Digital Foundry has been taking a look at the new releases of Gears of War: Reloaded across Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PS5, PS5 Pro and PC, and the results are pretty much what you'd expect - it's excellent for all of them.
Visuals are great, performance is really smooth for the most part, and even the Xbox Series S version is praised multiple times in the video analysis you see up above. Here's a bit of how they conclude it all:
"While I would have preferred a similar treatment for Gears 2 and 3, I can at least say this is still an excellent package and one worth checking out whether you've played Gears 1 or not."
When we say "for the most part" when it comes to performance, it's because the 60FPS gameplay is rock solid across all console platforms including Xbox Series S, but the 120FPS is a little bit different. It's actually quite variable, meaning it's seemingly intended for VRR-enabled displays, and for whatever reason the Xbox Series X version actually outperforms the PS5 version in this 120FPS mode by quite a bit.
Now, when we were reviewing Gears of War: Reloaded here at Pure Xbox, we noticed there was judder in the 120FPS mode when playing campaign, but it seemed perfectly fine in multiplayer. We put this down to the fact that campaign is only advertised for 60FPS, so we don't think it's even supposed to support 120FPS at all.
Here's just one example of this being mentioned by Xbox Wire:
"With stunning 4K resolution, assets and textures, a 60 FPS campaign with lightning-fast load times and 120 FPS in multiplayer..."
Digital Foundry also discovered this issue in the campaign (no mention of multiplayer), suggesting there's either a bug that needs fixing with this, or they need to remove the 120FPS option for campaign - maybe it was added by mistake.
"Essentially, on Xbox, VRR does not currently behave correctly. It simply appears to use standard VSync as opposed to VRR, so you get judder when the frame rate is between 60 and 120. Clearly this is unintended and it should be fixed, but it's something to note if you're jumping in at launch."
Whatever the case may be, let's hope that gets adjusted soon.
The rest of the analysis talks about some of the visual changes between the original Gears 1 and this Reloaded remaster, with some people in the comments highlighting how they don't like the new rain effects, for example.
Overall though, Gears of War: Reloaded is presented as an impressive release with only some minor nitpicks here and there - and let's be honest, we never expected anything less from The Coalition!
But what about you? How are you getting on with Gears Reloaded so far? Let us know down in the comments below.