Gears of War 4 drops next week with new characters, new multiplayer modes, and a new campaign. You can read my review soon, but one aspect I wanted to give a little more focus on were the cool new weapons and moves that developer Coalition has brought to the stop and pop genre.
Below are five new goodies for when it’s time to go for cover and take aim.
5. Yank
While in cover, which is the classic Gears position, you can now grab enemies from the other side by holding up on the left stick and pressing X to ‘yank’ them over. If your timing is right you can also then move toward the enemy and hit Y (when prompted) to get a finishing move, some of which are pretty gruesome. And by that we mean pretty awesome.
4. Overkill
My new favorite shotgun. Overkill is a four-barreled peace keeper that fires once with the pull of the trigger and again upon releasing the trigger. The feel of that can be odd, at first, but stick with it as the shotgun blast can actually be more focused by holding the trigger once that first shot is fired (quick shots give the more typical wide range shotgun shooting spray.) The Overkill can be taken by a down DR-1 DeeBee robot.
Note: Many of the new weapons in Gears 4 come from DeeBees which are (in my best non-spoilery way) the robots of the game.
3. Vault Kick
Hold forward and press B to vault kick enemies. Okay, this isn’t super useful except for kicking Trackers bots, but it’s by far the closest the series has to a silly, dare we say, adorable move so it’s on this list. Soccer ball that bot!
2. Embar
The Embar is a rail gun sniper rifle by way of the DeeBees (DeeBees use such range weapons to shepherd the outsiders of Settlement 5). Embars must be charged before firing, and if the charge is held too long, it will burst the clip and need to be cooled down so timing critical. Still, this is one of the most powerful weapons acquired early on. You only get three shots per clip so make them count. Oh, and there’s no scope because robots don’t need such things.
1. Running Vault
By far the most important tweak to the Gears of War gameplay is the Running Vault. While Roadie Running you can now vault smoothly over covers by simply pressing B. To be honest, this move is not at all intuitive as holding A and then quickly tapping B with the same thumb can feel off, but it’s absolutely essential to getting around the majority of the levels. Once you’ve got it down Running Vault is the most important new move of the series.
Note: the slower version of this is the Sliding Vault: which is done when sliding into cover instead of running.
