Gears of War: Judgment; Guess Gears 3 Wasn’t the End

Many video game developers are guilty of what Epic Games has recently done with Gears of War franchise. They release blockbuster games, call them trilogies, and swear to fans that there will not be another game released after the third.

Halo did it–after Halo 3 was released it was promised that Master Chief’s story would end there, and the Halo universe would no longer exist. Then, in an attempt to ride on the coattails of 3′s success, Bungie decided to release Halo 3: ODST and Halo Wars and Halo: Reach. But they didn’t stop there. Ignoring all previous statements, 343 Studios (which is replacing Bungie as leaders of the Halo franchise) is releasing Halo 4 in November of this year.

And, not to be outdone by their fellow Microsoft-only gaming “trilogy,” Epic Games announced Gears of War: Judgment at E3 this year. In Judgment, gamers will be following the story of a younger Baird and Cole, two members of Marcus Fenix’s squad in the previous three Gears games. Players will learn how Baird and Cole came to be held under contempt by the Coalition of Governments and will be able to take part in all of the mischief that got them in trouble in their youth.  Sounds interesting? Sure. And the new game type Epic is promoting also sounds interesting–a mix of Horde and Beast mode that includes class-based gameplay.

But I find that Judgment leaves something to be desired. The problem with rushing games out to cash in on the success of previous games is obvious–the games often look and feel as if they’ve been rushed. The graphics in Judgment look exactly like the graphics in Gears 3, and call me picky but I like to see some growth in between games. I’d like to see that developers actually learned something instead of watching them regurgitate the same graphics and cheesy one-liners onto a disk, give it better packaging, and call it a different game.

I probably will end up buying Gears of War: Judgement, but certainly not when it first comes out, and certainly not instead of the myriad other games that will overshadow it.

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