14 DAY TRIAL // Gears of War: Judgment is one of the last Xbox 360 exclusives to benefit from the deep bond that the console created between developer Epic Games and publisher Microsoft, just as the focus of the world was shifting away from the current generation towards the Xbox One.
The title serves as a prequel for the entire series and clearly shows how much third-person shooters evolved during the previous console generation and how refined their rather simple gameplay became.
Gamers get to explore the same wide open battlefields, with a variety of weapons that deliver massive amounts of destruction and need to think fast and constantly adapt their tactics in order to take out both normal and boss enemies.
Both the single and the multiplayer modes of Gears of War: Judgment are very well crafted, with a lot of attention paid to the placement of cover and a new scoring system designed to encourage the player to get through levels again and again, perfecting their strategy and action set.
Despite the solid mechanics, the title failed to attract the same praise as other installments in the series, mainly because it failed to offer Marcus Fenix as the main character and operated on ground that was already well covered.
Despite the rather uninspiring welcome, Gears of War: Judgment remains the best Xbox 360 game of the year, an experience that shows the power of the Microsoft console and how capable it was of creating multi-million-dollar selling franchises.
There’s a lot of speculation at the moment about the future of Gears of War, mainly because no announcement has been made about it on the Xbox One so far, so fans of the series should for the time being get a copy of Judgment and enjoy its core gameplay and interesting twists.