By going back to the day the Locust first broke through the pavement, The Coalition has rediscovered fear as the engine of Gears of War, and built its best combat yet around it.
The Monster Movie Inside the Military Shooter
Every long-running shooter eventually forgets what its enemies were supposed to feel like. By the end of the original trilogy, a Locust Drone was a pop-up target with a growl, something to be curb-stomped on the way to the next cutscene. The Coalition’s two numbered sequels inherited that problem and never quite solved it. Gears of War: E-Day solves it by changing the question. Instead of asking how to make the war bigger, it asks what it was like before anyone knew there was a war at all.
That is the entire premise, and it is a smarter one than a prequel usually manages. E-Day goes back 14 years before the 2006 original, to Emergence Day itself, when the Locust Horde tore up through the streets of Sera and humanity learned, in a single night, that the ground beneath it was hollow. The result is the most frightening Gears game ever made, and, not by coincidence, the best one to play.
Xbox kindly provided the code for this review, which I played on Xbox Series X. I finished the full campaign solo and in co-op, and spent the days since Early Access opened in Horde Siege and Versus.
Kalona, Before and After
E-Day is set entirely in Kalona, an industrial city that grew rich on science and on the wartime Imulsion economy of the Pendulum Wars. The war has only just ended. Soldiers are going home. Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago are two of them, young, raw and still carrying the death of Dom’s older brother Carlos, who was killed shortly before the fighting stopped. Their friendship is under strain before the first tremor hits.
Then the city opens up. The Coalition has structured the campaign across three days of the invasion, and each has its own register: the first night is confusion and panic, closer to a monster film than a war story; the second is the slow, improvised assembly of a fighting unit; the third is desperation. Marcus and Dom fall in with Mags Carter, a former Gear now working at Kalona’s Imulsion refinery, and Lucas Reyes, a communications officer who has never seen frontline combat. Together they become Bravo Squad, and the campaign follows them through five acts as Kalona comes apart around them.
The decision that makes everything else work is that Kalona is a living city when you first see it. The later games take place in a world the Locust have already broken, with ruins as the default backdrop. Here the apartment interiors are furnished and lit, the streets have traffic, and the civilians are people rather than set dressing. The Coalition has described Kalona as the largest and most detailed location in the series, and it plays like it: a single, coherent place, rather than a chain of disconnected arenas, which means every collapse registers as a loss of somewhere you have already walked through.
A New Body for an Old Soldier
Gears has always played heavily, and the heaviness was part of the identity. Marcus moved like a refrigerator on castors, and the roadie run was less a sprint than a controlled stumble. E-Day rebuilds the movement from scratch, and the danger with that kind of overhaul is obvious: lose the weight and you lose the game.
The Coalition has kept the weight. What it has added is freedom. Sprint now sits on a click of the left stick, as it does in most modern shooters. Cover moves to A, and vaulting and jumping to Y. Marcus can slide out of a sprint, clear a gap, climb onto a car roof or a loading dock, and, most importantly, tuck into low cover that earlier games simply ignored. That last detail changes the texture of every fight. A city street is full of waist-high debris, and suddenly all of it is usable.
The effect is that encounters gain a vertical axis without losing their rhythm. Gears combat is still a conversation between cover points, but you now have more ways to reply. Flanking a Boomer by going over a wrecked bus, rather than around it, is the kind of option that would have been impossible in Gears 5, and E-Day builds its arenas around exactly that sort of move.
The returning fundamentals are as sharp as they have ever been. Active Reload is back with a cleaner interface. The Gnasher still behaves like a door being slammed at close range, the Longshot still rewards patience, and the chainsaw is grotesquely satisfying, helped by a new gore system that tears localized chunks out of Locust flesh and accumulates blood and grime on everyone in the squad as a mission goes on. It is not subtle. It was never meant to be.
