I had significantly less fun with this than the base game. The focus shift to making it level based with no metroidvania thing is a good idea, and with that they up the difficulty, which makes sense. However, a lot of that difficulty is not fun to engage with. They upgraded all the enemies to be better versions of the base game, which is fine they were really simple there, but the bubble blowers and the ball throwers feel so bad to play with. The bubbles just go in circles and they are hard to deal with, and the balls just land and go into shotgun blasts, resulting in getting hit with small nearly unavoidable damage. The tiki boss wasn't fun because of the instakill pits that were fun in the dragon boss, but not here. At its core though, is more messenger gameplay so its still fun, it just has more stuff that infuriated me while playing.

I love this game. I like the creatures in each world. I like the idea of changing into things. I really liked how Rare was doing these crazy ideas during microsoft era. Kameo could have been really good, and I think a sequel or something would just do it. The fighting system could be revamped into something way better than it is, cause right now its kinda simple. There are synergies between the elementals, but its clunky to actually do those things. The world needs to be bigger too, like an actual open world. The elementals would all need interesting movement options to go along with that, but it could be so dope. Kameo is still good, but i could picture it being so much more.

Game looks good, game plays good. The campaign feels like pieces that don't really fit together, especially the beginning. I like that the lambent were "teased" in the first game and now they are here full force. The friendly AI in Gears 3 feels really bad though. It takes forever for an AI to pick me up when I am downed, like they have more important things to do than pick up the player character. They added 4 new characters since this game is 4 person co-op and Jayce is just a non-character; they use him quite a bit in the last half of the game, but he doesn't really do or say anything.