Gears of War: Reloaded Is an Upscaled Snapshot of a Distant, Darker Time

I played all of Reloaded on my PlayStation 5, which was bizarre for the first hour or so. It just feels odd to feel the vibrating thrum of a Lancer (the game’s famous “chainsaw gun”) coming through the PlayStation 5 controller’s haptics instead of an Xbox controller. Soon enough, though, I got used to it and forgot that there was anything weird about it at all.

If you played the 2015 remaster of Gears of War, many aspects of this version will be familiar (unless you played the PC port, which was bad). Many of the visual changes in that version, such as Anya Stroud’s straight blond hair suddenly having a rough-hewn look, are the same here, just upscaled further. The 2015 edition changed the pacing of various story cutscenes and even updated characters’ facial expressions and reactions at various points, and from what I can tell, this 2025 version preserves those changes, too. Reloaded’s campaign offers up 4K resolution at 60fps during the campaign, though, and the visual upgrade is impressive, when you stop to take a look around. Pools of water and reflections look much better here; Marcus’ blue eyes look a little prettier. In the heat of battle, though, I didn’t really notice or think about how the game looked (other than appreciating the increased frame rate). The lack of loading screens was certainly noticeable; I didn’t experience any crashes or problems with my PS5 build at all. I got to charge through the Locust-ridden streets of Sera with no technical hindrances.

The real question is, why would you be playing a 2006 game like Gears of War in 2025 at all? And is rereleasing this game yet again on modern consoles really going to benefit Microsoft, which has repeatedly faced criticism in recent years for its lack of major, first-party releases? Gears of War is a memory of a time when Microsoft didn’t have that problem, and when the console wars were raging hard enough that having an exclusive was apparently good business. It’s a true sign of the times that Gears of War: Reloaded is coming out on Steam and PS5, something that Microsoft was apparently unwilling to do even as recently as the 2015 remaster. Clearly, something has changed.

But the game itself has not, and that’s telling. Although I’ve waxed poetic here about how the fun of the game is the mechanical interplay between BFFs Marcus and Dom, this game is also a reflection of the time in which it was released in ways that aren’t so endearing. Anya Stroud, love interest and future wife of Marcus Fenix, spends the game in a support role and a form-fitting pencil skirt; years later, after the developers faced criticism for the game’s portrayal of women, Gears of War 3 put Anya in armor, gave her a Lancer, and included other depictions of female fighters on the battlefield alongside her. (None of this undid the original Gears lore stipulating that the few female soldiers in the Gears universe were only permitted to fight because they were incapable of bearing children, since any woman who could bear children was forced to do so by the in-fiction government due to the declining human population in the face of the Locust threat.) The first Gears game’s most prominent black character, Augustus Cole, garnered critique as well at the time for seeming like a collection of stereotypes rather than a fully realized human being. Similarly, the later Gears games humanized Cole and gave him much more backstory and a more nuanced personality. The Gears games reflected the changing times as they went on, and they were better for it.

But Gears of War (2006) is a reflection of what gaming was like 19 years ago, warts and all. The extent of its political commentary is buried under gory firefights and bro-fists. It’s definitely there for those with the political savvy to look for it—the planet Sera was clearly populated by Locusts long before humans arrived with their imperialist aims, and there’s no real moral justification for the slaughter of the entire Locust indigenous population as a result of that. They were here first. In later Gears games, the characters start to ask “Are we the baddies?” but in the first game, there are only hints at that. The hints are there, however, and politically savvy players will pick up on them. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it seems likely that a sizable chunk of those politically savvy players would also be the ones participating in the BDS boycott of Microsoft and Xbox Game Pass. Gears of War: Reloaded may be on PlayStation 5 now, but it’s still an Xbox Games Studios game.

There are not very many good reasons to replay any 2006 video game in 2025, especially one with a story that shows its age so much, even though Reloaded has upgraded just about everything else. But as an artifact of a simpler time, Gears of War has cultural value, and the series’ progression over its later entries can only be truly understood if you play the first one and see its simplicity. The premise had promise even then, though, by laying the groundwork for a larger commentary about the human threat against the Locust and how maybe — just maybe — it’s worth considering, when you move to a new place, that there might already be people living there, with their own lives, values, and dreams. Even if they look different from you, even if they seem “scary.” Even though, in the first game, that message is so often drowned out by the delicious, blood-spattering roar of the Lancer’s chainsaw.

Gears of War: Reloaded was developed by The Coalition and published by Microsoft. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It’s also available for Xbox Series X|S and PC.

Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.