Gears of War is at its best when it is focused on simple skirmishes rather than major set-pieces. This is the conclusion I’ve come to after replaying the first two titles on my newly acquired Xbox One X. Graced with the limited edition of the console emblazoned with the franchise logo under a plastic facade of ice, I decided it would do me well to revisit the franchise from its origin before catching up on the next-gen exclusives I’d missed.

It was a decision that inadvertently left me feeling old as I reflected upon the timeframe these games originally released. My mind flashed back to more than a decade ago, playing the original game in my College apartment. As I explored the co-op campaign with an old Internet friend, we expressed our desire to see a Warhammer 40K style of game done with these shiny new cover mechanics. They seemed like such a revelation in 2006, delivering a stylized interpretation of the grit and lethality of war in a manner other first-person shooters had failed to achieve.

There was something raw about hugging against a crumbling wall or pile of sandbags, peering up long enough to deliver a volley of bullets into the subterranean cranium of a Locust soldier before ducking your head back down. As med kits were abandoned in favor of regenerating health, players were resorting to diving behind cover for a breather in all the other shooters anyway. Epic Games merely turned it into a mechanic. Walking around out of cover exposed the player to incredibly lethal doses of enemy fire. The environment of each battlefield was arranged so the player had to carefully consider their position, flanking opportunities, and avoidance of being flanked.

It’s too bad Epic began to chase the big, cinematic set piece moments like every other developer of the era.

If we look back at the original Gears of War, the weakest moments of the game typically took the player away from their cover. There was nothing exciting about steering a vehicle down a linear highway only to stop and blast flocks of bat-like Kryll with a beam of ultraviolet light. It may have followed the basic “stop-and-pop” philosophy of the standard gameplay, but it removed the player agency in positioning, flanking, and target selection. It was an on-rails shooter that paused the rails so you could aim at a cluster of unidentifiable flying specks. There is no effort of evasion or additional defense available. Just creep forward until you see or hear the next flock coming, then stand stationary as you release bursts of light against dark, fluttering clusters. It is, perhaps, the weakest point of the game.

Runner-up, then, would likely be the fight with the Corpser: a giant spider-like creature fore-shadowed revealed at the conclusion of the game’s opening level. Rather than a pulse-pounding predicament that has the player hurriedly fleeing from the crushing might of its many appendages, the player waits for the beast to lift its armored limbs up into the air like it just don’t care. This exposes the soft belly long enough for the player to take aim and fire. Repeat ad nauseum until the giant arachnid has retreated back onto a platform, the confrontation’s closing challenge to instead shoot at the clamps keeping the metallic floor floating upon the lava-like imulsion. Once those clamps are released, the beast is submerged, boss fight complete. It would feel like an achievement if the player ever felt like they were in danger.

Both of these moments felt more like check-list items governed by what was popular in other games at the time. Halo had made vehicles in shooters popular, so every subsequent entry in the genre was required to have at least one such segment. Big, cinematic set-pieces with large bosses were becoming more commonplace, so a fight with a giant monster was included. Neither set piece capitalized on the core mechanics that make the game so enjoyable.

I am somewhat mixed on the fight with the Brumak, a giant dinosaur-like beast with rockets and chain-guns hooked onto its back. The conclusion of a level originally exclusive to the PC version of Gears of War, it was made playable on consoles with the Xbox One release of the Ultimate Edition. Featuring brand new character models and higher-res texture packs, the Ultimate Edition certainly puts on a pretty coat of paint to fool buyers into believing it is the best version of Gears of War available. Unfortunately, even the X, the most powerful console currently on the market, is locked at 30 frames-per-second for the campaign. The graphics have been upgraded to what you’ll remember them looking like when they were cutting edge, but the performance will be no better than it was in 2006 on the Xbox 360.

Get used to that Dead Dom icon. You’ll be seeing it a lot in the Ultimate Edition.

