This article reviews Gears of War: E-Day.

Background: Sera, Emergence, and the 20-Year Comparison

Gears of War first introduced the doomed planet Sera in the 2006 ground-breaking first title. Gears of War: E-Day is not a new world-building exercise. A rote prequel could have asked questions no one particularly cared about, but its title uses "E" for Emergence and returns to the very beginning, when the Locust first crawled out of holes to wreak havoc on humanity. In E-Day, the only thing ground-breaking is literally the ground.

The Coalition does not need to be ground-breaking here, and the hardcore fanbase does not seem to want that. In the comments and discourse around the Gears of War E-Day campaign review, one point became clear: Gears does not need to be complicated. Gears 5 tried to shake off the shackles of the dudebro machismo that defined the original trilogy, and the result was fine. E-Day turns back toward gore, provides something genuinely challenging, and tries to inject life into a floundering Xbox. The review calls out an uncomfortable truth: a successful Xbox exclusive does not really look that different from how it did 20 years ago.

That is not framed as a criticism, per se. The review's larger point is that looking back can also help the series look forward. E-Day is excellent at what it does: it is a cover shooter with Tarantino-esque comedy violence, barely held together by a plot that can be picked apart like Locust viscera in more than five minutes. But that is fun, and that is fine. The game is not here for Hugo Award-level narrative conceit. It is here for wet headshots, arcade cover shooting, and chainsaw guns that go brrr.

Development: A Campaign That Repeats Its Bridge and Fixes Its Jump

Spoiler warning: this section discusses the campaign's repeated route and the Emergence premise, not the ending.

The campaign is one pillar of the overall E-Day experience, alongside Versus and Horde Siege. The review treats Horde Siege as the real, exposed heart of Gears, so it is worth understanding how the campaign supports that structure. It keeps waist-high cover, ebb-and-flow firefighting, and braindead machismo. The bridge is an ironic touch: while the review does not want to retread too much campaign ground, the game sends players back and forth over the same bridge no less than three times.

The biggest control change is the jump button. The review says it never thought so much about a jump button, yet Gears really needed one. It sounds small fry, but cover shooters become a drag when clunky controls force certain death. In the 360 games, it felt like moving digital characters around an analogue world: Marcus moved like a rook on a chessboard, even though the floor was actually just real ground all along.

E-Day makes everyone more acrobatic, perhaps because the characters are not quite Rob Liefeld-esque steroid-addled abominations at this point. That makes climbing and mantling over cover more intuitive. Slides and rolls glue players to cover that is actually quite far away, making movement feel more cinematic and intentional. Incendiary grenades, emulsion-powered shotguns, and other fancy wares turn cover swapping into an integral part of strategy. Players cannot camp in any mode without risking getting skewered.

Latest Progress: Horde Siege Turns 2008's 50-Wave Mode into a 12-Player Siege

Horde has been a fixture of the series since it was introduced in Gears of War 2 in 2008, where it was a fairly barebones affair: fend off 50 waves of increasingly pissed-off enemies and survive. It was Gears' version of Call of Duty Zombies, and it has appeared in every game since, with varying levels of success along the way. E-Day's reinterpretation outshines them all, despite a convoluted onboarding and some janky UI.

Instead of four player-teams, or five for some reason in Gears 5, E-Day teams players up with 11 others and breaks them into units of four players each. The maps come from the open-ended areas in the campaign, which justifies their existence after they felt aggravating and a bit pointless in the story mode. They feature multiple objectives.

The mode reminds the reviewer of Destiny. Multiple fireteams zip around the map completing their own objectives while dropping in to help other squads here and there, generating a slightly buzzy, frantic energy. That becomes especially clear when a Corpser or Brumak tunnels up out of nowhere and suddenly all 12 players are forced to repel the behemoth threat before they can realistically continue their own missions.

