Some of you might of heard that you will be dying in Gears of War: Judgement?a lot. Epic Games is taking off the kiddy gloves and is going to really challenge the player in their next game (at least allegedly), countering the current trend of making a game beatable by anyone and appealing to newcomers. I really like this decision, because I would argue games are at their best when you play them on hard; it brings out the best components of the game, and challenges you to use all of the game mechanics to your advantage. Indeed, lets use the earlier Gears of War games as an example of how the hard difficulty can bring a game to its best. As a summary of Gears of War?s mechanics, you mostly take cover behind objects and pop out to shoot enemies; you have to quickly move between cover to get advantageous positions without exposing yourself to a hail of bullets?at least this is how the game is ideally played. When the difficulty is forgiving, you can probably get away with staying out in the open for a while, taking a shotgun blast to the face and surviving, etc.; in other words, there is no incentive for using the game?s mechanics to their fullest, and you can easily pass over using some of the more subtle aspects of the game to help you survive. On hard (aka Insane in Gears of War), this is not the case; take cover or die, and anything less than your best will bring you to the restart screen. On this difficulty, there is much more incentive to use features like active reload to take enemies down more quickly, close emergence holes (enemy spawn points) to bring fights to an end quicker, actually try to put distance between you and shotguns, etc. To put my point more simply, you get to experience more of the game (out of the interest of helping you get through the game) when you play on hard, aspects which one might have missed when they did not need to use them on lower difficulties. As an aside, I have also found when you first play a game on normal and then go to hard, you get use to playing the game a certain way and as a result fail a lot more when you move on to a higher difficulty; playing the game on hard first requires you to develop better strategies off the bat and get familiar with all the mechanics. In conclusion, embrace the pwnage, bite the bullet, and buckle down on hard if you want to get the most out of your game.