Hindsight tells us that Microsoft's gamble on the Gears of War series paid off not once but twice: first, as a successful tech demo for what its Xbox 360 console could muster in 2006, and second, as an honest-to-goodness contender for the online-combat crown.

Frankly, the game didn't need to be more than a beautiful tease for the lighting and rendering effects of Unreal Engine 3 on console-grade technology, but it happened to distill the important bits of a multiplayer shooter into a gameplay system that kicked butt on an Xbox gamepad. Halo works well enough on a controller, sure, but Gears of War, with its stick-to-cover, turf-control battling system, is the rare online game that might be better with two joysticks and zero mice.

But sticking to the Xbox 360 for nearly a decade meant that the shooter series began to tread water in both of those respects. Gears of War 4, the series' first entry on a new hardware platform, seems to aim its sights at resurrecting the series' original tentpoles: compelling multiplayer combat and jaw-dropping real-time visuals. The game's overall success boils down to nailing those aspects, but Gears 4 also stands as a curious first for Microsoft.

This is a game for a console that doesn't exist.

If you own an Xbox One, you'll have a fine enough time thanks to smooth, 60-frames-per-second multiplayer combat. But the game's best performance—with higher settings and resolutions, still easily locked at 60fps—can only be yours if you have a moderately powerful Windows 10 PC. Microsoft's "Project Scorpio" hardware won't be out for about a year, but Gears of War 4 is letting impatient people sneak their own hardware into the next-gen console party. And in a way, the latest edition of this long-running series proves the Xbox team's promise for that gaming ecosystem's future.

A campaign that nearly spoils the whole package

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Before I praise the game any further, I have bad news to deliver: Gears of War 4's campaign mode might be one of the worst I've played in years. It's probably as bad as Battlefield Hardline; worse than any of the overreaching, later-era Call of Duty games. This mode is so bad, I originally dedicated this review's entire introduction to how much I hate it. I have since calmed down in various ways (soak in the tub, lots of candles, pwning noobs) to give the rest of the game a fair, deserving shake.

But this mode, I'd rather throttle. Gears of War 4 pushes the series' clock forward 25 years, and it follows new series hero JD Fenix (as in, OG hero Marcus Fenix's son) with his gun-toting pals Del and Kait. JD and Del were members of the game's COG Army a while back, but now they're not. We're never told in the game exactly why they left the force, nor why they now live in a settlement full of people dressed as if they were extras in the show Firefly. The game opens with JD, Del, and Kai breaking into a military base to steal some incredibly expensive electricity-generating gear for their ramshackle settlement, which sparks a conflict with the leader of the world's new, post-war political and military machine.

Minister Jin decides to pin some recent calamities on our three muske-Gears, and instead of trying to bring them in for a trial or a conversation, she pummels them with waves of robo-soldiers. As they fend off this logically unsound premise, our heroes uncover another threat in the form of the old games' Locust enemies. They've returned in mutated form because, er, their dead bodies from the end of Gears of War 3 were buried in a giant pile in the middle of the Earth and then left alone for decades. (That always ends well.) This spurs JD to invite his father to help with matters.

You might think evolved Locust baddies and a new slew of robotic foes would make up for a game script laden with plot holes and logical leaps—this is Gears, not Shakespeare, after all—but the developers at The Coalition blow this opportunity for refreshed combat, at least in the campaign mode. The Locusts' new monkey-like "juvie" foes prove interesting because of erratic, bouncing movement patterns; they spice up waves of combat with pesky motions that force new tactics, and they're more fun than most games' weak "grunt" characters. (Plus, they blow up real good.) But the other commonly encountered newbies—a flying, gun-mounted drone and a four-legged, shrimp-like, acid-spitting thing—mostly exist to run players out of cover.

