The Campaign’s Gone Open World… Kinda
As you might have read in the previews that recently dropped, Gears 5‘s campaign sprawls out farther than any entry in the series before it. During two of the campaign’s acts, players will be given free reign to explore the ice-cold Valley, and sandy desert hub worlds at their own leisure.
By doing so, players can find side missions that come in the form of crashed Condor sites that you can scavenge for useful upgrades for Jack, help out NPCs, and also find rare, unique Relic Weapons (more on those later).
The whole thing helps add a sense of scale to Gears 5’s narrative, with the effects of the war against the Swarm being far more clear now that you can see more of the world and the people that inhabit it.
That being said, Gears 5 isn’t a fully-fledged open world experience. There’s not a ton of side missions, and the open world can be a little bit barren in terms of things to do, with no enemies randomly spawning. Still, it’s a step in the right direction for the series.
