Marcus Fenix is back with a few more years under his eyes.

Hindsight tells us that Microsoft’s gamble on the Gears of War series paid off not once but twice: first, as a successful tech demo for what its Xbox 360 console could muster in 2006, and second, as an honest-to-goodness contender for the online-combat crown.

Frankly, the game didn’t need to be more than a beautiful tease for the lighting and rendering effects of Unreal Engine 3 on console-grade technology, but it happened to distill the important bits of a multiplayer shooter into a gameplay system that kicked butt on an Xbox gamepad. Halo works well enough on a controller, sure, but Gears of War, with its stick-to-cover, turf-control battling system, is the rare online game that might be better with two joysticks and zero mice.

But sticking to the Xbox 360 for nearly a decade meant that the shooter series began to tread water in both of those respects. Gears of War 4, the series’ first entry on a new hardware platform, seems to aim its sights at resurrecting the series’ original tentpoles: compelling multiplayer combat and jaw-dropping real-time visuals. The game’s overall success boils down to nailing those aspects, but Gears 4 also stands as a curious first for Microsoft.