2013 ended up being a swansong year for the Xbox 360, with fantastic titles like Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite and believe it or not, Grand Theft Auto V debuting on the system in its final year.
However, on the exclusive front things dried up a little bit prior to the Xbox One’s arrival in November 2013. Forza Horizon launched the year prior, as did Halo 4, but 2013 was a quiet year for first-party Xbox 360 games. Well, save for Gears of War: Judgment that is.
Yep, Epic Games (along with co-developer People Can Fly) launched this Gears of War spinoff 10 years ago today and we can still remember its arrival a decade later. A Gears prequel based off the tech that built Gears of War 3, what could go wrong? Well, a fair bit as it turns out.
Now, we don’t want to turn this into a Soapbox rant because Gears Judgment did have a few things going for it (as pointed out by our 10-year old review, which focused entirely on single player). The class-based Overrun mode was a lot of fun, and People Can Fly’s campaign actually wasn’t bad either all things considered, although it still fell short of the original trilogy.
It’s the game’s main multiplayer mode we took the most issue with. Removing revive states? Getting rid of the Locust in multiplayer? Launching with about four core maps? To say Gears Judgment’s multiplayer was half baked is a huge understatement and aside from the aforementioned Overrun mode, Epic had clearly ran out of ideas for Gears of War.
When Microsoft swooped in and picked up the Gears IP the following year, we were relieved to be quite honest. While we didn’t know what the future held for the series, we were happy that a new team was going to get a chance to breathe new life into the franchise.
Of course, since then The Coalition has done a good job with Gears of War, especially Gears 5 which in our opinion is a fantastic entry in the series. In fact, thinking back to Judgment has made us realise just how good of a job The Coalition has done so far.
We do wonder though, how many of you played this ill-fated Gears of War game? Did you take issue with it in similar ways to us, or do you actually have fond memories of Judgment?
Let us know down in the comments below. Oh, and happy 10th birthday Gears of War Judgment, you made us realise how amazing Gears 3 was!
