Sticky bouncers are as out of control in this game as bumper jumpers in Halo, and that's a huge detractor as well. It's a strategy that's open to anyone so I don't factor this into just this game, but the series as a whole needs work with this. Game looks absolutely amazing, but the gameplay doesn't add up to much more than a 7. Luckily, this was free with my Xbox One.

As my first RPG ever, this game is the benchmark I compare all other games to. I've loved nearly every Final Fantasy since VII (Except the ones with Lightning and Snow, level caps are for weaklings) but none of them compare to this. Playing it now, compared to newer RPGs, may not seem overwhelmingly amazing, but it was certainly the coolest thing on the market at the time and it's still in my Top 5 of entertainment history (This game, Godfather III, Harry Potter/LOTR series, Brady's 50 TD season and Skyrim). It's $6 on PSN, go give it a try!