We’re back. Your loadout is prepared with power armour, Chainguns and Roadie Runs readied, and Sera is under attack again, but where there was once the reassuring feel of an Xbox controller in your hand, you look down to find a PlayStation 5 DualSense instead. Is this some Locust trick? No, this is gaming in 2025, and while it’s likely proof that the console wars are basically over, Marcus Fenix can never rest, with a new battleground to protect.
Gears of War: Reloaded is the original Gears game, but tugged, tightened and scrubbed up to fit into a newer, shinier suit of armour, ready for battle on the enemy console. For the veteran, there’s not a whole lot to find, pulling together the additional campaign act from the original PC release and the 2015 Ultimate Edition, alongside all of the previous DLC, and there’s cross-platform play as well as cross-save.
Unfortunately, though, it’s only cross-save across the brand-new Reloaded version of the game, as opposed to any other rendition of this game. It’s the kind of thing Fenix would shrug at, and so should you, but I found it a little odd that the cross-save is a feature limited to this outing, when Xbox gamers will have played it a number of times.
At this point, I could genuinely reload a Lancer in my sleep – assuming you only have to hit a shoulder button at the right time to do so. I’ve played through this campaign more times than I can count, but it still hits the same beats, still ramps up the drama, and is still capable of putting you on the back foot, especially on the higher difficulty settings.
The steady stream of iconic moments, from your first steps through the city, the fight through darkened alleyways filled with avian Kryll, or luring a Berzerker through narrow corridors, are as much of an adrenaline rush as ever. We don’t see many of these types of shooters anymore, and in the absence of modern or even remastered Killzone and Resistance, there’s a welcoming little slot on PlayStation that I think Gears will fit nicely into.
Multiplayer will play a large part in that, and co-op and competitive play is still a massive part of the gung-ho Gears experience. Adding in cross-play to bolster the community should mean that there’s always someone to play with or against, though I have to wonder how newcomers will fare against a legion of players who’ve been honing their reloads and shotgun blasts for the best part of twenty years. If you’ve got the tech, multiplayer is also available in 120fps on consoles and even higher on PC, which is frankly mind-blowing, making the game feel more fluid than it ever has before.
It’s still pretty brown and grey, though. That’s utterly indicative of the time, of course – it wasn’t until Gears 3 that the series really found a new palette – and for all that this looks pretty damn arresting at times, I still wanted some more vibrancy beyond the blood red COG logos and shining blue armour highlights. Reloaded builds on the work done for the Ultimate Edition a decade ago, enhancing it further, most strikingly with the lighting. If you want to be sold on a decaying, dehumanised civilisation, it does a good job of that, and with the campaign running with upscaled 4K at 60fps on PS5 and with HDR, it’s never looked better. PS5 Pro can push a touch further with resolution, shadow quality and PSSR, but it looks great on the base console.
For all that Gears might be the poster boy for the frat-boy, mid-2000s era of gaming, your comrades are even dumber than I remember. While Dom, Baird and Cole will do some work along the way, they’ll also stand in your way, run back and forth under enemy fire, and on occasion be more of a nuisance than you’d want. Sometimes you’ll just hear them thumping around somewhere nearby, and when those thumps are as loud as they are in Gears, it’s an unnecessary distraction.
Tie that up with a few graphical glitches – my favourite saw a painting end up stuck on Dom’s neck for a while, like he’d inadvertently ended up in a comedy skit with some Locust playfully hitting him over the head with it – and you can still see the Xbox 360 origins if you scrape away a few layers of the shiny paint.
There are a few little PlayStation 5 exclusive features here, and one of them is that the speaker in your DualSense delivers all the comm messages from Anya as well as the area-cleared audio notes, which is a nice touch, albeit one that reminds you that your speaker is probably turned up too loud. You can, of course, turn it off if you want to.
I hope that this is the start of Microsoft bringing across the rest of the Gears games, though it does feel like we should be getting something more like the Master Chief Collection at this point, at least for the first three games. There’s still a hell of a lot to like in the first Gears game – it is a classic that launched a thousand over-the-shoulder third-person cover shooters after all – but the series gets better, with 2’s campaign and 3’s multiplayer still holding position as the true highlights. The iconic Horde mode didn’t arrive until Gears 2 as well, and a Gears game without that now feels strangely lopsided.