Playing through this again now, a nice distraction while waiting for Cyberpunk. What made me enjoy this more this time around is putting it in 1440p 120hz instead of 4K 60, though sadly I had to give up HDR. 4K wasn't much of a sacrifice ultimately because the game, even with the texture pack, simply doesn't have high res textures, nor the high frequency detail that would benefit high resolutions. Or at least whatever is there gets completely smudged by the industry's worst TAA - the UE4 one. It's an absolute abomination and I really hope they innovate on it for UE5, because this is just SHIT!
Overall it's still a mediocre/sub-mediocre campaign, especially after coming off of the highs of Metro Exodus which showed me very clearly what a top class single player campaign looks like while still having open world elements interspersed. It's too bad Microsoft is mishandling the Gears franchise, there's a lot of potential to that universe. Mind you none of the games have been "bad", or sunk to the depths that you saw someone like Bioware fall to, but it's just some middle-of-the-road, vanilla, bland, gaming. From top to bottom, but especially the writing.
Wish I could say I have hopes for the future for the franchise but it's MS we're talking about 1st, and 2ndly I see a lot of people leave The Coalition that worked on these games, so now you gotta start from scratch with new faces (after already having started from scratch for setting up TC post-Epic. Maybe it will work out, but I think this would've been much better if it was a 1st party-adjacent studio rather than straight up owned by FP, sorta like how you had Insomniac in the past. It's always an issue when control isn't down to just a few people who own it instead of a giant corpo. It's all about vision, and I just don't see it from current leadership (a struggle we can observe with 343i too, but worse there).