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Editor's note: This is an early impressions piece based on a playthrough of Gears of War 4's campaign. Our full review will be published early next week once we've had experience of the full game on live servers.If Gears of War 4 is about 'showing respect' for the past, to quote The Coalition's studio head Rod Fergusson, it's also about dealing with a terrible legacy. The game presents a gorgeous but devastated planet, bled almost dry of human life and buffeted by nigh-supernatural tornadoes - a potent if under-explored metaphor for 21st century climate change. In the course of the 10 hour campaign, you'll visit abandoned mining complexes that are now mass graves, their siderooms heaped high with rusty weapons, and dip into playable flashbacks that recount the final moments of anonymous grunts, inserted around the events of the Xbox 360 trilogy. In what feels strangely like a nod to the Izalith of Dark Souls 3, you'll wander through a dank and crumbling quasi-Pharaonic necropolis lit up by pulsing violet eggsacks, and peer at preposterous golden statues of the tyrants of yore.
You'll also pay witness to uncertain efforts at recovery. The first chapter is a raid on a Coalition of Ordered Governments settlement, a marriage of European medieval town planning and circuit board with a mobile curtain wall, where "DB" robots protect and police a depleted, unseen population. Though one of the more colourful environments - and a good platform for a tutorial section, thanks to a relative absence of visual noise - it's also a study in genteel desolation. The cobblestones and shrubbery have a waxy, unconvincing look, as though moulded on rather than laid or planted. In one of the hospitals, government posters preach to empty beds about the citizen's duty to reproduce.
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