The first new Gears game in seven years gets a ton right but also has some real flaws. Gears of War: E-Day might be the best the series has ever looked or felt. It has scenes and set pieces that will stick with me as some of the franchise’s most memorable. But the overall experience is far from perfect. Just as quickly as the tension and spectacle ramp up, they’re dissipated by weak storytelling, bumpy pacing, and bland sandbox exploration.
I’m a few hours away from finishing the roughly 14-hour campaign, so these are my initial impressions of Gears of War: E-Day based solely on the story campaign, the only part of the game available during the review period. Multiplayer will go live with the shooter’s early-access period starting October 1, though key features like private lobbies and ranked mode won’t be available until later in the month. But I wanted to share my early thoughts based on an incomplete playthrough of an incomplete game. The TL;DR is that the old-school spirit of the franchise burns bright in Gears of War: E-Day, and it features moment-to-moment combat that left me eager to come back at the end of every session.
For fans of Gears‘ iconic post-WWII sci-fi world building, which mixes gothic horror and baroque architecture, the setting of Gears of War: E-Day is doing a lot of work here. It showcases the events of Emergence Day, the pivotal period 14 years prior to the events of the original 2006 game in which the Locust Horde comes out of the ground and lays siege to humanity. Still reeling from the terrors of the Pendulum Wars, COG soldiers Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago are thrust into guerrilla warfare on home turf with a merciless enemy that they can’t yet comprehend.
This is where I’ll note that I’ve been playing on Xbox Series S, an experience that is good enough but far from ideal. I’m used to games not looking their prettiest or running their best on Microsoft’s less powerful console, and was content to stick mostly to playing in quality mode for the campaign. Even at 30fps, however, there were frequent sections of the game where things stuttered and chugged, especially during the transitions between checkpoints and action-filled cutscenes. It’s the closest I’ve felt to having a “last-gen” experience on my Series S.
Gears of War: E-Day is at its best when you’re bobbing and weaving from cover to cover and flanking enemies in larger-than-life arenas that range from towering cantilever bridges and sprawling, ornate hotel lobbies to vast airfields crumbling beneath the Locust sinkholes popping up left and right. These spaces are at once breathtaking and immensely fun to navigate as you try to swiftly dispose of the grunting Locust swarming through the city of Kalona, a metropolis reminiscent of a rust-belt industrial center during its heyday. The enemy AI is occasionally underwhelming, and the new Locust monster types didn’t do a whole lot for me, but being able to go prone behind cover as debris ricochets everywhere from incoming fire has added a new layer of satisfying drama to the still excellent cover-based combat.
Less impressive are the open-world elements and broader narrative. Marcus and Dom are joined by former Gear Mags Carter and a rookie coms officer named Lucas Reyes. If you were curious to see how two of the franchise’s icons might respond to being on the frontlines of world-historical events, you’ll be underwhelmed. While Gears of War: E-Day devolves into backstories and skims the surface of war-fueled traumas, the plot and character interactions take a backseat to everything else as Bravo Squad toils between objectives with dutiful but hollow grumbles about shit rolling downhill.
Combined with some optional objectives while patrolling the city of Kalona and a ton of collectibles that feed into a neat but not entirely impactful equipment mod system, you get what can often feel like a peak Gears combat experience wobbling on top of weak scaffolding. The periods in between cool combat arenas and big set pieces can feel tedious without the payoff of unexpected story beats or engaging character arcs. Maybe I’ll feel differently once I’m done with the whole thing. And the new Horde Siege mode and other online multiplayer content could go a long way to making the overall Gears of War: E-Day package feel more like an overwhelming success. For now, it feels like a string of battle victories that haven’t yet won the war.