Gears of War: E-Day

Gears of War: E-Day is a prequel set 14 years before the original Gears of War. You play as young Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago on Emergence Day, the moment the Locust Horde first rips through the surface of Sera and turns everything upside down. The Coalition built this thing from scratch in Unreal Engine 5, and it shows. The game looks incredible. The gunplay feels like Gears. The active reload is back. Split-screen co-op is back. If you grew up chainsawing Locusts on a couch with your buddy, this game is reaching for that feeling, and for most of the campaign, it gets there.

The tone is darker than any Gears before it. This leans into horror territory. You're watching a city fall apart in real time. Civilians getting torn to pieces. Marcus and Dom aren't the hardened war machines you remember from the original trilogy. They're younger, still figuring things out, fresh off the Pendulum Wars and trying to have a normal life when the ground opens up. Watching them become the guys we know is the best part of the story. Their brotherhood is the backbone of the whole campaign, and The Coalition clearly understood that.

If you're looking for a game to play this October, the horror angle works. There's a tension here that the older Gears games didn't have because we already knew what the Locust were. In E-Day, nobody does. The first time you see them crawl out of the ground, it hits different when the characters around you are just as confused and terrified as the civilians running for their lives.

Where It Starts to Slip

There's a squadmate named Mags. She's a former soldier who gets pulled into the fight when the Locusts attack. She's fine as a character on paper, but her presence chips away at the thing that made the original Gears campaign so iconic. Gears of War was Marcus and Dom. Two guys, one nightmare, and a bond that carried the emotional weight of the entire franchise. Adding a mixed squad dilutes that. It turns something that felt personal and specific into something that feels like it was run through a checklist. The bro code energy that made the original trilogy resonate with its audience gets softened, and you feel it.

Then there's the multiplayer. The campaign stays clean. No weird forced dialogue, no agenda shoved into the story. But the multiplayer store has Pride-themed cosmetics, and that's where the line gets crossed. Pride flags on Gears of War armor. Think about that for a second. What does that have to do with the Gears universe? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's the same as slapping a Coca-Cola logo on Marcus Fenix's Lancer. It doesn't belong there. It's not part of the world. It's advertising.

Kids play video games. A lot of kids play Gears. Putting lifestyle branding into a multiplayer store where kids are browsing for weapon skins is blatant recruitment into an ideology. It has nothing to do with gameplay, nothing to do with the Locust, nothing to do with Sera. It's a company checking a box because they think they have to, and it poisons what should have been a straightforward return to form for the franchise.

The saving grace is that it's optional cosmetic content. You don't have to buy it. You don't have to look at it if you don't want to. It's not woven into the campaign. So it's not a complete write-off, but it's still crossing a line that didn't need to be crossed. You came here for Gears. Not for a message.

The Gameplay Itself

Cover-based shooting is still the foundation and it feels great. The Lancer has weight. Popping out of cover to land a headshot with the Longshot still scratches the same itch it did in 2006. Movement is a little more fluid than the older games, which some purists might notice, but it doesn't sacrifice the Gears feel. You're still a walking tank. You still roadie run into cover. The snap-to-cover system is responsive.

Co-op is the way to play this. Two-player split-screen on console and up to four players online. If you've got a buddy who grew up on Gears, this is the move. The campaign is built for it, and the horror elements hit harder when you've got someone next to you reacting to the same chaos.

Some classic features are missing. No meat shields, no chainsaw duels. The Coalition said they built the game from an empty hard drive on a new engine and some things didn't make the cut. That stings for longtime fans. Those mechanics were part of the identity. They might get patched in later, but at launch, their absence is noticeable.

Horde mode is back but it's been reworked into "Horde Siege," and opinions are mixed. Some players are into the new direction, others feel like it's stripped down compared to what Gears 3 and 5 offered. Versus PvP is there too, but the multiplayer launched with limited modes and options. No Beast mode. No grenade tagging. It feels like a game that shipped before it was fully loaded.

The Verdict