Conclusion

Gears 5 is an extremely entertaining shooter with impressive visuals that still runs well on a wide range of hardware. Gameplay has no surprises, you shoot it out on various maps with vastly different environments to uncover the secret behind your protagonist's history. The story, while mostly linear, is solid and captivating. For newcomers to the Gears or War Series, there's a quick recap at the beginning of the game. During my playthrough I definitely felt interested in what would happens next, and how things unfold. While Gears 5 has some minor RPG elements, a very basic talent tree, it's not much to write home about, and probably not that important in this kind of game. Skill development is fed by hidden pickup items in the world, some of which are very hard to find. What makes things interesting is that there is a counter that tells you how many of them are hidden in each map, and I got distracted a couple of times by trying to find them all. Some are not reachable by your character as you have to aim at them and tell your companion to "fetch".

Gunplay is good. There is plenty of weapons to pick up, most of them with a second firing mode to make things more interesting. The Gears of War Series pretty much invented the "cover" mechanics, so it's not surprising that cover is an important aspect of Gears 5, too. Basically, it's a good idea to immediately hide in cover as soon as enemies show up, or you'll get wasted in no time. I found moving between, or in and out of covers, slightly clunky, but you do get used to it. What's super annoying is that your character walks very slowly, which felt like a way to artificially increase the time it takes to finish the game. Running is possible (jumping is not), but for some reason, the developers thought it would be fun to make movement while running extremely sluggish. Another annoying thing is that you can't skip cutscenes, or the intro screens; other games handle this facet more elegantly. When playing solo, you're always paired with AI-controlled team mates that do a surprisingly good job at moving, shooting, and stopping to revive you, in case you go down. Your character has several special abilities, like "stun", "root", "shield", and "cloak" that definitely come in handy, especially at higher difficulties.

As you can see in our screenshots, the maps are incredibly detailed. While some are relatively compact, others are bigger than ever, and almost have an open-world feel to them. Unfortunately, these maps consist largely of empty space, which is not that much fun to navigate with the slow movement speed. Still, big big kudos to the level designers who eked out the most amazing visuals I've ever seen on Unreal Engine 4. As expected, Gears 5 uses DirectX 12, and it does so exclusively—there is no DX11 support. "How does it support Windows 7 then?", I hear you ask. In order to achieve that level of compatibility, Microsoft is using a DirectX 12 translation layer on Windows 7, probably the same as in World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, it isn't a capability you can install into your OS to make all DirectX 12 games run on Windows 7. Rather, the developer integrated the technology into the game's code to keep it exclusive and give people a reason to update to Windows 10. Windows 10 users who bought the game through Microsoft Store must be on the 1903 update as running an older version will simply not work. I'm not sure whether this applies to the Steam version, too, because, well, I upgraded my last 1803 installation to run Gears 5.

Gears 5 supports split-screen and online cooperative multiplayer, which is a blast, especially when playing with friends. If you do that, definitely increase the difficulty—figuring out tactics to beat encounters is a lot of fun. The online matchmaking system is currently suffering some issues, and people report getting kicked out a lot, but I'm convinced Microsoft will fix this soon. Other reported issues revolve around the inability to sign into Xbox Live—an account is required to play the game, even on Steam, even offline. Gears 5 not only has cooperative as there are also other modes, like "Versus", "Escape" and "Horde", to keep you busy after finishing the game.

Graphics are really good and there's a ton of controls to balance between fidelity and FPS rates — I wish all games had this many quality dials. While the game makes heavy use of post-processing effects like motion blur, shake and sharpening, they can all be adjusted and disabled completely. What can also be disabled is the FPS limiter, the game will run as fast as your hardware allows. If you just want fluid gameplay, then Gears 5 has you covered too. Several options work together to dynamically and automagically balance FPS rates and quality, which will be a godsend especially on weaker hardware. The optional "Ultra Textures" pack is an additional 10 GB download. It definitely helps with quality of the textures, but some still look low-res—do we need "Ultra Ultra" texture packs now? The limitation here is certainly not graphics memory. We measured up to 6 GB VRAM usage on 4K, which means there's still plenty of headroom considering most graphics cards in this segment have 8 GB memory or more.

Even with its stunning visuals (some maps do look less impressive) performance is very good across the board. For 1080p 60 FPS gaming at Ultra details, all you need is a RX 570 4 GB or GTX 1060 3 GB. Gears 5 definitely looks well optimized. To achieve 60 FPS at 1440p, a Radeon RX Vega or GTX 1070 Ti will do. 4K has much higher requirements though as even the mighty RTX 2080 Ti can only achieve 56 FPS at that resolution. Remember, all this is at "Ultra", the game has plenty of options that can be dialed down a little bit for only a minor loss in quality, but some extra FPS.

While AMD has released their game-ready drivers two days ago, well ahead of the "Ultimate Edition" headstart, NVIDIA definitely dropped the ball on Gears 5. While they confirmed that the GameReady driver will be available on Sep 10th, the game's official release date, lots of people are playing already. It doesn't help that there is some level of confusion over which driver version is best for NVIDIA—436.15 (latest WHQL), 431.60 (previous WHQL) or 431.68 (latest Beta). We did ask NVIDIA if we could get a beta of Monday's GameReady driver, which must be finished at this time as there would otherwise not be enough time for WHQL certification, but haven't heard back from them past an "I'll check".

Our performance results do show some weird results, namely for the GeForce GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti, which end up extremely weak, reaching only GTX 1060 levels. Vega 56 at 1080p seems to run slower than expected, ending up behind the RX 590 at that resolution, and the GTX 1080 Ti seems to be flying—beating even the RTX 2080. We did test these card combinations several times and results remained unchanged.

Overall, Gears 5 is a ton of fun, with good gameplay and excellent graphics. Pricing is a tad bit high, though. I'm not sure if I'd say it's worth spending $80 on the Ultimate Edition to be able to play now and end up being a beta tester for a few more days. The regular edition is $60—still expensive enough, an alternative option is Microsoft's Game Pass, which is $2 in the first two months and includes Gears 5.