Gears of War 4 (2016 game) = Finished

I didn't find a way to describe how radical the changes were to the Gears of War formula, until I noticed an audio cue that was missing.

In previous Gears of War games, when a new objective was added to your tracker or completed, an ominous bell toll would ring out. It was a badass end to many pitched fights and generally reinforced an atmosphere I'd like to describe as "apocalypse punk". When you died, a braying horn combined with the roar of some nameless, terrible beast heralded not just your death--but the end of the world itself. Getting injured meant that a skull, large as could be, would steadily obscure your screen to the point of blinding...which generally meant you were one piece of shrapnel away from dying. In every game, the world was ending right now, and despite your greatest efforts you still might not be able to stop it. As a result, each installment (at least up to Judgement which I haven't played yet) felt essential. 

The greatest issue Gears of War 4 faces, in my opinion, is that it carries little of this urgency. The bell tolls are gone. The roars of an oncoming, inevitable death are gone. The skull is only completed when you actually die--which helps with visibility, but not in establishing a tone. Yes, more color is here, but there were moments of brilliant color in the original games. The amount of banter is about the same level as ever. The difference is that the original games contextualized it with an inevitable, almost eldritch sense of overwhelming threat. Memento moris, in other words--down to the skull on your armor. Their stories felt like tales that needed to be told and completed. Gears of War 4 just doesn't.

The weapons are as fun to use as ever, if not better. Smoother. Your tactical options have increased, battlefields are dynamic...Gears of War 4 manages to retain the mechanical bits that made its predecessors special while advancing the formula in its own considered ways. That is a titanic achievement. The story is good, too! However, shifting the atmosphere by taking away the cloud of visible and invisible darkness that tinged even the brightest moments in the original games removed a piece of the Gears of War formula that I didn't even realize was a thing.  In many ways, its light handling resembles an Uncharted game--which is a great series, but a seemingly odd choice to apply to Gears in hindsight. 

Gears of War is no longer a fight against capital-lettered The End. It's an adventure, and it suffers for it.