I really enjoyed Gears of War: E-Day‘s campaign. It’s a lengthy experience that looks amazing and does a fantastic job of showing the fall of humanity in the early days of the surprise Locust invasion of the surface. However, I did not enjoy having to fight giant floating ballsacks that take far more damage than you’d expect and that fill the sky with tiny, annoying spores that shoot needles.
Out now on Xbox and PC, Gears of War: E-Day is a prequel to the original Gears trilogy and stars Dom and Marcus alongside two new squadmates, Mags and Lucas. Over the course of the campaign’s 12-15 hours, players get to see the earliest moments of Emergence Day, when nasty Locust monsters erupted from underground and killed millions. Then players get to experience the next two days or so that followed as they desperately try to save as many as they can while figuring out this never-before-seen enemy. Most of the enemies in E-Day are classic foes seen in older Gears games, like Locust drone soldiers, boomers, and wretches.
However, there is a new floating monster that appears, which is weird because this is a prequel and we never see them again. They’re known as spore maidens, but everyone in the game just calls them floating ballsacks, and they are just the worst.
These damn hovering ballsacks are incredibly annoying to fight. For one thing, they are very tough. On the game’s standard difficulty, it takes 200+ bullets from a lancer to down them. Even if you’re hitting them in their weak point, their eyeball, it takes many, many bullets. Too many, really. And it doesn’t make sense. The design of the spore maidens makes them look very fragile and easy to blow up. They’re big flesh balloons, so when I first started fighting them, I assumed a few shots would take them out. Nope! Instead, these are some of the toughest enemies you’ll face in Gears of War: E-Day, soaking up tons of damage and bullets.
If they were just annoyingly tanky, I wouldn’t be so mad. But on top of that, these bastards spit out little spores that also float and shoot needles at you. A lot of needles. And the spore maidens can keep spitting out these flying organic needle shooters until you kill them, meaning that if you aren’t fast enough or you get bogged down killing other stuff, you can quickly discover the sky is filled with spore turrets. This is very annoying, and was the thing that downed me and my NPC squadmates the most over the course of the campaign.
Fighting them is also just a chore. They eat up bullets, make cover less valuable, and often demand your full attention. If you have explosives on you, the ballsacks practically demand that you use them rather than saving them for any other threat. Bleh. Dealing with them just don’t gel neatly with managing the rest of the Locust, and if I’m being really nitpicky, I don’t even think they look like they belong in the horde at all. Go back to your knock-off Lovecraft novel or fantasy RPG and leave me alone, you damn ballsack.
And the worst part? The game often throws two or more of these ballsacks at you at once. During one side mission, I fought like four of them and wanted to chainsaw my TV in half from pure frustration.
If these spore maidens were covered in armor that I shot off over time and they didn’t spit out as many spore turrets, I’d… still be annoyed at them. Sure, it would explain how they can take so much damage and would mitigate the spore spam that can happen during some later fights, but visible armor and fewer spores wouldn’t change that these things don’t show up in later Gears of War games. The Locust brought some incredibly hard-to-kill floating death machines to the party on day one and then just…forgot about them.
I guess I should be happy about that because it means Marcus and Dom never had to fight these ballsacks in the later games.
