My journey in the Gears series began May 1st 2023. I have now finished every single numbered game in the series.
All have merits and issues. 3 remains the best to me.
4 is a weak entry even tho that final act was awesome with the mechs.
5 is fine but the skiff parts destroy the pacing of the game and have the worst open world of any game. Worse than Rage 2 and No More Heroes. At least the stuff outside those is solid.
I can't help but think they lightened up on the gore and I love gore. 4-5 feel like weaker entries to me. 4 is technically worse than 5 but if I want to replay Gears again at least 4 is more or less a more traditional Gears game. More or less. I let Del die in 5 because I thought in stories like this the character you like most has to die in these situations. 4-5 looked nice on PC but 5 is not optimized that well. A lot of hitches and a couple of crashes. I have a 3070, 32GB of Ram, and a 10 Core i7 CPU in this so should be fine.