This might have paid off, but the level designs are so boring. The game's battles largely take place in straight-line rush rooms, where players' most interesting decisions are, "do I take the left-side cover or the right-side cover?" As a result, if a flying attacker drives a player out of cover, there's nowhere interesting to go, nor is there any cool, new maneuver to exploit. You just have to hold your gun up, spray, and pray. Even a few busy, multi-tiered scenes, with altitude and flanking opportunities to spice up the combat, would've helped a bit. Alas.

You may not die in those tough-sounding scenarios, at any rate—and you certainly won't feel challenged. The artificial intelligence systems on display are pretty rudimentary, meaning enemies show very little interest in flanking your squad, attacking from multiple angles, or even breaking out of a spot of cover if they're not getting anywhere in a fight. Gears 4's enemies do like to jump out of cover and run straight through a giant battlefield while attempting strategically unsound melee and shotgun takedowns. My playthrough of the "hard" mode included characters doing exactly this about once every other battle. (Perhaps they were as bored of these levels and arenas as I was.)

To top all of this off, the checkpoint system is badly paced. If a battle has three or four distinct waves of enemies in which the first three are ho-hum and the fourth is full of insta-kill attacks, you're almost certainly going back to square one if you get caught by a single explosive torque-bow shot. This is the way the game ramps up difficulty, by the way, because even if you play sloppily in harder modes (which I did to test), your AI squadmates will almost always revive you mid-battle if you've been "downed" and not outright killed. They'll also kill a lot of enemies on your behalf in harder modes.

Did I like anything about the campaign? It looks great, and I delighted in a few physics-driven moments in major battles. The final sequence also flips the game's systems for a kooky, one-off battle that offers more fun than the entire rest of the game combined.

Mechanically, the game suffers from awful momentum pacing and uninspired level design. Yet the worst taste in my mouth came from how lousy the characters are developed. Their banter between and during fights is wasted on one-liners, which might be more forgivable if I had any context about what these characters had gone through in the past (or if I learned anything about their personalities). Many of the one-liners are uncomfortably tone-deaf, too. Loved ones are dying and suffering left and right, and JD and Del can't stop making flip jokes about games of rock-paper-scissors. If this stuff was funnier, or if I liked the characters more, I might forgive it.

Gorgeous and scalable gibs

The only reason I persisted with the campaign, other than needing to do so for this article, was that I managed to get it running quite smoothly on my computer at a whopping 1800p resolution with almost all visual toggles maxed out. (This, like Forza Horizon 3, is an Xbox Play Anywhere title. A single digital purchase unlocks the game on both Xbox One and Windows 10 systems, though disc owners do not enjoy the same benefit.) When I first booted the campaign mode on my Windows 10 testing rig (an i7-4770K processor, overclocked at 4.2GHz, and a factory-OC'ed 980Ti), I opted for 1080p resolution to play it safe, only to find I could lock performance at a blistering 60fps with all settings maxed out.

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From there, I went straight to Gears of War 4's impressive benchmarking utility for a delightful dive into the world of settings min-maxing.

The Coalition clearly wanted to show off how well it had optimized Unreal Engine 4, so the engine's two CPU-bound refresh rates are monitored at all times, right next to the GPU-bound refresh rate. Two gameplay sequences play out in the 90-second benchmarking demo, with the first showing off a standard, simple gameplay scene and the other recreating one of the game's most taxing visual moments (complete with explosions, particle swirls, and a prolonged test of the game's physics and collision systems). Once the test is over, users are shown a dot path defining the demo's frame rate at all times, along with your system's GPU and VRAM usage maximums. It's all displayed next to every visual toggle you've chosen and a basic summary of your system specs. As you can see above, this is a very readable interface for screenshotting and sharing.

Toying around with this, I found that my 980Ti will never play nicely with this engine while targeting a full 4K refresh. If I want to run Gears of War 4 at 60 frames per second, my system simply can't get there at 3840x2160 pixel depth, even with every setting turned down to "low." By reducing my resolution to 3200x1800, then turning most settings (and there are a lot of settings) to "high" or "ultra," I'm back in a mostly 60fps domain, with the benchmark demo's final portion always bringing me down somewhere between 52 to 55fps.

