The Lambent are the worst aspect of Gears of War 3. I regretted selecting Hardcore difficulty as I slogged through the game’s opening chapters. “Do I really need to play this third entry before jumping into the fourth?” I asked myself. Did it truly matter? I knew the basics of the plot – who survived and who died – and I knew that Gears of War 4 introduced some new form of monstrous antagonist. Was it really worth suffering through the Lambent?

By the second or third hour into the game, shuffling through the trenches of a Locust stronghold, I was struck by a sudden realization: I was having fun. In fact, I was having more fun than I had at just about any point in Gears of War 2.

An hour later I found myself surrounded by Lambent once more. When the glowing, parasitic berserker showed up, I decided I had played enough and put the controller down.

For years I was certain Gears of War 3 had the worst campaign in the trilogy. It turns out the only thing I remembered were the worst parts. Playing all three games back-to-back, it’s clear that Gears of War 3 was almost the best campaign of them all.

It should be noted that each of these games would no doubt be improved with a co-op partner. I already expressed my displeasure at the artificial intelligence of Ultimate Edition. By the third title your computer-controlled companions seem to juggle between overly-aggressive and maddeningly clingy behaviors. There are times they seem to charge directly into the face of the enemy, as eager to test their chainsaw bayonets as a thirteen year-old newbie that just got the game. This rarely ends well for them. There are other times you begin to try and flank the enemy, curious as to why you’re still drawing enemy fire before realizing your friends have huddled around your position. This rarely ends well for you.

Of course, most of the time they simply are. Performing adequately enough that you don’t really notice them, but not as useful as an ally that you can communicate with. You cannot plan which unit will carry the explosive weaponry for combatting the armored Kantus soldiers, for example. You must either sprint back to the previous zone, praying the system hasn’t wiped the Torque Bows or Boom Shots off the ground to clear the console’s memory. There are just so many situations where a fellow human player would be more capable of drawing enemy aggro when necessary, or employing other superior tactics.

Tactics that may or may not help when fighting against the Lambent. There are multiple tiers of frustration in the design of these opponents, with only the lower-level examples of the monsters being tolerable. At the bottom-most rung are the standard Locust transformations: drones and wretches that simply pop when slaughtered.

Rather than climb out of emergence holes – one of those interesting design choices that defined the first game and yet vanished in both sequels – these basic Lambent are instead birthed from stalks that can rise from anywhere. Whether indoors or outdoors, beside water or surrounded by concrete, these fleshy imitations of roots climb to the sky and continually drop Lambent for the player to combat. Unlike emergence holes, these stalks cannot be taken out swiftly. All that was required to close an emergence hole was a single grenade and player accuracy. Some of the most satisfying moments in Gears of War were when you had a distant emergence hole that you couldn’t rely on the HUD trajectory to target. Having a good sense of how far that trajectory reached, however, and letting a frag out to shatter the tunnels from which Locust crawled out of was an empowering feeling.

The Lambent stalks instead blister with pods that drop Locust continually. At first there are only two or three of these pods that must be shot off, but towards the game’s conclusion you’ll need to shoot off four. That there are usually two separate stalks means you’re shooting a total of four to eight pods each encounter.

Supposing you can. Quite often pods will form on the distant side of the stalk opposite from your starting position. If the arenas were designed so you could circle around and surround the enemy, then there’d be tactical potential in trying to wipe these stalks out as swiftly as possible. Instead, the environments are typically linear, forcing the player to try and push through the enemy location in order to find a better position. Not only does this pull the player out of cover – contrary to the whole concept of “stop and pop” gameplay the franchise was founded upon – but it separates the player from their companions. Should you find yourself in the likely position of dying, then you have little-to-no chance of revival.

An example of one of the stalks spirals towards the ceiling in the background. This is a rare instance where the positioning makes sense, as a second human player would be on the upper balcony in the background, able to shoot at any pods from behind.

The emergence holes present the player with a risk-reward scenario. Tossing a grenade into an emergence hole means exposing oneself to enemy fire, and should you miss then you’ve wasted a grenade. If you succeed in destroying the emergence hole, then the player will burn through less ammunition tackling the Locust. This presents opportunities for players to examine the battlefield, trying to find a better position to close the emergence hole and potentially encouraging teamwork with their companion.

The stalks are all-risk with little reward. Even with a human companion, it costs a healthy amount of ammunition to try and destroy every pod. If a number of those pods spawn in positions where survival is unlikely, then that ammunition would have been better spent slaughtering the Lambent until the stalks are exhausted.

If those bottom tier Lambent were the only ones dropping out of the pods, the answer would be obvious: just kill the drones and be done with it. Unfortunately, the next tier of Lambent both encourage the player to eliminate those pods while simultaneously making it all the more difficult.

