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Gears of War: Judgment is a third-person shooter. That may seem like stating the obvious, but it's perhaps the game's most refreshing aspect. We've been bombarded with increasingly top-heavy blockbuster games as this elongated hardware generation wheezes along, but Judgment suffers from none of the feature creep that has weighed down the likes of Assassin's Creed, Dead Space and Tomb Raider.Our thick-necked COG soldiers simply pick weapons up off the ground. They don't build them, or craft accessories for them, or upgrade them with XP points. They're not distracted from the war against the Locusts to collect pages from notebooks or pick 10 mushrooms. Nor do they have a cosy domestic hub, and if they did you can bet they wouldn't give a s*** how it was decorated. The world they inhabit is one of relentless forward progression, in which only two things matter: shooting the enemy and not letting them shoot you back. Yes, Gears of War: Judgment is a third-person shooter, and is all the better for its simple, unpretentious gameplay focus.
Clarity of purpose doesn't go hand in hand with innovation, however. This is a machine-tooled game, as slick and unsurprising as you'd expect from a series that has made four appearances in just over six years. The cover system, the active reload mechanism, the grenade throwing, the chainsaw executions - all are as effective as they are familiar.
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