Gears of War: Ultimate Edition – all the reviews in one place

Buy Gears of War: Ultimate Edition here.

Pick up the game between launch and December 31, and you will be able to download the full Gears of War back catalogue, via the Xbox One’s new backwards compatibility feature.

One feature I certainly appreciated was making the collectible COG Tags actually do something more than reward players with an achievement as they’re discovered.

For one, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition looks every bit as good as most current games. My eyes were stunned by how different the game now looks.

There’s little to complain about when it comes to this Ultimate Edition. This game still looks attractive even though the settings are all in dark places. As I progressed through Gears of War for yet another time, I was impressed by how much The Coalition improved on the original material’s graphics. The Epic-developed game was one of the very first titles to wow audiences with high-definition visuals and show the graphical prowess of Microsoft’s second gaming console. If you’ve got a code, come join us! In the Ultimate Edition, the rat is now brown and you can see its fur.

I honestly didn’t get to spend a considerable amount of time with MP prior to release however, so whether or not everything will work smoothly right out of the gate remains to be seen. From landing a ideal headshot with a pistol that leaves your target decapitated, to decimating an entire squad of locusts with a frag grenade resulting in an explosion of gore and gibs, the visceral nature of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition’s combat is bloody, and entertaining.

We’re kicking off with Gears of War.

The biggest change to the gameplay though is the inclusion of Gears of War 3’s movement, cover and Tac-Com. In other games it feels stiff and it breaks the flow of the game. The best way to convey my time with the Ultimate Edition multiplayer is to say it shall absolutely resonate with veteran Gears fans. In terms of controls, a lot of small improvements made in the series over the years have found their way into the game. The enemies are not dumb and bad at aiming like in most other video games. Each of the five comics – Unseen, They Also Serve, Unsaid, Promise Me, and Harper’s Story – can be zoomed into and read just like any digital comic. Most importantly, the third-person gameplay is just as fun in multiplayer and has received the same finetuning as the single-player.

Replaying one of the best games of the previous generation within this Ultimate Edition will bring fans back to the days of the series’ more horror-fueled elements. Not to mention the game still has split-screen and LAN support too. But for the sake of this review, I decided to hold off on diving further into the multiplayer mode as I prefer to test how it performs when everyone else is able to jump into the game.

A total of 19 maps have been included in the Ultimate Edition – all original and downloadable maps from the Xbox 360 version and three new maps from the PC version. The new checkpoints make some of the original’s more frustrating moments, such as finding yourself in a cramped maze evading a Beserker – a monster that can kill you in one hit – easier. Not only is the gameplay still great, but the visuals are simply stunning and there’s enough new content for fans to play through the game again. Thanks to the horsepower of the Xbox One, there’s none of this anymore.