First impressions from “Gears of War – Judgement”

At the moment the fans of the very successful Gears of War series have to be very patient – as media websites reported a bit more than a week ago, the newest game is very likely to come out in February 2012. Even though the series has been well received so far, especially “Gears of War 3” attracted some very harsh criticism. According to many reviews, the normal difficulty level of the third part was too easy for advanced players.
Moreover, the game received negative feedback for what some called “shallow writing”. Very quickly after the release of the third part, it became clear that the game developers needed to respond to this criticism – especially if they wanted to maintain a circle of ‘hardcore gamers’. 

Luckily, it seems like the creators of this very entertaining action saga took the fans’ concerns very serious. Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski told the online magazine Xbox 360 Achievements that game developers in general tried too hard to release games that would appeal to a much wider audience than before. The result of this was that the games had become too easy and therefore disappointed the core of the gaming community. He stresses that, as a consequence, games have to manage to become more difficult again. Speaking about the much awaited “Gears of War – Judgement”, he claims that “If this game doesn’t make you sweat, we haven’t done our jobs.” Advanced gamers probably love to hear that and the latest test version that was released very recently is apparently able to live up to Bleszinski’s statement.

This game’s story is set fifteen years before the beginning of the first part of the series. The members of a special unit, Damon Baird, Sophia Hendricks and Augustus Cole find themselves in a court room as they are accused of stealing military technical devices. As computerbild.de reports, the shooting game is part of a flashback and goes through the events that lead to the scene in the court room. According to computerbild.de, the upcoming game finally entails the level of difficulty and action that the series once was famous for. Moreover, Digitalspy is right in stressing that now the narrative is one of the most exciting parts of the game that we can look forward to – the developers clearly reacted to the gamer’s criticism at this point. The fans of Gears of War have every reason to look forward to the launch of the next game as it might become one of the most exciting Xbox games of the forthcoming year. However, it is going to be interesting to see how the changes with regards to the difficulty of the game will affect sales figures – and in what way.