I'll take that slight interruption on a higher-resolution, higher-settings system over the Xbox One's locked 1080p/30fps campaign mode any day of the week. The Xbox One edition handles many of Unreal Engine 4's best bits pretty admirably, particularly in terms of material-based lighting and how well the game's geometry renders through giant clouds of dust and other particle effects. However, the campaign's textures are just outright muddier on Xbox One, and those are tough to return to once you've seen the PC version handle those in an "ultra" setting—especially at double the frame rate.

Shiny robotic enemies that explode in shrapnel, buildings that fall apart, believable facial expressions, shimmering bursts of light in dark rooms full of little dust particles—they all look damned good even on a 1080p display with cranked-up anti-aliasing (or an easy-to-toggle super-sampling setting, if your GPU has the headroom). The more pixels you can render on your display, the cooler all of Unreal Engine 4's tricks look. Gears of War 4's aesthetics are a far cry from the series' original "brown, gray, and more brown" visual reputation, and both the campaign mode and the multiplayer arenas derived from it shine with sprawling view distances, diverse terrain, and enjoyably gross effects in the "slime, blood, and guts" category.

An Arms Race we can get behind

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The console version may lock its campaign and Horde modes at 30fps, but thankfully, the game's versus modes have all been tuned to refresh on Xbox One at a smooth 60fps. There's nary a noticeable hit to the visual quality. You'll still get a better-looking experience on a powerful Windows 10 PC, but in the context of fast-moving multiplayer combat, visual elements like subpar textures are easier to swallow.

If you wanted to see a substantially different game of Gears here, you're out of luck. Gears 4's multiplayer modes favor evolution over revolution, with no major maneuver changes—particularly in terms of player speed or vertical movement. No grappling hooks or jetpacks either; you're stuck to the ground.

But after spending significant time playing with what's changed, I feel like the game's multiplayer fire has returned. For starters, three major new weapons contribute to the game's strategic play in satisfying ways. The "overkill" is a new take on the shotgun, and it allows players to blast by both pressing and releasing either your controller's right trigger or your mouse's primary button. Press, shoot once. Release, shoot again. On paper, this sounds insignificant. In practice, this offers a very interesting way to spread out your weapon's six-shell clip as needed. Need to pump two or three bullets into a nearby foe, then roll backwards and immediately push a backside attacker away? If you manage your shots correctly, you'll be able to do it all without a foe exploiting your reload break.

The "embar" splits the difference between a long-range rifle and the series' pull-to-charge Torque Bow, and it offers a powerful, mid-range, quick-shot version of other games' railgun options. This really helps players quickly stymie rushing shotgun users. And the "dropshot" is the most fun of the new guns by far. Shoot it across the battlefield while holding your trigger down, then release when the glowing bullet hovers over your desired target. That's when this weapon drills down and blows up anything beneath it. Because it requires a direct line of sight, however, it's an easy one to misfire, making the charge bounce off a wall and prove worthless (all while freezing a shooter in place and forcing a reload animation, which gives attackers plenty of time to kill off a dropshot operator).

Players also get a couple of cool cover-related moves, which do a lot to speed up the action and movement of the game without disrupting Gears' core movement systems. The first is a "yank-and-shank," which lets players tap a button to grab a foe on the other side of their own cover platform, pull them over, and stab them. This maneuver makes for a much more explosive moment when opposing forces share a spot of cover—and for fun, the attack can be reversed with proper button timing on the victim's side. Players can also now auto-vault over cover while running toward it, which doubles as an attack when players hop onto a foe who's already hiding on the other side. Even without that attack perk (which, like the yank-and-shank, is quite fun), this move really helps players springboard across cover-loaded maps. It makes the opening 15-second rush of a versus match that much more frenetic, as players madly dash to pick up the best weapons lying around.

