Why yes! It did take a while for me to write a little something about this game 😂. It's been in my drafts folder since July 2022 and over the holidays I've been going through my drafts to see what I can write about, and what I can just let go.  Since I like the Gears franchise, I thought I'd add my 2c about this game.

Just to set the scene, Gears of War 4 takes place 25 years after the events of Gears of War 3, where the Imulsion Countermeasure weapon destroyed all Imulsion on the planet Sera, killing the Locust and the Lambent in the process, the weapon forced humanity to adapt to new ways of survival after knocking out the use of fossil fuels, and bringing across the planet powerful windstorms called "Windflares". To protect the surviving human population from decline, estimated to be hundreds of thousands, the reformed Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG) established walled-off cities to protect its citizens from the dangers outside, while declaring martial law to prevent any travel outside the cities. However, some human survivors rejected the viewpoints of the COG and formed a group called the "Outsiders" that live outside of the COG jurisdiction, raiding COG territory to gather resources.  The main character(s) of this game are J.D. Fenix (son of Marcus from the first trilogy), Del(mont) Walker, and Kait Diaz (whose mother was the Queen of the Swarm).

Story from Wikipedia:

The leader of the reformed Coalition of Ordered Governments, First Minister Jinn, commemorates the 25th anniversary of humanity's victory over the Locust. An elderly Hoffman, who is present at the ceremony, recounts past battles at Aspho Fields, Emergence Day, and Anvil Gate.

Meanwhile, J.D. and Del have recently deserted the COG after disagreeing with Jinn's hardline policies and join a group of Outsiders led by Reyna (Justina Machado). In order to help their village, J.D. and Del decide to raid a nearby COG settlement under construction to steal a special fabricator. They are accompanied by Kait (Laura Bailey), Reyna's daughter, and her uncle Oscar, a former Gear and Locust War veteran. Though they are forced to battle the COG's new robotic DeeBee soldiers, aided by an unknown person remotely controlling some of the settlement's machinery, J.D. and his group manage to successfully steal the fabricator and escape back to their village. They are then confronted by Jinn (broadcasting via a DeeBee), who accuses them of kidnapping her people, much to their confusion, before launching an all-out assault on the village. J.D. and his friends manage to repel Jinn's forces and get to work repairing the village's power generator. However, in the midst of repairs, unknown creatures raid the village, capturing everybody including Reyna and Oscar. As her last act, Reyna locks J.D., Del, and Kait inside the power station to protect them.

Dubbing the unknown attackers the "Swarm", J.D. reluctantly asks his father Marcus Fenix (John DiMaggio) for help. Marcus, who is still angry at J.D. for joining the authoritarian COG and then endangering himself by abandoning it, is reluctant to help J.D. until he shows him that the Swarm is not human. Suspicious, Marcus decides to lead the group to Fort Reval where thousands of Locust corpses were buried to dispose of them. After escaping another attack by Jinn's forces, the group reaches inside the city, where they are ambushed by a Snatcher that captures Marcus. As J.D. and his friends pursue the Snatcher, they find evidence of the Swarm being responsible for the abduction of COG citizens, whose bodies are being harvested to create more Swarm creatures. They also hypothesize that when the Locust were hit by the Imulsion Countermeasure, they did not die. Instead, their bodies underwent a long-term metamorphosis over the last 25 years until the Locust changed into the Swarm. J.D. eventually manages to track down Marcus and free him. Marcus reveals that the Swarm operates on a hive mind and that he was briefly connected to it, confirming their hypothesis that they are the Locust reborn and that Reyna is still alive and being kept at another Locust burial site, but none of the other villagers survived.

Determined to save her mother, Kait demands that Marcus lead them to her. He takes the group to Tollen Dam, where they discover that the burial site has been converted into a Swarm hive. The group fights and kills the Speaker, the Swarm leader that had captured Reyna, who refuses to give them any information about what happened to Reyna. Realizing that the hive's defenses are too formidable for them to breach on their own, the group fights their way to a radio antenna—noticing that the Swarm seem to be able to affect DeeBees' behavior—where Marcus calls for the assistance of Augustus Cole (Lester Speight), Damon Baird (Fred Tatasciore) and Samantha Byrne (Claudia Black), with the latter two now being lovers. Baird, now a famed industrialist and the creator of the DeeBees, is revealed to have been the one who aided the group during the earlier settlement raid and brings a pair of mech suits that J.D. and Kait use to fight their way into the hive. Inside, they find out that Reyna has been forcefully integrated into the hive's network, and that removing her would result in her death. Despite this, Reyna requests that Kait end her life, which she tearfully does. She then inherits her mother's amulet, which had belonged to Kait's grandmother. However, upon closer inspection, it bears a resemblance to the symbol of the Locust Queen Myrrah – implying that Reyna was her daughter and Kait is her granddaughter.

In a post-credits scene Oscar, still alive, cuts himself out of the Snatcher that had captured him.

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Overall this was a fun game. As you can see from my stats, it was a quick in and out. I got minimal achievements, a minimal gamerscore, and only put in about 10 hours of play.  The environments were fun and in keeping with the GoW world. It was fun to have a little flying robot to assist in the missions, and it was good to see the connections to what had happened previously in the story of Ephera.  The electrical storms that seemed to be a big deal when you first started playing don't seem as big of a gaming element in retrospect.  I think they could have done more with this mechanic.  The instances where this mechanic was used seemed like fun and made destructible parts of the environment provide with novel ways to take out locusts. Maybe this warrants a replay.

Final tally...

Hours played: 9 hours 30 minutes

Achievements: 34

Gamerscore: 410/4000

Completion score: 10%