The pace of the gameplay (aside from the dialogue, the music, sound effects, etc.) is what I was paying attention to. Even for an early build, it looks good, but to me, this looks great. Here's why: this game was originally made to be a survival-horror game, so the pace of play, as well as the events that transpired in the first couple of Gears were more along the pace of what you would expect for a survival-horror TPS. The problems began in Gears 3, which wasn't a horrible game, but wasn't great either. In Gears 3, they started switching to a survival-horror-action game, with faster pace, and fewer aha/scare moments. The point of a survival-horror game is not to throw hordes and hordes of enemies at you, but to make you think of how to solve the problem at hand without dying by using the environment and weapons at your disposal, some scenes are just an ammo dump, yes, but many of Gears 1 and 2 scenes made you stop and consider what you were doing, having to try a couple of times before getting it right in many cases.
The unfortunate thing is they had a model of what NOT to do in the Resident Evil series, but they did not heed that warning of failure imminency and they just continued down the path of regular old fast paced TPS, ruining what once was a great franchise, ESPECIALLY with Gears Judgment, that game was the epitome of awful for them. To me, this reboot shows signs of being that slower pace, aha kind of thing, and to me, that's encouraging. The graphics are not meant to be pretty, it is an early build, so you have to pay attention to the rest of it. The dialogue is a bit more down to Earth and less over the top than the previous 4 Gears, so maybe this is more of an attempt at more real sort of characters...at least in the demo video. I like what they have done, they seem to be going back to the roots, and it looks like it is in at least decent enough hands to possibly resuscitate the franchise.
The big question to me is, how will they refresh the multiplayer?
NNID: Dongo8 XBL Gamertag: Dongos Revenge