This is nothing to say of the lobotomized A.I. causing your companions to stand back and watch as you try to fend off the Locust hordes by yourself, going so far as to ignore any incoming fire gouging holes into their own faces. If there is a good version of a fight with the Brumak, it is in co-op alone where your very human companion can take turns drawing the monstrosity’s fire. Relying purely on A.I. to have my back resulted in several repeated attempts to take the beast down, for each effort saw Dominic diving face-first beneath the Brumak’s stomping foot. Trying to destroy the guns strapped to the Brumak’s arms became a far more challenging task while it was constantly trudging after me, high caliber rounds determined to increase the size of Marcus’ belly button. It felt more like a proper fight than the confrontation with the Corpser, but one that failed to impress without competent A.I. to assist. As it is, the so-called Ultimate Edition is best played with a companion rather than the insufficient and bugged A.I., somehow downgrading the original release’s mostly adequate computer companions.

Regardless of whether the Ultimate Edition is worthy of its title, the consistently best parts of the campaign – the reason I played it with friends so often as to have remembered nearly the whole thing – is due to the structure of its cover-based arenas and enemy encounter design. The melee focused Wretches were designed to force the player out of cover, exposing them to the long-range lethality of the greater Locust horde. Emergence holes were placed in difficult to see or reach corners of the battlefield, causing the player to risk exposure in order to grenade them closed or simply use more ammunition to slaughter Locust until the holes dried up. There’s an early moment like this, where the player is likely to be hunkered down in a dry fountain, emergence holes opening up on all sides and threatening to swarm the player’s position with hostiles.

Before the player is forced to steer a very slow, boring vehicle, they have to instead navigate darkened alleyways by finding and igniting gas cans to create new sources of light, in one case leading to a chase downhill after a flaming car for cover. There’s another instance where the player must push a car steadily across a bridge to avoid the rapid and cutting rounds of a stationary Troika turret.

It is in these sections that Gears of War delivers on its vision of down-to-earth wartime grit, occasionally peppered with a dose of that Hollywood charm. The “destroyed beauty” motif they had gone for brings to mind the ruined European landscape of World War II photos and film. Once peaceful population centers are now bloody concentrations of carnage as man and Locust compete. The entire purpose of the “roadie run” being so close to the ground and frantically shaking was so the player could feel like a camera man ducking down to avoid incoming fire, recording the horrific events for historical record. Such camera work carried over to the narrative, where many of the scenes stuck to a single perspective passing back and forth between the characters, trying to catch as much of the action with a single handheld as possible.

That the cut-scenes were completely redone in a manner to reduce this “on the ground” style of camera work in the Ultimate Edition speaks to Epic’s continual misunderstanding of that core purity that drew people to their franchise in the first place. Yes, I know that the Ultimate Edition was not handled by Epic Games, but it was in Gears of War 2 that we saw a shift away from the battlefield and towards cinematic spectacle.

Notice how the 360 version retains that handheld “in the action” feel, often relying on a single camera, whereas the Ultimate Edition keeps bouncing around from different “cinematic” perspectives.

If I were a betting man, I’d put a significant chunk of change on the development of Gears of War 2 beginning with set pieces. The manner in which the game progresses feels far more like a team just thinking of cool ideas first, then stitching them together into some semblance of narrative cohesion. This is how a squad of soldiers find themselves wading through blood, chain-sawing through colossal arteries in order to kill the giant worm that swallowed them whole.

I can only look back and wonder if so many of us players were tricked by the illusion of grandiose stakes so easily. We were all starry-eyed at the concept of being swallowed by this giant worm-beast that we failed to see the “gray box” interpretation of the map. There were no challenging battles to be found, just the repeated task of sawing through super-sized veins before the chamber filled up with blood. Timing your sprints before pink, fleshy slabs crash into the ground in an organic depiction of the most stereotypical video game obstacle course. In 2008 this seemed impressive, and in 2020 I can’t help but wonder why.

It’s not that all the new ideas in Gears of War 2 were bad, however. There were some set-piece moments that still relied on cover-based combat that expanded upon that simple purity rather than deviating away from it. Trying to keep Locust from climbing on board your massive siege truck, or trying to fend off war boats while your own raft hastily spirals downstream out of control. These are memorable moments that added a new dimension to the cover, forcing the player to constantly change their position and adapt to a more dynamic battlefield. I can only wonder how much more use they could have gotten out of the invulnerable rockworms that provided a mobile form of cover.

