Gears of War: Ultimate Edition

A couple of years ago I expressed interest in playing Gears 5 and that gave my boyfriend the idea that we should play Gears together on console so that we could be in the same room for once when playing something together. I was wary of the idea since I'm terrible with controllers. When I play on console I usually play QTEs, point-and-clicks and TBSs; things that don't move very quickly because I can't control the camera properly and I never remember where the buttons are and which button does what since the different brands put the buttons in different places and there seems to be no "standard" for button mapping on consoles. Not like on PC. For reference, the games I've played on console in recent years are Until Dawn on PS4, various Telltale games on Xbox 360 and PS4, and various Fire Emblem on DSi Lite, 3DS and Switch. And some of the QTEs in Telltale games and Until Dawn were too quick for me ^^;

But a few days ago we decided to try out the original Gears, but remastered. On Xbox. I've played the most on various Nintendo handheld consoles; DS, DSi Lite, 3DS and Switch, so if I can claim to be comfortable with any console it's Nintendo. Which had the unfortunate result that I pressed B when trying to press X a lot of the time when we played on Xbox :P

So we started the game in couch co-op and chose casual difficulty to make it easy on me. Except casual didn't seem casual at all. And we played through the tutorial hoping it would tell me things I needed to know to play. Except it didn't say shit. I learned what the different buttons do by clicking around on my own and boyfriend doing the same and telling me what he found. The tutorial in this game made me remember the very first time I tried to play Wolfenstein: The New Order back in 2016 or so and the game just kind of assumes you know what you're doing, even on the easiest difficulties, which just makes it a kind of uphill battle from the start for someone new. 

And then we got going. After 30-45 minutes my hands were aching. I have yet to find a controller that doesn't make my hands hurt after less than an hour of playing. The one controller that is the most comfortable for me is the original Switch controller. The one you can attach to the console to make it handheld. 

The first part of gameplay went pretty well. I didn't die as much as I thought I would (even on casual), but that could be because boyfriend usually shot all the enemies dead before I had even managed to aim properly at one. 

In any case I was kind of enjoying myself until we got to the first Berserker and things went downhill rapidly. I had trouble dodging her charges fast enough. It wouldn't have mattered if the game had had checkpoints after each door we got open, but no, if both of us died (or if one got knocked down and then got stomped on by the Berserker) we were forced to restart from the very start of the Berserker encounter. Which is just the kind of gameplay I dislike. I don't mind dying a lot if it feels like I make some progress throughout all the dying. But having to restart from the very beginning every single time just feels too much like banging my head against a brick wall. Not fun at all. Luckily, boyfriend was sympathetic towards my frustration. He had played the game before on 360 and remembered his own frustration at the Berserker encounter. 

We decided to stop there. The entire session lasted around 1½ hours. I still wouldn't mind to give Gears another go, but on PC. I'm a PC gamer and always have been. I didn't grow up with consoles, but I've played games on PC since they were still DOS-based and back before there was a camera involved so no mouse control and the game was usually played with the arrow keys :P The switch to WASD was so strange in the beginning... 

But yeah, Gears was promising story with ridiculously macho characters (like laughably so) and mostly fun gameplay and nice environments. I just suck with the controller x''D