Gears 5

Gears 5 Gears 5 moves more of the attention to Kait and the connection between her family and the Locust. That gives the story something different to work through. You're still fighting the Swarm, but Kait also needs to understand where she fits into all of it. That's one of the things about a series with this much history. You can keep following the same war from a different person's position and find something else in it. Marcus has his history. JD has his relationship with Marcus. Kait has a whole set of questions that the earlier games couldn't have told in quite the same way. The campaign also opens up more than the earlier games. The skiff sections give you larger areas to move through, and there are places to investigate away from the next main objective. It isn't one enormous open-world game, but it changes the pace between the more directed fights. Jack becomes a bigger part of how you handle those fights too. His abilities give you more options than simply changing guns. You can use him to help control the situation, protect the squad, or get at an enemy that would otherwise be difficult to deal with. Finding upgrades matters because you're changing what he can do for you. So when you're talking about collecting everything, the story collectibles and Jack's components need to be kept separate. Finding a document and getting an upgrade for a useful ability aren't the same reward, even if both mean taking the time to look around instead of running straight through an area. The campaign's co-op setup is different as well. The main story supports three players, with one playing Jack. That third person has a different role from the two carrying the guns. Horde and Escape are separate modes again, so the way a class works there isn't automatically how everything works in the campaign. Hivebusters is its own campaign expansion, following Lahni, Mac, and Keegan. They were the characters introduced through Escape, and the expansion gives Scorpio Squad a story of its own. Their individual abilities are part of its combat, rather than using the main campaign's Jack setup. I love the characters and the storyline in Gears, and that's why I don't want to reduce the later games to just what changed with the graphics. There are different people involved, different relationships, and different ways the combat works. Gears 5 has enough changes that it deserves to be discussed on its own rather than just being called another version of the earlier games.