Action · 2019 · The Coalition · local · online
Gears 5
Chainsaw rifles, cover shootouts and a campaign that runs with three.
What it is about
Kait Diaz searches for her family's origins and finds out where the Swarm came from that humanity has been fighting for decades. It is told in a campaign of four acts, two of them in more open regions with a sled in the snow.
You fight from cover, with a rifle that has a chainsaw on it. Reloading at the right moment does more damage; miss the window and it jams. Whoever goes down crawls on and waits for someone to pick them up.
The campaign runs with up to three people. The third takes over Jack, a flying robot who does not shoot but heals, stuns enemies and collects items — a role nobody has to aim for.
Our verdict for couples
The campaign is the reason to look here: it runs on split screen, and the third role is Jack the robot, who does not shoot at all but heals, distracts and collects items. So there is a role here for someone who dislikes shooters — though the most-read review on Steam has nothing good to say about it: Jack only picks things up rather than playing along. On Steam the game sits at seventy-two percent despite good reviews, and that is almost entirely about the PC version: split screen was cut from Horde and Escape there, and many are annoyed by how the extra content is handled. On Xbox it is all in.
Pros
- The third role never has to aim: healing, stunning, collecting
- The whole campaign runs on split screen
- Checkpoints are dense; a mistake costs minutes
Cons
- On PC, split screen is missing from Horde and Escape
- Explicitly gory; no good for a quiet evening
- Many find the third role too thin: assisting rather than playing
Suitable from
Hobby
- Conflict potential
- Harmonious
- Cosiness
- Draining
- When you can stop
- After 15 minutes
- How long it lasts
- 5–15 hours
What other co-op fans say
Seventy-two percent on Steam against considerably better critic scores — and the most-read review hits exactly our point. It comes from three people who bought the game for its three-player campaign, and their verdict on the third role is damning: Jack only picks things up rather than playing along. That is the counter-argument to what this role can do for an uneven couple, and it deserves to be heard. Alongside that it is about performance on PC and the forced Microsoft account. About the campaign itself hardly anyone writes against it.
- “Gears 5 has all you could want from a AAA third-person shooter.”
- “The gunplay lands with incredible weight, making every firefight feel intense and rewarding.”
- “They have an interesting story to this game it is not all shooting and guts.”
- “But thankfully, the good graphics and adventure in icy worlds and a Martian desert environment make the game playable.”
- “The third player is effectively a garbage collector.”
Summarised by machine from 60 Steam reviews, not written by our editors. The quotes appear verbatim in those reviews.
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