Each squad gets to choose its own difficulty, and that scales damage dealt and received to the team. It is possible for one squad to play Allfather difficulty while another is on Rookie, both trying to take down the same cursed spider-bastard at once while having a very different experience in tandem. The review calls that a bit of engineering wizardry, and notes that it can also be activated in Campaign. Credit goes to Kate Rayner, longstanding Coalition technical director, because she and her team employ all those Unreal 5 dials and levers in an artisanal way.

The process is gamified by energy drops. The more energy a player has, the more weapons, ammo, defensive installations, or squad upgrades they can buy. Players choose a class before deployment, then spend energy to kit themselves out more as the siege continues. In 15 hours, the mode produced so many emergent moments that the reviewer was a little taken aback.

The highlight came while running to the extraction point after clearing the group's objective. Another squad was nearly wiped by a minigun-toting Grinder, and the reviewer landed a perfect headshot to splatter its brains all over concrete. A slide and a roll revived one ally. A hop over some low cover revived another. A tight corner swat turn revived the third. Then came a roadie run to the chopper with one second left before extraction, while the reviewer's own fireteam provided suppressing fire from the helicopter. The game prompted, "Enjoy the ride, Gears," while the watch recorded the moment as a cardio session.

The review says it had not experienced such multiplayer synergy since Destiny 2 days, and that is enough to keep playing into the future. The game may remain on the harddrive just for Horde Siege. After a rough day, there is no better way to blow off steam than teaming up with a group of randos, with matchmaking solid, and popping Locust heads. Between the level design, or what the review jokingly calls urban planning, and three-tier cover mechanics, Versus and Siege feel fresh enough compared to past Gears games to be worth investigating, even if someone thought all this juvenile musclebound bloodletting was behind them.

Versus: New Acrobatics Change the Old Very Fun or Very Annoying Loop

Versus is the package's tight, focused player-versus-player cover-shooting mode. Gears player-versus-player was always either Very Fun or Very Annoying, depending on how well a player was doing. The binary has been offset by the new acrobatic Gears. Leaping over insta-death pits is exhilarating. That becomes even more satisfying if a player lands, charges a Torque Bow, and takes an unsuspecting greenhorn's head across the gap while the rookie cowers in fear.

It becomes even more uniquely Gears when the bolt that pierced the rookie's head then lands in the leg of a seasoned vet who runs into his teammate and explodes both. The flip side is, of course, when it happens to you. A sweaty tryhard wall-bouncer can wipe a squad in seconds. A mistimed jump can drop a player into an instadeath pit. Running out of ammo while defending a king of the hill flavoured objective can force a player to use a disgusting gun touched exactly once in the past 35 hours of playtime.

That is part of the experience, sure, but the review still mutters "Back to Horde Siege" after chunks of its own skull decorate xX_yourmum69_Xx's shop-bought premium skin. Balance and mechanical issues make Versus harder for more casual players to enjoy.

Current Stage: A 2026 Retro-Modern Chimera Built from Familiar Parts

The same tidal nature present in the campaign maps onto the rest of the E-Day package: for everything the review wants to celebrate, there is something that just about undercuts it. Horde Siege is a phenomenal interpretation of the Gears formula, but the UI, onboarding, and pacing are a little wonky. Versus is a tight, focused exploration of player-versus-player cover-shooting, but there are balance and mechanical issues that make it hard for more casual players to enjoy. The campaign is pacy, well-designed, and fun, but it has baffling checkpoints and a couple of repetitive beats.

Gears of War: E-Day is a game of contrasts: conservative by its very nature, but with enough technical proficiency and iterative thinking to make its old-fashioned ideas feel competent and engaging. Bleeding edge graphics and 20-year-old design sensibilities drip into this bloody crucible of familiarity, and the result does nostalgia right. It is telling that a successful Xbox exclusive looks the same in 2026 as it did in 2006, but the review does not treat that as a mark against The Coalition or the retro-modern chimera it has created.

The beast stands proudly on its own two feet as a living example of how to appeal to a generation of gamers that had its cake and ate it. That is no mean feat. A copy of Gears of War E-Day was provided for this review by Xbox.