10 Genius Gameplay Tricks That Made Video Games WAY Better
7. Active Reload - Gears Of War
The Gears of War franchise has been widely praised for its innovative cover shooting mechanics, but the feature that truly sets it apart from the competition? Active reloading.
Active reload is effectively a mini-game where you attempt to manually reload your gun - if you can press the reload button again in an indicated area of the reload progress bar, your gun will be reloaded faster.
Depending on your timing, you can pull off a perfect reload which grants you damage buffs, but if you mistime your button press your gun will jam leaving you vulnerable to nearby enemies.
Active reload adds a fun tactile element to gunplay and enhances the tension of a tricky firefight in the event your gun ends up jamming.
As such it's surprising the mechanic hasn't appeared in more games, a fact designer Cliff Bleszinski is surprised by, even freely encouraging other developers to use it.