“There is some DNA of our previous games in here,” said Adrian Chmielarz, People Can Fly’s Creative Director, the studio partnering with Epic Games for Gears of War: Judgment.

“From our perspective, we actually do not want to be the studio that is known [for being] all about dick-tits. This is slightly different,” Chmielarz remarks. “There is some DNA of our previous games in this, especially in the intensity of gameplay. We have more enemies on-screen and you basically have these crazy gameplay moments where you almost feel like you’ve lost control over what’s happening. Actually, you do lose control every now and then, and it’s just pure chaos, but that’s the beauty of war.”

That, my friends, is what you should expect from Gears of War: Judgment, the latest Gears of War game that tells the story of Baird, circa Emergence Day. The title is being developed by majority owned studio Epic studio, People Can Fly, in collaboration with Epic themselves and is currently scheduled for a 2013 release.

According to Chmielarz, the campaign mantra for Judgment is to make you “Fear the Locust again.” They intend to do that by upping the intensity of the combat and they do that in three different ways.

Firstly, there's the S3 system, which stands for Smart Spawn System - “A feature has to have a name,” chuckled Chmielarz – which takes the traditional formula of tying the difficulty level to how much health you have and how many bullets it takes to kill an enemy and flips it on its head. Judgment will analyse your performance and adapt to your play style instead.

Yes, casual mode is going to allow you to go through the motions if you want to see the story and just be a tourist, but every other difficulty level is set to challenge you. It’ll do that by offering up different scenarios at the same points throughout; so, say if you tackle a scenario a few ways and keep dying, just as you start to suss it out, it may mix it up and throw a new scenario at you, meaning you have to adapt to a new situation. On higher difficulties, new enemy types that you might not have faced on lower difficulty levels will be thrown at you, and so on. The result, according to Chmielarz, is a “sweaty palms campaign.”

“If this game doesn’t make you sweat, we haven’t done our jobs,” notes Epic’s Design Director, Cliff Bleszinski.

Secondly, there’s the classification system, which is simple but means there’ll be an incredible amount of replayability in Judgment. Simply put, on your first time through the game, the story provides testimony for the trial you saw in the debut trailer. After you’ve completed a section though, you’ll have unlocked a declassified version, meaning you can unlock parts of the story that were redacted on the first time through. You’ll even be forced to replay the mission in a completely different way too, meaning you’ll have a completely different experience.

And finally, there’s the revamped control scheme, which is a result of the more frantic and intense gameplay. It’s easier to do everything now, so instead of winding up and aiming a grenade, you can throw it on the fly with the tap of a button, and for instance, like in Bulletstorm, you can switch weapons with one button. “We were scared to do this,” remarked Chmielarz, “but once we tested it, it took us five minutes to realise it was the way to go”

For People Can Fly, the developer doesn’t want people to play it to learn what happens next, they want people to play it because they love the second-to-second gameplay.

People Can Fly isn’t just revamping the single-player formula for its stab at the series either. The studio is looking at doing the same with the multiplayer, and part of that is with the new class system in a mode called Overrun, which was one of the focuses of this year’s E3.

Overrun is a simplistic defend and attack game of sorts where two teams of 5 fight over a generator. It’s a two round game where the COGS have to defend the generator whilst the Locust destroys it. It’s then a case of switching teams and repeating. The winner is whoever can destroy the generator the fastest. It’s a little more in-depth than that, and it’s the first time you’ll see a class system as well as a proper human-controlled Locust team fighting off against human-controlled COGs.

Let us run you through the COG classes and Locust options:

COG

• Engineer – The engineer can deploy temporary sentries to defend the generator whilst also repairing existing fortifications. Be careful though, because you can’t rebuild fortifications, once you lose it, it’s gone forever, so make sure you repair as much as possible. The engineer has a shotgun as standard.

• Scout – The scout can climb into perches that only the scout can climb into. They are also equipped with a tagging beacon and any enemies tagged take on extra damage when hit.

• Medic – The medic is arguably the most important of the four and is equipped with a stim gas grenade, which can heal teammates and help up downed allies. The medic has a Lancer as standard, so he’ll be just as efficient in combat.

• Soldier – The soldier class, AKA, The Cole Train’s class, is the main firepower class and can help the team by tossing out ammo crates to the rest of the squad. Ammo is important in this mode, so the soldier will be as well.

Locust

The Locust earn points for the damage they inflict on COGs and defences alike, which they can then spend on bigger and more badass Locust. They are as follows:

• Ticker – The Ticker by trade chomps defences and has its trademark ability to self-destruct. It also has the ability to dash really fast. Interestingly, you can combine the Ticker with the Grenadier for more efficient tactics i.e. a Ticker eats a Grenadier’s grenade, then the Grenadier can kick the Ticker at enemies and the grenade inside the Ticker can double the area of effect of the explosion.

• Wretch – The Wretch is the only son of a bitch able to leap over defences and climb into scout’s perches. It can also stun enemies with its scream.

• Grenadier – The grenadier, wait for it… can throw frag grenades. Get on a Bloodmount and you can toss them even faster!

• Kantus – The Kantus is the Locust medic who can heal everyone in the immediate vicinity. Get him on a Bloodmount and his ability recharges faster.

• Bloodmount – The Bloodmount, as you can work out, carries the Grenadier and Kantus. It can quicken the recharge abilities of its passengers.

• Corpser – The spider-like creature has armoured front legs, making it hard to kill, and can even burrow under COG fortifications.

• Serapede – This slimy beast attacks with its mandibles and can rear up and spit poison at distant enemies. It can only be killed, as Baird puts it, by shooting it in the butt.

• Mauler – The hulking Mauler wields a giant shield and flail. It can also spin said shield and reflect COG fire. If any COG get too close when it’s spinning too, it can turn them into chopped liver. 

The mantra of the mode, according to Bleszinski, is still to let players play their own way. If you want a team of soldiers, you can do that, but as it is with any Gears of War game, if you co-operate and synergise, you’ll be far better off.

Gears of War: Judgment was a lot of theory and not much substance at this year’s E3, with Epic and People Can Fly not being really all that ready to show off too much. However, the theory and reasoning behind a lot of proposed design decisions – from the campaign to the new class-based multiplayer mode – made perfect sense and actually intrigues us to see what the Polish developer can achieve with Epic’s stalwart franchise. We’ve always been big fans of what Chmielarz and his team in Warsaw can achieve when they’re given the reins – Bulletstorm was a good recent example – and with a fresh crew behind a franchise that’s been around nearly as long as the Xbox 360, it’ll be interesting to see what sort of life they can inject into the proceedings. Watch this space, methinks.

Gears of War: Judgment is scheduled for a 2013 release.