Until recently there wasn’t much in the way of information from co-developers People Can Fly and Epic Games about the latest game in the Gears of War series which is called Judgement. Odd that Microsoft hasn’t been talking up this game as much as they usually do like with the Halo but that’ll probably change the closer it gets to its release date of the 19th of March 2013.
Gears of War: Judgement will be a prequel and the plot will follows Kilo team which is led by fan favorites Braid and “The Cole Train” Gus Cole along with two new characters Sofia Hendrick, an ex-journalist who believes that ethics shouldn’t come in the way of the mission and Garron Paduk who joined the army to get revenge on the locust. There on trial for treason and the missions will be flashbacks that lead up to the trail.
The campaign mode will also have tower defense parts which basically adds hordes mode to the single-player and will help break up game-play. Add to this the fact that at certain points of the game you’ll be given the chance to slightly alter the story. How it will work is that at certain points you’ll be given a challenge like defend an area with only a certain type of weapons. You don’t have to do them but doing so also unlocks story experience points which goes towards the games star ranks in where you can get up to three in each level and they appear to be connected to something called aftermath which will be unlocked after you clear the campaign hence the name.
While it doesn’t look like they’ve changed the series combat mechanics at all even thought to be fair that is excepted, they have however changed the control scheme and no for some reason you’re not allowed to change it back. One example of the change is that instead of using the D-pad to change weapons you’re now using the Y button in order to as the developers put it allows for faster weapons switching. Also the game now features smart spawn so every time you die or replay a level the there are new locusts to fight so there won’t be any trial and error.
Judgements will be adding two new modes to multiplayer which are called Overrun and Free-For-All. Free-For-All is well a free-for-all mode where players will be fighting for them self’s and will make a nice break from Gears of Wars usual team-based multiplayer. The other mode Overrun on the other hand looks to combine both beast modes with the hordes mode while adding tower defence gameplay into the mix. In Overrun one team players as the COGS and the other as the locusts. The locusts work the same way as in last year’s beast mode where in you use weaker locust first like the tickers to earn enough points to buy better ones like the berserker and the COGS use there points to make better defences like barriers and turrets. The COGS also have classes who are the snipers, engineers, soldiers and medics. The objective of Overrun is to destroy either the Locusts E-Hole or the COGS generator.
Gears of War: Judgement is shaping up to actually be a really good game with a fun and unique new multiplayer mode and an interesting story campaign idea that reminds me of Dragon Age 2 although it looks like their taking full advantage of it here unlike in that game. It is however a little weird that they changed the original control scheme with no way of going back to the original one.
