8. Superb Visuals
The original Gears of War was a breath of fresh air as far as third person shooters go; it looked fantastic, and was a banner title for the Xbox 360, offering a style and aesthetic not quite like anything on that console or, indeed, any other. Though the subsequent games didn't exactly reinvent the wheel, they still looked splendid, and thankfully, Judgment, even with its shorter development cycle, doesn't just lazily recycle the textures from the previous game; everything looks noticeably better. Though the Aftermath campaign epilogue is a tad disappointing in as much as it uses the GOW3 visual style - which is jarring when you've just been playing Judgment's vastly superior one - the game on the whole is the slickest and most vibrant entry of the bunch. If the previous titles occasionally felt too grey and drab, more colours are thrown in to shake things up this time; the sky lighting is especially gorgeous during day scenes, and the textures of both your characters and the enemies are spectacular. Epic firefights have never looked this good before.