The best shooter games like Gears of War are Gears 5, Vanquish and Binary Domain. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to shooter costs you.
Filtering to shooter means you want the guns to be the answer. It is the right filter when what you liked was the feedback — the sound, the recoil, the way enemies react.
What you get: Moment-to-moment feel, and the shortest distance between picking a game up and enjoying it.
What made Gears of War worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the shooter part of that answer, and only the shooter part.
The best-playing entry in the series and the most generous with co-op.
Takes the cover shooter and adds a rocket-powered slide — same DNA, opposite tempo.
An underrated squad cover shooter with far better writing than it needed.
The current best heavy third-person shooter, and openly built for Gears fans.
Cover shooting as the core loop, with loot on top.
Cover shooting with the best squad in the genre.
Third-person co-op shooting with real difficulty.
If co-op chaos with friends was the reason you played Gears.
The PlayStation answer to Gears, from the same year.
Variety. Shooters commit hard to one loop, and the ones that try to be something else usually do the something else badly.
The full list is on games like Gears of War — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Gears 5. The best-playing entry in the series and the most generous with co-op.
No. Gears of War released on the Xbox 360, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
How the guns sound and how enemies react to being hit. A shooter with mediocre levels and superb weapon feedback is more fun than the reverse, every time.
Each pick says. Several of the best shooters ever made are single-player campaigns, and a few of the co-op ones are genuinely worse with bots.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Gears of War list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is shooter — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the shooter guide for where to start in the genre generally.