Just finished the campaign. The story, characters and dialogue were basically all pretty uninteresting. Not a big deal, but I've always found the story in the Gears series entertaining for what it was and Judgment's story is a let-down in that regard. Thankfully, though, the campaign is fun (and I imagine will be much more so with friends). The campaign lacked any big set piece moments/bosses, but the combat throughout was really entertaining and each encounter felt unique from another (particularly thanks to the declassified missions), People Can Fly did a great job in that regard.
The biggest problem I encountered was the one I mentioned earlier in the thread where the random elements to the weapon (it might be my imagination, but weapon spawns seem to have a slight random element to them, but it doesn't seem to change up as regularly as enemy spawns do) and enemy spawns mixed with a Berserker's appearance (not random) resulted in me not having a Scorcher to kill it with. The section became broken and I had to restart from the last checkpoint - which wasn't a big deal, but naturally it's not an ideal situation. It was disappointing to see in that it showed a certain lack of polish not normally seen in the series (or this game, for that matter).
I don't know that I'd want every potential Gears sequel to follow Judgment's formula, but it's a really cool spin on the typical campaign infused with some horde-mode DNA and a dash of People Can Fly's creativity. I would count it as a worthy entry into the series purely for the gameplay contained within and what looks to be some real potential for repeat plays, even if it pales in comparison to its predecessors in other areas. As someone who comes to Gears primarily for the campaign, with only a little bit of dabbling in multiplayer, I'm very satisfied with Judgment overall. I was just a little disappointed that there was only one boss fight in the game (at least it meant I was super pumped when a boss finally showed up, I guess
) and that it generally lacked a certain sense of scale. That said, there are some scenarios in the game that are very cool, a great example being the way Act 4 is book-ended with firefights on a beach. I should note I haven't played through Aftermath yet.
Looking forward to friends getting the game and playing through this stuff in co-op.
