If playing Gears of War while feeling the thrum of the PS5's DualSense is wrong, I don't want to be right – this is still a genre masterpiece 19 years on

An extra layer of symbolism has been added to Gears of War Reloaded in its opening. 14 years after the apocalyptic 'Emergence Day', it sees imprisoned hunk of meat Marcus Fenix freed from confinement by his legendary bro Dom Santiago, and reinstated into the COG military (yes, that stands for Coalition of Ordered Governments, and yes, that's Gears' tone in a nutshell). Except this time around, Marcus Fenix has also been freed from the shackles of Xbox.

Within minutes, the PS5's DualSense controller is shaking in my hands as I unload steaming hot lead into hordes of locusts – the underground-lurking invasion force responsible for humanity's turmoil. Comms chatter about how to best squash these enemies comes out from the DualSense's speaker and, more delightfully, holding melee to spin up the lancer rifle's onboard chainsaw purrs from the device – it's like having an incredibly violent cat on my lap. It might just be the very first Gears of War that's leapt off of the Xbox and onto PS5 so far but no matter – Gears of War Reloaded is a reminder that this original outing is still the best.

Waist high

And sure, I'm well aware each of the sequels did bolt on improvements across both narrative scope and the mechanics of enacting brutal violence. But also, there's a simplicity in this first outing that still makes it a cover shooter masterpiece 19 years later. If anything, the smoothness of control in Gears of War Reloaded only drives that home.

The muscled bros that make up Marcus and his COG allies aren't just bulky for the sheer masculine pleasure of it, or to simply riff on a Warhammer 40k-style grimdarkness (chainsaw guns and all – Gears owes a lot to Emperor's Space Marines). As an early and definitive third-person cover shooter, their hulking frames are a design promise across both its campaign and multiplayer. These targets are not small: blast away and see the flesh fly. Get close enough, and allow the chainsaw-based splatter to commence.

In some games, you may think of heftiness as a negative – clunky controls, perhaps, or unresponsive slowness. Not so in Gears of War, which embraces the pleasure of heftiness with all the satisfaction of slapping a thick cut of steak directly onto a hot pan. There's nothing slow here, bullets spraying forth with abandon to ca-thunk into targets, heads exploding.

Every now and then there's a moment's breath for more deliberate violence, a bowls-esque fling and roll of a frag grenade to seal up an emergence hole from which the targets of your ire come; the quiet joy of lining up a headshot with a scoped rifle and seeing that head simply disappear, replaced with a gushing fountain of bliss; 'roadie running' to outflank locusts mounting turrets, the cover-to-cover dash bringing the camera low in order to shake back and forth – a clomping rhythm that feels like a drum-fill lead-in to the violence to come.

Even the act of reloading feels like a pause on the crest of a rollercoaster, a well-timed tap of the button rewarding Marcus with a quicker reload and damage enhanced bullets, genuinely turning the tide in some tense shootouts.

So many of the brutal pleasures in Gears of War are all about the simplicity with which you can enact your vengeance on the locust enemy. You rarely have to worry about ammo, or even care much about where your shots land as you paint pain – heavy brushstrokes across torsos in the direction of skulls, the gore a celebration as enemies turn piñata-like into chunks.

Still, the feedback of these rages is one area where Gears of War Reloaded could have used more blood-red polish. Often, enemies don't react all that much to gunfire, and even popping heads feels a bit cursory. Occasionally, enemies will flip-flop their AI behavior when they do come under attack like a switch has been flipped to jerk off on another route for seemingly no reason.

So too do some of the annoyances I had with Gears of War Ultimate Edition rear their head. Anecdotally it feels like in the solo campaign, squad AI in Gears of War Reloaded can still be a little iffy. That's a shame as, in the Xbox 360 original, it was really solid, and one area I really felt Ultimate Edition dropped the ball. Reloaded does feel a bit better than Ultimate Edition in this regard, but some rough moments persist. The less said about the finale of Act 1 the better, in which you have to bait a blind Berzerker through several doors while your CPU-controlled Dom insists on getting himself killed again and again, resulting in a Game Over.

Beyond that, though, it has to be said the Gears of War Reloaded feels like a huge leap from Ultimate Edition. Reloaded runs like a dream on PS5 Pro, and I think the way the higher fidelity visuals have been implemented do a much better job of capturing the weird modern gothic and industrial labyrinths that made the original compelling to look at – something that really left me cold in Ultimate.

Excellent day

I also still love Gears of War's storytelling. While I still find the culture-shattering trailer scored to Gary Jules' 'Mad World' cover a bit cringe (hey, I was a teenager when Gears hit – I was into metal, my friend), Gears of War does successfully manage to tell a deeper story than all the muscle flexing might have you think.

I love how Gears of War opens in media res, leaving you to learn what sort of conflict Marcus has been thrown into, why he was imprisoned, the relationships between him and his squadmates, and what the higher-ups in command are scheming. Through a combination of mid-mission dialogue and clever environment design, much about Marcus' background and E-Day become clear before an explosive finish. Though it ends with a sequel hook, I still think Gears of War is a tremendous sci-fi blaster in its own right, even outside of the rest of the series it spawned.

Gears of War's dedication to simple smart design across its satisfying shooting and storytelling mean it's aged incredibly gracefully – and is still top of the pile when it comes to the third-person cover shooter genre for me, even if some parts show its age even in Reloaded.

And yet, rather than get me hyped up for the impending Gears of War: E-Day, my enjoyable trip back to Gears of War also leaves me less excited to see more. Gears of War Reloaded emphasizes why the original works so well. Gears of War: Judgment felt weird as a bit of a prequel itself, and I definitely don't like the idea of retreading a past that's explored so well in the original. After all, playing it again, I'm reminded of why Gears of War felt so exciting in 2006 – it just felt so fresh and new in how it implemented the fundamentals. Years and years after the fact, yet another sequel in a series with diminishing returns is going to struggle to capture that.

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