The drudges are larger forms of drones capable of powerful mutation. While they have a weak-spot in their lower-abdomen, the hitbox seems inconsistent. A precision shot with the sniper rifle can cause them to explode in one or two shots, but those shots might instead be considered standard body or leg shots that instead lead to mutation after so much damage. These mutations often fire bursts of immulsion capable of downing a player in one shot and, due to their elevated position, can even hit players behind cover. This means a player may be reloading or trying to better position themselves only to get knocked out of commission, defeating the purpose of the cover mechanics the game has been built around. A.I. companions put no effort into shooting the glowing sac of lower-abdomen, meaning these Drudges will almost always mutate. As the game progresses, they become more and more numerous on the battlefield.

Less common but still rather frequent are the gunkers, a relentless foe whose arcing glob of immulsion curves over cover with great precision. Even if the player moves, the splash damage is bound to deal significant damage. Typically, by time the player is struck by the first globule of gunk, the second is high in the sky and on the way. Should the gunker enter close range, they will extend a fleshy tendril with a blade on the end. This, too, can pass over or through cover, knocking the player down in a single strike.

These larger creatures can be viewed as Lambent equivalents of the boomer and other larger Locust foes. Such larger opponents did not climb out of emergence holes, however. Nor did their weaponry go through cover – well, with the exception of the maulers, who moved slowly and only had melee capability. Boomers, grinders, and maulers instead encourage the player to be more careful about peering out of cover, prioritizing either the weaker drones between each volley by the larger Locust, or to lay down as much firepower as they could on the larger, powerful foes. The game’s focus on cover was kept intact while only appearing in encounters without or with minimal emergence hole presence. They are manageable.

An example of two drudges which have mutated.

The larger Lambent are instead a constant. Even if the gunkers aren’t in every encounter, there are multiple drudges in each fight that are capable of bypassing cover and dropping a player to their knees in a single strike. So does the player tackle the stalk pods to decrease the presence of these drudges? Or do they simply try to target each drudge’s abdomen, hoping to kill it swiftly despite leading to another one spawning from a pod? Aiming for the pods may reduce the number of drudges that spawn, but your companions will never slay these creatures efficiently. The odds of the player getting knocked down in one shot is high as they target the pods.

All-risk, no reward.

These separate monsters are not an inherently bad concept for an enemy unit. Once I discovered the vulnerability in the drudge I felt great satisfaction in swiftly and safely eliminating them. However, the trick of encounter design is to be careful not to overwhelm the player with enemies whose strengths and advantages all overlap. Multiple drudges, a gunker or two, and then the stalks all overwhelm the player with powerful enemies capable of killing them in one-shot. They are relentless, and any encounter in which I tried to target those drudge abdomens resulted in swiftly running low on sniper or Torque Bow ammunition – many rounds resulting in swift mutation rather than elimination due to the tricky hit boxes.

If there is anything that saves Gears of War 3, it’s that there are far more maps where the player is fighting just Locust than it first seems. These maps tend to be some of the best encountered in the franchise. All the enemy types from the prior two games are present, but spread out in a far better balance. You’re never overwhelmed by, say, encountering bloodmounts in every other encounter towards the game’s conclusion. Reavers aren’t crashing down every level. There are far fewer set piece boss fights like the second game, sticking instead to the cover-based combat that made the franchise so strong in the first place. Gimmicks and set pieces instead seem designed around capitalizing on how cover can be used in an inventive manner, or testing a player’s observational skills and precision. Though it’s only used in one level, having to spot and kill Locust guards before sounding the alarm tests the player’s speed and capability in sniping distant foes. Should they fail, the sacrifice is… more gameplay.

I think the moment where I knew I was enjoying Gears of War 3 more than the second was outside of the dockyards in Act IV. Pulling a switch, I slammed Marcus Fenix against a now-moving trolly, following the rails into a flanking position. While the A.I. companions distracted the opposing forces, I moved into a superior position, exposing all of the enemy Locust so that I could turn them into swiss cheese. It was an optional moment that rewarded my observation and assessment of the battlefield. It was brief, but it capitalized on what made these games so enjoyable.

It is in such levels that Gears of War 3 is the best the franchise has to offer. It is those levels that taught me this game is worth replaying after all, and is perhaps the most enjoyable… when it’s just you versus the Locust. Yet I cannot ignore the frustration of those levels with the Lambent, greater frustration than I had felt in either of the prior games. That Gears of War 3 starts with these Lambent and all of their problems are no doubt the cause of my instant distaste with the game. Though the final encounter in Gears of War 3 is also against the Locust, it exhibits the same overwhelming encounter design as those Lambent skirmishes. Enemies pour in from all sides, yet the player must escape cover in order to snipe at their real target. The final encounter intended to cap off the franchise abandons all which made the franchise a success back in 2006.

With a game that starts and concludes with such weak encounters, it’s easy to understand why I’d feel distaste in 2011. If I’m glad to have revisited these three games at all, though, it’s so that I could have returned to Gears of War 3 and found a new appreciation for all that it did right, no matter how often it is broken up by what it does wrong.