Gears of War: Judgement is very obviously an Epic game, what with all the massive stompy men and massive stompy guns and massive stompy soundtracks. The hand of Bulletstorm household People Can Fly isn't quite so obvious, perhaps, but Epic's franchise development director Rod Fergusson assures that you'll detect the former's influence the second you pick up a pad. Or rather, the second you die.
"How it started was that there was a looming transition into the next generation and we were like, 'we have an opportunity to get another Gears game out and how do we do that?'" Fergusson told OXM at E3 this week.
"The way we can do that is to get a partner and they love the franchise so it was an easy way to go. So we started talking and they said 'well if we're going to do this, this and this' and we thought that was kind of interesting, and so the campaign is a very different type of campaign.
This sort of replay-friendly dynamism will be familiar to Bulletstorm fans - People Can Fly's first Xbox 360 shooter was less about beating the odds as beating them creatively, playing and replaying to nail the highest scores. Despite the comparable breadth of tactical options you'll find in Gears 3, Fergusson feels Epic's style is a lot more story-driven.
"I think that's our mix," he went on. "Our Gears game was heavily scripted, lots of cinematics, big storytelling stuff. They're very much about stuff in-level with a high replayability, because of the Smart Spawn stuff which they brought to it by changing the AI. So yeah, their campaign is a different campaign, but at its heart it's Kilo squad, and Lancers and taking cover - it's a Gears game."
The last Gears of War for current gen consoles, Judgement packs a new class-based multiplayer mode, OverRun, which merges Gears 3's Beast and Horde offerings. It's out next year.