I’m currently playing Gears 5 on my newly upgraded Xbox One X (a separate story which I’ll email you about later this week) and LG 4K TV, and I have to say the HDR enhanced graphics are exceptional. Lighting, shadow and particle effects such as snow, dust, sparks etc. are all exemplary, class leading I’d say. And colour-wise the game is much brighter and more colourful than most out there. Although I don’t have a PlayStation 4, so have no idea how the best looking games on that format compare, the game is undoubtedly the best looking on Xbox in my opinion.
In fact, it made me go back and re-read your review to confirm what I thought from my original look at it – you make literally no mention of the visuals whatsoever. Firstly, I don’t disagree with any of the review, the games shortcomings are evident to me as well. I just was slightly surprised that you didn’t see fit to print even one sentence mentioning the graphics, or even a bullet point in the pros and cons summary. So I was just curious really to get your opinion, were you actually indifferent to the games visuals or did you just prioritise other aspects of the game you wanted to get across in the review?
Also, more in general, have you noticed Xbox One X/PS4 Pro enhanced games look noticeably better than ‘standard’ versions? I feel HDR makes a significant visual difference, both in movie/TV/YouTube material (Amazon Prime’s Grand Tour is a very good example of HDR) and games, more so than simple resolution increase.
As always, keep up the good work GC.
gaztop2511 (gamertag)
GC: Indifferent is probably about right. The graphics are technically very impressive, but we didn’t feel they were used to any interesting effect or showed anything we hadn’t seen in a dozen other similar games – including the rest of the Gears Of War series. When the colour of the sand is the most interesting visual element of your game you know there’s something not quite right.
