I did enjoy combat in the DLC more than the gears games. Main game was a lot of running around, fighting a handful of enemies the same way (dodge, light, shoot, occasional flare), and repeat. DLC had choice encounters where you're summoning objects into the world by illuminating floating text and you could wrangle enemies to a certain word to trap them.
and yeah, aiming is really responsive in the game. More so than most shooters, except like Vanquish and maybe Dead Space 2.