Gears 5: Hivebusters

Gears 5: Hivebusters Hivebusters gives another squad a chance to carry a Gears story. Lahni, Mac and Keegan aren't just three alternate faces to put in the same campaign. This is Scorpio Squad's origin, with Hoffman sending them on a mission against the Swarm. If you know them from Escape, this is where you get more than the mechanics of getting out of a hive. You get a story built around the people doing it. That's worth separating from the main Gears 5 campaign, because it isn't another chapter about Kait that happens to use different characters. The Galangi islands also give it a different setting. Jungle, lava and beaches change what you're looking at without making the world any less dangerous. Gears doesn't have to put every fight in the same ruined city to still feel like Gears. The abilities matter too. Lahni's Electroblade, Mac's Barrier and Keegan's Resupply give each person a different way to help the squad. It makes sense to think about them together instead of waiting until everything has already gone wrong before remembering what each one can do. And all three characters can be played in co-op. That gives the group a different setup from the main Gears 5 campaign, where one of the three players is Jack. Here you've got the three members of Scorpio working through their own story together. I love the characters and the world in this series. That's part of why I want to include the smaller stories when I'm talking about it, not just move from one numbered game to the next and leave everything else out. There's more to Gears than Marcus's part of it, even though Marcus is one of the biggest reasons the series means what it does to me.