But wait—there's more! A few new multiplayer modes have arrived, as well, and most of them offer perfectly fine twists on the usual team-deathmatch formula. "Dodgeball," as an example, includes neither dodging nor balls; it just means dead players can't respawn until a teammate kills a foe (kind of like when you catch a dodgeball in gym class). The exception here is Arms Race, a brilliant mode that might work in any multiplayer shooter but particularly shines in Gears. Here, players must rack up three kills as a team with a given weapon (and only that weapon). Once they get three kills, their weapons all change to a new one. They have to do this for 13 guns in the game, running mostly in order from strongest to weakest. Get the round's final three kills with the game's pistol, and your team wins. This stands out as a good Gears mode because of how its weapon variety forces players to aggressively move toward or away from opponents—and it's a great mode to play online if you've always hated Gears players who rely on shotgunning their way to up-close victories.

All of these changes are boosted by ten shipping multiplayer levels that employ just the right balance of verticality, object density, and sight-line variety. It almost feels like a Gears greatest hits package. These arenas compel players to bounce around the maps, support teammates in flanking positions, and find meaty spots to hide whether while sniping from afar or sneaking up with melee kills up close.

Horde returns—with a little too much class

Those maps double as levels for Horde, the game's multiplayer co-op mode. I have had a solid time with "Horde 3.0," but I wouldn't go so far as to declare it a major reason for diving into Gears of War 4.

The Coalition has mixed up quite a few elements in its first stab at Horde, but the core concept remains. You and four friends hunker down in a giant map and contend with increasingly difficult waves of foes, who appear from various corners of the map each round. Kill all of the enemies in a wave, then pause for 30 seconds to regroup, grab more ammo, pick up the mode's currency (in this case, little lightning-bolt icons dropped by the last round's dead enemies), and use that cash to build and repair defenses (ranging from barbed wire to decoys to giant, automatic turrets). Enemies get tougher, as do your defenses, and the fun is all about slogging together for 20 to 50 rounds with friends. The simple hunker-and-survive motif remains a pretty good excuse to chat with friends over microphones; it's the bloodiest chat room in town.

The biggest change this time around comes in the form of classes. Players can now elect to play as one of five types: the all-around powerful Soldier; the explosives-loving Heavy; the long-distance Sniper; the gizmo-building Engineer; and the resource-gathering Scout. You may read those names and think that Gears has gone the Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch route, making its characters feel so distinct that they lean on each other's superpowers to supplant the other players' weaknesses. Gears 4 isn't that aggressive with its class system, however.

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This ultimately makes Horde 3.0's class system unnoticeable at best and annoying at worst. To some extent, the system appears mostly designed to get players to sink their teeth into Gears of War 4's collectible card system. (What new game in 2016 doesn't have one?) Each class can equip a number of perk cards before a Horde session begins, and they mostly offer stat boosts (ammo, power) along with class-specific perks, like the kinds of structures that the Engineer can build. At first, these perks do a good job of guiding players toward certain play styles and weapon choices. For example, I'm the Heavy, and I have a bonus that stacks when I pick up a bigger foe's "Mulcher" chain-gun weapon. You're the Scout, and you choose bonuses to shotgun blasts and item pickups. Let's work together with our respective skills.

The problem here is, Horde 3.0 matches take a long time. As in, no less than two hours to complete a full 50-wave session. (Even the "basic" 20-wave Horde mode can take over an hour.) By your 70th minute in battle, you may feel trapped behind your class—and frustrated that you can't swap out one card's perk for another between waves of combat. If you only have one or two card slots unlocked for a class and you pick a perk that doesn't really make sense based on the other people you're cooperating with, too bad.

This might have felt different if these cards controlled wild superpowers or game-changing boosts that could be enabled on occasion. Instead, the cards dictate the duties you must uphold for the next hour or so. Worse, the Scout and Engineer classes already come saddled with specific upkeep duties throughout a Horde session (picking up bonuses and managing built structures, respectively). By the 1.5-hour mark, you'd be forgiven for wanting to switch to Sniper or Soldier status for a minute.

