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I haven't spent much time with the cooperative or competitive multiplayer modes, as it's still pre-release, but I imagine the rhythms there will be as comfortable and gory-and likely as repetitive-as the single-player offering. I enjoyed my time in the trenches, but I felt numbed by the onslaught. It feels like Gears of War has always felt, and it crescendos into an oddly melancholic repetition. A shooter lives and dies based on the terrain of its battlefields, and the level design here is simply too conservative. Some encounters, particularly in the game's second half, feel inspired and dynamic, but others drag and blur together. Each battlefield is a mess of broken pillars, abandoned vehicles, and other objects that provide useful cover and the opportunity to plan maneuvers and modulate the range and tempo of each fight. From a third-person perspective, you take cover, shoot, and flank whole armies worth of aggressors. It’s a simple, familiar rhythm of carnage. Beneath, where the Locust once teemed and the Swarm now emerge, the bloody heart of combat and gore remains largely unchanged. The lightness of Gears 4 ends at the surface. There are fan expectations to reckon with, and Sera is so well defined-its crumbling cities, its brown and gray palette mixed with the ludicrous, hyper-realistic gore that practically birthed the last console generation-that it doesn't lend itself to narrative innovation. Nor can the franchise's new developers, The Coalition, offer an entirely different kind of story. That would feel dishonest, and, frankly, repetitive.

In a situation like this, you can’t immediately jump into telling another sprawling war story. Twenty-five years later Sera remains a disaster area populated by a precious few humans, half-abandoned and left to rust. As Fenix, a growling musclebound soldier, you managed to stop them. They featured grim, sprawling battles against the Locust, a seemingly infinite horde of monsters from the bowels of Sera, a sort of martial rebellion from an over-industrialized planet on the brink of destruction. Gears of War 4 has the unenviable job of following a trilogy of war epics. More frightening horrors await underground. Overhead, unrelenting lightning storms buffet the planet so violently it tears villages apart. And that's just the problem on the ground.

Without an existential threat distracting them in Gears of War 4, they’ve gone from kinda fascist to totally fascist, and from the start they're on your tail. The most pressing threat comes from the COG, remnants of the militaristic government player-protagonist Marcus Fenix served in the first three games. On Sera, the Earth-like setting for the Gears of War franchise, everything wants to kill you.