I am a huge fan of the Gears of War series. I have been playing the games since the first one's release and I will play every Gears game out there. Gears 5 has a lot of great ideas and executes them well, but it is held back by it's online gameplay.
First and foremost, to be able to play this game day one on gamepass is a genuine treat and speaks to the quality of gamepass. I'll say right now, that if you have gamepass, download the game and play it. If you are a fan of Gears, it is exactly the evolution the series needs and it's a lot of fun to play. The core gears action is still there, but in act 2 and 3, the game opens up to a large playable area that you can explore to complete side missions and find collectibles. It's not an open world game, but if you think of how the Tomb Raider reboot handles open areas, that is what Gears 5 does. It is unique for a gears game and it's most welcome. The side missions aren't too overdone and they don't overstay their welcome when you've completed them all.
Gears 5 is a gorgeous presentation on the Xbox One X, coming in at 4K and 60fps, The shooting feels crisp and the combat is as fun as it's ever been. Cruising around the different confined areas and the open areas is a treat. Everything looks great and I never had an issue where the frame rate felt like it dropped. The game always felt smooth to play and always looked fantastic.
The one issue that I had with Gears was it's online connectivity. I will start by saying I did a network test a couple of times to ensure my connection, which is hardwired, wasn't the problem. My connection was consistently fine. I played through the whole campaign with a friend who also has an Xbox One X, and we did so on the experienced difficulty. My friend would host the game and send me an invite to play with him. While he didn't have any issues, I would often have situations that would make the game harder than it should be. By far the most frustrating was when we would die and have to restart. My friend would load into the game quickly, but I would not. This would set up a situation where my character would be loaded in not moving while he started the fight, making my character cannon fodder causing my character to get killed and we'd have to load in all over again. Sometimes this cycle would repeat for a couple of tries at a time. Eventually, we learned to just pause the game and wait until I loaded in. Then, there were issues with gameplay as well. I would be shooting an enemy in front of me and it would be obvious that I took them down, but they would lock in place and then disappear a few seconds later. There were also situations where an enemy would teleport because of the poor connectivity in the game, causing me to get killed unfairly. I just beat the game today, one month after release, and there is no excuse for the network to be in as poor shape as it is. In addition, there were times where the game wouldn't register a checkpoint and we'd have to fight a boss or get through a challenging part a second time, despite having already completed it.
Gears 5 is a great game and when I wasn't getting unfairly killed or set back because of a bad network connection, I was having a lot of fun. The open areas are a lot of fun and the combat is as true to Gears as it should be. I recommend playing the campaign solo if you play it, you will likely have more fun that way.