The Coalition could make Horde 3.0 that much better with a simple patch that gives players the option to switch roles and/or booster cards every 10 rounds. This would be particularly useful for those moments when other players drop out of your Horde session, leaving you one Engineer or Scout short. (I'm going to tweet at The Coalition every day after this review publishes until they acknowledge this as a reasonable request. I am not kidding.) Until that happens, I'm doing what I can to ignore the class stuff and play how I like at a moment's notice—to switch from a level-roaming scout to a camping sniper to a gizmo-building engineer—because the core gameplay, boosted by everything from new weapons to great arenas to new monsters to yank-and-shank powers, all mixes together smoothly. Horde 3.0's challenge and panic offers all the urgency and intensity that the campaign doesn't, especially in terms of enemy AI and pathing. All of those floating enemies I mentioned earlier? They have far more impact in Horde co-op, and they go very far in forcing interesting tactical changes on the fly with a coordinated co-op team.

By the way, major foes drop a few new power weapons. Like the older games' "Mulcher" machine gun, these offer a ton of power in exchange for heft and character slowdown. One of these, the Buzzkill, is friggin' awesome. It shoots unwieldy, hard-to-aim razor blades across the arena, but if players miss some of their shots, that's OK! They can bounce off walls and hit your foes from the other side. That pool-hall geometry-boosted shooting really stands out as a Horde highlight. ("Did you see me bounce that blade and slice that dude's head off from behind?!")

The Scorpio era, one year early

In February, Xbox chief Phil Spencer announced a vision for the Xbox line from here on out: that anything labeled "Xbox" would just play the games you liked. In June, he clarified this would include the cheaper Xbox One, the upcoming Project Scorpio, and a variety of Windows 10 machines. So, what exactly would that multi-device Xbox future look like?

Gears of War 4 answers that pretty emphatically—and ahead of schedule to boot. The game is perfectly playable on the Xbox One with obvious visual compromises, and The Coalition has delivered two distinct pare-downs: a slight quality reduction to achieve better frame rate for versus modes and more visual effects at a mere 30fps for single-player and Horde. Players with suitable hardware, meanwhile, can flip the bird at those downgrades with a meaty-enough Windows 10 rig. While The Coalition's tech team coyly dodged my direct questions about this game's Project Scorpio viability, it's easy to assume Microsoft's next Xbox model could carry those Windows 10 version improvements over easily. Higher frame rates, higher resolutions, higher texture quality, more visual effects—they're all there, ready to exploit.

Gears 4, more than the other Xbox Play Anywhere games that have launched thus far, seems poised to scale across various Windows 10 rigs. This gives players real choice between higher frame rates and higher visual settings. A smooth 60fps refresh at Xbox One quality levels (or better) can easily be achieved with the right toggles on our test rigs. That may not prove out over every processor+GPU+RAM+HD combination in the wild, but so far, the game appears to be both highly optimized and infinitely customizable.

I hope Gears 4's wealth of options for PC gamers marks the beginning of a new trend for Microsoft Studios, and I'm glad that much of the game attached to this visual achievement happens to be fun to play. The game will run just fine on lower-end machines, but its shiny, bloody, gib-filled content really does crank up the lust for better hardware and better screens. Today, its scalability in both directions is good news for anybody who wants to crank a chainsaw-loaded machine gun anew.

The good:

Engine scalability means the game runs like a beast on high-end PCs and still offers really solid performance on lower-specced systems (including, of course, Xbox One).
Evolution over revolution ultimately works in the online modes' favor, thanks to great new foes for Horde mode and a fantastic mix of maneuvers, weapons, and level designs for versus.
The Buzzsaw weapon. It rips, man.

The bad:

Horde 3.0's class system sticks players with boring duties, not exciting superpowers.
Cards can be unlocked or purchased, but the game is ultimately more fun when they're ignored.

The ugly:

The entire campaign mode. In my dream world, fans would be given the option to drop $20 from the box price to skip it.

Bottom line: Online-shooter fans and 4K enthusiasts should buy.