After much anticipation, “Gears of War 4” is finally here, and the game is all that many fans of the franchise have wanted to see. Some were worried that the gameplay style might have gotten worn out by this point, and that the game would feel stale in today’s market, but that’s obviously not the case.
In fact, most reviewers have been praising the developers for managing to put a fresh twist on an otherwise aged gameplay style, and the game has been enjoying a lot of positive attention since it hit the market. It’s obvious that a lot of effort has been put into polishing it and developing every detail as much as possible, but there are also some issues on the horizon that some fans have been pointing out.
More specifically, the way the game handles its monetization has been the subject of some serious criticism among fans, and it looks like this could seriously undermine the popularity of the release as a whole.
The problem is that “Gears of War 4” contains a “loot crate” system, much like many other games that have been released in recent years. However, the developers of the game have apparently pushed the system to some rather extreme levels, asking for a lot of money for crates that are otherwise locked behind significant periods of playing.
As can be expected, players were not happy with the idea of having to spend so much time unlocking items in a game they’ve already paid money for, and the situation was made even worse by the apparent lack of anything interesting to unlock during the game.
The way customization options are being distributed has been changed significantly from the last version of the game, and players are no longer guaranteed to obtain all items by the time they’ve done a 100% run through the game.
There is a lot of randomness tied to the system right now, which means that a player could theoretically spend dozens of hours without obtaining the items they were going after, according to some players.
This seems to be the only major complaint players have about the game right now though, and otherwise the developers have handled it pretty much perfectly. The gameplay itself flows smoothly and progresses very nicely, and there has been a lot of praise for the overall difficulty of the game.
Something else that players have been quite fond of is the variety of environments and the overall art of the game, something which has always been an important part of the “Gears of War” franchise. Some were worried that the style of the characters might have gotten a bit too strange for modern trends, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, the game looks fresher than some other releases we’ve seen on the market recently.
Critics have been particularly positive towards “Gears of War 4”, although most of them are avoiding the subject of loot crates in their reviews. We’d be curious to see a professional review written around this topic.
But for now, players are already saying enough, and there is a lot of discussion going on about the state of monetization in “Gears of War 4”. Hopefully the developers are listening, because they still have a chance to recover from the negativity and show their fans that they actually care.