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Gears 5 review — The Coalition nails action and emotion in one of series’ finest games

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 9 min

The Gears of War saga has always been a mixture of intense combat, serious war story, ridiculous over-the-top scenes, and comedy in a world gone mad. The levity is still there in the latest game from The Coalition, but it also has a more serious tone that goes with the devastation of the world of Sera, a beautiful home for humanity which at this point feels like it has been wrecked more times than Godzilla has destroyed Tokyo.

Yet here we are again, with humanity as the underdogs as the resurgent Swarm comes back to try to finish everyone off. And to this backdrop, the storytellers now add the specter of a more personal loss.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.