Gears 5's Escape mode has its own map maker

Appropriately enough for a game with a chainsaw as one of its main weapons, Gears 5 will give players the opportunity to do a little DIY. Escape is a cooperative, Hive-bursting PVE mode, enabling teams to stalk through a series of levels and splatter the Swarm, and the map maker will let players customise that carnage. Would you like to know more?

The new map builder is pre-fabulous, with tiles, enemies, loot, and more for the player to click into place. It’s like designing a garden path, if that path could then be turned into a gnarly meat-grinder. The tiles are chunky sections of map, pre-made, so you won’t be designing the whole world or doing anything like placing down cover. You are overseeing how it all flows together.

Escape mode, that Brendy stroked at E3, has a few quirks that you’ll need to consider: when players start out, they only have pistols, so giving them access to weaponry is something that could make or break the map. Venom, a green miasma of death that you set off to clear the hive, will also kill the players, and you're in control as to how this spreads. In short, you can make it a challenge or a cake walk. And there's probably not a huge amount of cake in the Gears canon. When you've mapped your map, there's various sharing options: you can host friends or the public, or you can post it to the game for others to play.

Here’s Escape in action, to see what's what.

Gears is out... September 10th. Oh, that's next month. How on Earth did that happen?