Bland level design and poorly implemented features conspire to make Gears of War Judgment a bore.
Cons: Uninspired, repetitive encounters; Campaign flow regularly broken; Difficulty spikes abundant
Note: I don't have Xbox Live Gold and thus did not try the online modes. They didn't seem worth shelling out money for gold to play and thus I won't cover them. I also didn't play Survival Mode because I only had the game for a day, and after the campaign I didn't really feel like playing any more Gears of War Judgment that night. If that's the one saving grace of the game, then I'm sorry I didn't cover it. But since it looks like Horde mode from before, but with classes, I doubt my opinion would have been swayed. In short, this review will be 100% campaign focused.
A little while ago I wrote a review about Gears of War 2, bemoaning its lack of quality compared to Gears 1 and 3. Although it's hardly a popular opinion, I stand by my belief that it is the worst game in the trilogy. Now that the trilogy is over, there's a new contender for worst game in the series: Gears of War: Judgment.
Gears of War: Judgment is something of the worst kind of sequel: it only makes small changes to the formula, and yet every small change seems to somehow make the game worse. The cover-based, alien shooting, chainsaw revving core is fun, but somehow everything around it has been worsened.
Gears of War: Judgment sees you playing through the testimonies of Baird and Cole's trial in the early days of the war with the Locust. The story is forgettable, thanks in part to a seeming lack of personality in any of the characters (though this means Cole stops 'developing his personality' by shouting stupid things as often, which is a legitimate improvement), and it mostly serves as a framing device for the new structure of levels.
This new structure is where things start to go wrong. In short: it feels like Gears of War: Angry Birds. Not that you're flinging Cog soldiers at the Locust, mind you, but in the short, score-focused nature of the levels. Having a scoring system doesn't really hurt the game, one way or another, but seeing as it's pretty simple to earn 3 stars by simply playing the game and not dying, scoring each level seems kind of pointless.
Similarly, short levels aren't in themselves bad. Angry Birds and other mobile games smartly acknowledge that people are busy and that having frequent breaking points can be useful. However, this style of levels is not really conducive for good flow in a larger campaign. The reason these short levels work in mobiles games is because nobody is playing them for anything besides simple, instantly gratifying fun. No one is playing for story, for a seamless experience, or for more complex emotions.
Gears of War: Judgment is trying to tell a story and offer a continuous flow of encounters, but the design about shorter levels undermines that at every step of the way. It's simply annoying to fight only one or two encounters.
And then suddenly you're at a scoring screen for the level. You watch an uninspired cutscene and then play another encounter or two.
Congratulations, you've beaten another level: cue the scoring screen and another bland cutscene.
This goes on for the entirety of the main campaign (the Aftermath campaign is more traditionally built, and is by far the better campaign because of it). No one wants to play a campaign and have control ripped from them every 5 minutes or so, especially when most of the cutscenes serve very little story purpose other than to disguise loading of a new area (for this reason you also can't skip them, in case you keep dying at the same part of the level).
But what if you tried to play this game like a mobile phone game? IE: What if you played a couple levels at a time rather than experiencing the game in larger bursts? If you play it in small bursts, then the story might as well be rendered pointless, and the encounters themselves would have to stand on their own. And this they cannot do.
Gears of War: Judgment would have you believe that it has carefully paced its campaign with a variety of encounters. One level you're fighting through an area from point A to B. Another has you defending a room while a bunch of enemies attack you (see: Horde mode from past Gears of War games). And yet another has you attempting to escort a robot beacon as enemies attack it.
Here's the thing, though, it's all the same stuff. If you're defending a room, you have to kill all the enemies to proceed. If you're escorting a robot, it will take exactly as long to finish its task as it takes you to kill all of the enemies in the room. Even if you're going from point A to point B, the death of your foes might as well spawn a key, since you're stuck in the room until you kill all of them.
Should the encounters have been interesting, this would not be a problem: after all, every short Super Meat Boy level had the same goal and it was a blast. However, the game flirts with dynamic difficulty in a way that robs these encounters of their personality. Should you do well, the game gets harder, to the point of serious frustration (try taking on 5 big bullet-sponges at the same time and tell me that's not annoying). But then when you start dying it gets easier.
Again, like with most things in this game, dynamic difficulty is not inherently bad: you only need to look at Left 4 Dead to see a good implementation. The problem here is that most encounters are composed of the same randomly chosen puzzle pieces: the same weapons and enemies make up most fights, and by the halfway point, you'll have seen most combinations. Again, pacing and flow are crucial, and it's the reason why Left 4 Dead's carefully crafted levels are more fun to play than the repetitive challenges of Gears of War: Judgment.
The repetition gets tiring, but fortunately it's not all bad. Every now and then you do see an encounter that shakes things up just enough to be fun. But more importantly, there are declassified missions that you can take on throughout the campaign. Posed as extra details in the testimony, these declassified missions are essentially difficulty modifiers that give you bonus points while making the game harder in a variety of ways.
This can be as simple as adding more enemies, but the more fun challenges force you to use certain weapons or perhaps make your vision all blurry and distorted. Not only are these a great idea (like Bastion's shrines and Halo 3's skulls, I would love to see more of this kind of difficulty tweaking), but they do make an otherwise uninspired game much more fun to play. Do declassified missions save the game? Not even close. But these modifiers are much more varied than the main mission themselves, so they add some much needed diversity.
But they are seriously the only new thing added to Gears of War: Judgment that is good. Everything else good about Judgment can be said about prior entries, whether you're praising the strong core, the pretty graphics, or the full split screen support. The new changes are really minor in the grand scheme of things, but they are almost universally bad, and the level design is universally uninspired. The result is a game that is universally mediocre.