Then the game throws you up against a giant fish where cover doesn’t really matter. Shoot the glowing blue tonsils so you can toss a grenade into its throat! Repeat three times because video games! Feel empowered by commandeering the flying Reapers and engaging in a linear rail shooter!

Perhaps what speaks most to the actual engagement of the game rather than the pretend engagement of epic scale “empowerment” is my mistaken memory. I had completely forgotten the final descent into the gargantuan emergence hole outside Jacinto that concluded with a commandeered Brumak. It had slipped my mind that the “final boss” of the game was a giant, body horror mutation of said beast that needed to be slaughtered with the Hammer of Dawn satellite beam. Instead, I recalled the siege on Jacinto as the game’s conclusion. I was ready for the final confrontation to be at humanity’s last refuge, where I clearly recalled ducking behind cover as I fought against seemingly never-ending hordes of Locust soldiers, firing mortars into the charging Brumaks before they could rocket my position away into oblivion.

When the game instead proceeded to push forward into the next mission, I suddenly flashed back to a disappointing conversation I had with a friend in 2008. Microsoft had advertised Gears of War 2 with a massive, subterranean battlefield in which the odds felt slim. It was a battle I had been looking forward to, only it had never appeared in the game. Rather than feel like one soldier among many, I was left to feel like some super-powered trooper capable of slaughtering colossal worms, massive fish, and commandeering Brumaks.

Exhaustion, a sense of hopelessness, comrades outnumbered on a massive battlefield that you charge onto because what choice do you have… these are not the emotions conveyed by the game. Instead, the characters seem more inconvenienced by the war than anything.

Which, in some games, would be totally fine. I even recall being delighted to take control of a Brumak in 2008. I mean, it looks like a dinosaur. Giant, destructive reptile beasts are my entertainment bread and butter. Now, in 2020, I cannot help but feel bored by marching invincible – or nearly so – onwards and turning all the Locust at my feet into a fine red paste. There are moments for such empowerment, but it feels less earned in this instance. Delta Squad is no longer Delta Squad, and Marcus Fenix is no longer just a soldier. He’s not a cog in the greater gears spinning in this war. He’s a super-human monstrosity that the surviving Locust will whisper of in fear.

This is why it doesn’t surprise me that the cut-scenes were changed in the Ultimate Edition to more closely resemble your standard Hollywood camera, nor that it changed in the immediate sequel. Be it due to the developers themselves opting for a more cinematic approach or mandates from Microsoft to chase current trends, the Gears of War franchise left that dirty, gritty feeling of Saving Private Ryan to instead chase after your typical heroic piece of blockbuster cinema. Sure, there were still moments of raw grit within the narrative. Those moments of darkness may fit the game’s aesthetic, but too often the set pieces and narrative curb stomp these somber scenes into paste. You can’t convince me of how nightmarish the Locust torture devices are when Cole Train can just grab a microphone from within the heart of enemy territory, talk smack while outnumbered and outgunned, and then escape on a hijacked pair of Reavers. The threat being established by the former event is completely invalidated by the fist-pumping nature of the latter.

In other words, Gears of War 2 attempts to frighten the player like Doom 3 while simultaneously pumping up the player as some destructive force of nature like DOOM 2016. These two tones are incompatible with one another, and like a spice that overtakes all other flavors in a dish, the bravado and bombastic spectacle stands out far more than the somber and contemplative.

As I begin my march into Gears of War 3, I can only lament that the original Gears of War was certainly a great game. However, it never became a great franchise. Not in terms of its campaign, at least.

Fortunately, Gears of War 2 had its Horde mode to keep my friends and I occupied when the campaign failed. It was in that mode that we found ourselves spending the most time, fending off ever escalating waves of Locust hostiles on a battlefield absent of giant worms or massive fish. I still recall hunkering down in that farmhouse, planting Mauler shields into the doorway and preparing to be besieged. Simple and pure, just like the first game, and quite possibly the best the series had ever been on the Xbox 360.