Xbox 360 backwards compatibility is finally live. Unfortunately, the Gears of War collection will go live for the ones bought Gears of War ultimate edition on December 1st unless you have the original DVD like me. Upon inserting the disk into the drive, the install option appeared. Upon clicking it, I was greeted with an 8 GB download patch. Apparently, the disk inside is just for verification purposes as it downloads the whole game to your drive yet you cant play it without the original disk.
Since I always leave my Xbox One on standby mode for it to download updates while I’m away, the download and install was done in the background ready for me to fire it up once I relaunched the console. Clicking start on the game found in my apps brought down the manage menu with all the DLCs waiting for my command. I clicked download all and finally started the game.
The game loaded fine with a sudden message that the system is trying to get my Xbox 360 information. The message disappeared within 3 minutes and the classic signed into Xbox Live appeared. My progress got downloaded from the server and I’m right where I left off. I tried getting into an online match, but the game informed me that I needed to download some DLC. As I was about to exit, one of the DLCs downloaded and the online play was now available.
I joined a quick match and the game started. Man, and I thought Gears of War ultimate edition was not an improvement. Don’t get me wrong, thew gameplay and mechanics in Gears 3 eats the ultimate edition alive but the graphics were not what I remembered. Rest assure, after about 5 minutes you wont notice a thing. The game is the best in the series so far and for a good reason. The community is still strong and joining games takes seconds.
The gameplay was fine with no noticeable glitches. Sometimes the game would slow down, but that’s not the backwards compatibility issue. I will be testing the game further along with the rest soon. Apart from me wishing that Microsoft would at least increased the Anti-aliasing, the game looks and plays good. Go Xbox.