The Arsenal, the Mods and the Hardcase Problem
E-Day’s progression lives in modifications. Hardcases are scattered across Kalona, inside apartment blocks, on the roofs of car parks and down in Locust tunnels, and breaking one open yields mods for weapons and armor, fitted at supply points along the way. The system is a genuine success where it matters, in combat. Mods change how a weapon behaves rather than nudging a number, and the right combination can turn a familiar gun into something new. The Incinerator shotgun, one of the new arrivals, is the standout, a close-range weapon that burns through Locust hide and rewards aggressive play. The campaign also hands Bravo Squad Horde-style tactical gadgets for scouting and crowd control, an idea that sounds out of place in a story campaign and turns out to be natural by the second act.
I will be honest about where it slips. The hunt for Hardcases is the weakest thread in the design. The game nags you whenever one is nearby, a good share of what they contain is for weapons you will never carry, and logging collectibles involves more menu work than it should. This matters because of how the campaign is shaped. After a superb linear opening, E-Day alternates tightly scripted missions with broader districts that you can approach from several directions, with optional encounters to rescue civilians or reinforce isolated Gears. The best of these side encounters are excellent, small stories told in a stairwell or on a rooftop. The weakest are filler, and the Hardcase pings make the open sections feel busier than they are.
The other flaw is the biggest Locust. Drones and Wretches react beautifully to gunfire, staggering and losing armor, and those fights are the best in the series. Reavers and the larger beasts of the late campaign absorb fire with far less visible reaction, and in those encounters the health bar does the communicating that the animation should. They are spectacular to look at. They are less interesting to fight than the smaller enemies, and the last act leans on them more than I would like.
Neither problem comes close to sinking the game. They are the reason it falls short of perfection, not the reason to hesitate.
Bravo Squad and the Weight of a Brother
The Coalition’s creative director, Matt Searcy, pointed to Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan as models, and the comparison is apt in one specific way: E-Day is an ensemble story about a small unit, told at ground level, in which the larger war is mostly something that happens off-screen and arrives as bad news. Vee Nyarko’s script keeps the camera on Bravo Squad almost without exception, and Karen Traviss, whose novels shaped so much of the series’ backstory, consulted on the story to keep it consistent with established canon.
The performances carry it. John DiMaggio and Carlos Ferro return as Marcus and Dom, and both have been given something new to play, which is vulnerability. These are not the slab-shouldered veterans of 2006. Marcus is a man being forced into leadership before he wants it, and Dom is a grieving younger brother whose loss gets heavier with every civilian he cannot save. The new facial animation, with more than 350 facial shapes per character, gives that grief somewhere to live. The quieter scenes between them are the best character work the series has produced.
Mags and Reyes are the campaign’s real discovery. Mags is the squad’s spine, practical and protective, with the dry authority of someone who has done this before and hoped never to do it again. Reyes is a civilian in uniform, and his knowledge of the city, its transit lines and its districts, makes him the person who keeps reminding you what Kalona was. Seasoned COG figures such as Tai Kaliso and the Raven pilot Gil Gettner add a sense of the wider army, and of how badly it is losing.
The script has weak moments. Some of the dialogue reaches for action-film cliché at exactly the moment it should be quiet, and a few threads are clearly left dangling for whatever comes next. But the emotional core lands, and the ending does what a prequel to a known tragedy should do: it makes the history you already know feel heavier.
Unreal Engine 5 at Its Limit on Series X
E-Day is the most technically accomplished game on Xbox Series X, and the margin is not small. The Coalition rebuilt every asset from scratch in Unreal Engine 5, and it shows in the geometric density of Kalona, in the character models, and above all in the lighting. The game uses hardware Lumen for global illumination and reflections, and it is among the first titles to ship with MegaLights, which lets the artists place hundreds of shadow-casting lights in a scene. That matters for more than spectacle. It is what allows E-Day to be dark in the right places, with hard contrast in a flooded underpass and pools of emergency light in a gutted police station, and darkness is what makes the Locust frightening again.
The destruction system completes the picture. Cover chips away under fire across different materials, streets give way into sinkholes, and whole buildings collapse in real time. It is the first time a Gears city has felt physically vulnerable.
