I'm as surprised as you are, but Gears of War: Reloaded is showing every other major publisher how a remake should be handled

Today's Xbox Games Showcase gave us a new look at Gears of War: Reloaded, the remake of the 2006 original that kickstarted the series and made good on all of Xbox 360's HD promises. I don't particularly follow Gears but I have a lot of love for the first game in the series, which was simply a blast to play through in singleplayer, and had a genuinely great multiplayer mode that took full advantage of those slick-as-hell movement and combat mechanics.

That's the thing about Gears: the bro-hard styling and gigantic meat men may not be to everyone's taste, but I'd defy anyone to play Gears for a few minutes and not have fun. It's one of those games that arrived fully formed, felt great from the first cover-slide and head pop to the last, and delivered such gleefully gory spectacle you couldn't help but smile. Gears might be dumb as all hell but, by god, you don't need a good story when the shooting's this good.

I was surprised by how much I cared when the Gears of War: Reloaded trailer came around, not because I've been particularly looking forward to it but because it reminded me of just how great the original was. And then after the nostalgia, what hit me is that Epic is doing an absolutely spectacular job here: the kind of treatment that should set a standard for how other big publishers handle remastering their material.

Remasters and remakes are a part-and-parcel of the industry now, and there are many excellent specialist studios dedicated to this aspect of gaming: perhaps the standout would be Nightdive Studios. But Epic operates on a quite different scale to these studios, and seems like it has used every inch of that bulk with Gears Reloaded to make this a definitive version of a game that's already been remastered once (2015's Gears of War: Ultimate Edition).

Reloaded comes from the same developer, The Coalition, but has ambition on a different scale. It's not that this is a ground-up remake that looks fabulous: That's the baseline for a game that was once one of the technical showcases that helped Epic sell Unreal Engine.

No, what's impressive about Gears Reloaded is what The Coalition's built around this near two-decade old game. It will launch across Xbox, PlayStation and PC, and will feature both cross-play and cross-progression, so you can co-op this thing on PC with console players, then boot up your own console and carry that progression over.

That kind of easy interplay between systems is still all too rare, and it should be a standard: I own several PCs and consoles, I'm sure I'm not alone in that, and I just want an easy life.

But we're not done. The Gears Reloaded visuals are 4K HDR, with 60 FPS campaign (this trailer is for a console crowd too, remember) and 120 FPS multiplayer, plus Dolby Vision support. "Looks like they upgraded" gruffs Marcus Fenix as the trailer whacks up the stats, and he's understating it.

Then the final thing that really impressed me: splitscreen co-op. Splitscreen was such a part of the original Gears experience, and it's how I first experienced the campaign, but it's one of those features that often gets put aside as too much work. But in this case I really understand why Gears Reloaded has put in the work because, if you're appealing to the folk who loved this back in 2006, that splitscreen functionality was such a huge part of the charm: this really was one of those games where you'd have your mates round to play, just to show off how good it looked.

Getting back to the trailer, "It's game time baby!" whoops the Cole Train as he chainsaws a locust in half, then boots another, and I am once again in my early 20s in front of an Xbox 360, with a whole evening of lancer-ing fools ahead of me. "Momma told me not ta die!" Nothing could bottle that feeling, but Gears Reloaded is as close as I'll get.

The Gears Reloaded trailer does begin with a ludicrous claim: "Experience the groundbreaking original that changed gaming forever!" I suppose it did change gaming, inasmuch as almost every third-person game afterwards started trying to fit-in a cover mechanic, but Gears itself was heavily influenced by Resident Evil 4 and never reached such lofty heights. Hell of a good game, though, and this remaster comes with the kind of functionality that should make it one hell of an example to other publishers.