You can now play Gears of War on the PlayStation 5. Despite the changes to the video game landscape in recent years, that sentence still makes me react similarly to how I would if someone said “you can now drink coffee with a fork”. My brain’s immediate reaction is to dismiss it as nonsense. It’s not. We’ve seen plenty of Xbox games on PlayStation already, but there are some games that bleed Xbox. Gears of War is one of them.
I’ll talk more about the game itself (Gears of War Reloaded, to use its full title), but first it’s worth looking back to November 2006. A year following the release of the Xbox 360, Sony was set to unleash the PlayStation 3 and start clawing back next-gen market share from Xbox.
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The PS3, though, had a lacklustre launch line-up without any true showpiece games – those previous E3 presentations that the gullible believed to be actual in-game visuals did them no favours here, with MotorStorm in particular failing to get close. Resistance: Fall of Man was decent enough, but things were absolutely greener over on Xbox. The company was ready to drop the most hyped game of that generation, on or before the release of the PlayStation 3.
A look at Gears of War’s muddy visuals (that you don’t see in this modern remaster) through today’s eyes doesn’t tell the story of the time. Gears was a sensation, a rallying point for the next-generation, and a show of power. It helped make Xbox the console for an audience that wanted the booms, the online multiplayer, and the cutting-edge. Sony got its act together eventually, releasing some proper showstoppers, but Xbox 360 remained the console of choice for more people than seems possible now.