On Series X there are three modes, all reconstructed toward 4K with TSR. Quality targets 30fps at an internal resolution of around 1152p and is the most visually complete, keeping the full set of ray-traced effects. Balanced targets 40fps on a 120Hz display, at roughly 1000p to 1080p, with near-Quality settings. Performance targets 60fps at around 936p, trading away some reflection and shadow quality, and the image does turn soft at times. I played most of the campaign in Performance, because Gears is a game about reaction speed, and it holds its target through the linear sections; the heaviest late set pieces are where it dips. If your television supports 120Hz, Balanced is the best compromise of the three. Competitive multiplayer goes further, running at up to 120fps.
Lastiwka’s Score and the Sound of a City Breaking
Adam Lastiwka, who scored Gears 5, wrote the music here, and the soundtrack is built for the campaign’s three moods: dread on the first night, grim momentum as the squad forms, and grief by the end. The main theme, “Emergence,” is the best piece of music the series has had since the Mad World trailer, and Lastiwka’s rework of that very song for the reveal trailer was a statement of intent the game honors. The menu even offers an instrumental version of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” among its four themes, a nice nod for anyone who grew up with the original’s swagger.
The sound design deserves as much credit. Weapons are punchy without being shrill, the chainsaw’s revving and its wet conclusion are almost embarrassingly satisfying, and the Locust make the right kind of noise in the dark, a clatter of claws in a stairwell before you see anything. The ambient layer does a lot of storytelling: distant sirens, collapsing masonry, crowds somewhere out of sight. On a good surround setup, E-Day is a frightening place to stand still.
Couch, Squad and Siege
The campaign supports two-player split-screen on console and up to four players online, and all four members of Bravo Squad are playable from the start. That last decision is the right one. E-Day is designed around the “Never Fight Alone” idea, with encounters that reward covering a teammate’s flank and reviving under fire, and it plays best with friends. Split-screen co-op is increasingly rare in big-budget games, and its presence here is something to celebrate. Solo play is entirely satisfying too, with capable AI squadmates, but co-op is where the game’s design makes most sense.
The difficulty range is wide, from a gentle entry point to the punishing Insane, and the Boot Camp tutorial and the Practice Space for testing weapons against PvE encounters make E-Day an easy first Gears for newcomers. The story requires no knowledge of the series; it is set before all of it.
Multiplayer arrived with Early Access, and Horde Siege is the headline. It is a substantial reinvention of Horde: 12 players split into three squads of four, each pursuing objectives across a large, interconnected slice of Kalona, building defenses, taking on optional side missions and extracting after surviving successive waves. The four classes, Assault, Breacher, Marksman and Medic, give squads clear roles, and when three teams converge on the same objective it becomes the most chaotic, cinematic thing the series has ever done. It is also the mode with the most obvious room to grow. Versus is more traditional, 4v4 Team Deathmatch and Conquest on symmetrical maps, but the new movement makes it feel fresh, and on Series X it runs beautifully. The one cloud is cheating, which has been reported in the opening days, concentrated on PC; The Coalition’s anti-cheat needs to tighten quickly if Versus is to have the long life it deserves.
Verdict
Gears of War: E-Day is the game The Coalition has been building toward since it inherited the series. It goes back to the beginning and finds what was lost along the way: the fear, the intimacy of a squad under pressure, and a city worth mourning. It surrounds all of that with the best combat Gears has ever had and the most impressive technical work on Xbox Series X. The open districts are padded with too many Hardcase pings, and the biggest Locust deserved to fight back with more personality, but those are the flaws of an ambitious game, not a timid one. Horde Siege, meanwhile, is a reason to keep playing long after Kalona has fallen.
Play it if you have ever loved Gears, or if you never quite understood why other people did, because this is the clearest argument the series has made for itself in 20 years. Play it with a friend on the couch if you possibly can. Skip it only if cover shooters have never been your language, because E-Day makes the case for them as well as the genre ever will.
