Gears of War is one of our favorite franchises, and we’ve spent a lot of time with the games as well as the books ever since the original Gears of War arrived on Xbox 360 in 2006. Several sequels, a prequel, a new generation of Gears games and plenty of multiplayer along the way, and we’re now back to the beginning. Fourteen years before the events of the original game, Marcus and Dom are younger soldiers who find themselves caught in the first Locust attack. This is Emergence Day, the day humanity discovers that something enormous has been living underneath its feet.
E-Day doesn’t slowly build towards the invasion, w3’re thrown straight into it. The city is being destroyed around us, people are running in panic, buildings are collapsing and enormous creatures with claws, sharp teeth and guns are coming out of the ground. We push through destroyed roads and broken buildings while trying to understand what the hell is happening. There are people dying around us, others desperately trying to escape and soldiers attempting to organise some kind of response to an enemy nobody was prepared for. The whole thing feels surreal and insanely eerie, and that feeling stays with the game almost all the way to the end.
The latest Gears game may be scary, but that’s just one of the reasons why we love it so much. The atmosphere is one of the strongest things about the entire campaign. We know where this story eventually leads, but that doesn’t make Emergence Day feel any less horrifying. These people don’t know what’s happening. They don’t know what the Locust are, where they came from or how many of them are coming. We’re discovering the invasion at the same time they are, and the devs do an outstanding job of keeping us inside that chaos.
The best Gears story yet
For us, this is the best Gears story so far. There are a few moments where the writing gets a little cliché, and parts of the ending aren’t particularly difficult to predict, but the performances sell almost everything. Marcus and Dom are younger here, and watching their relationship further develop during something as horrific as Emergence Day works like a charm. We already know these characters and we know what they eventually become, so even small moments between them carry more weight than they probably would in a completely new story.
A lot of the storytelling also happens without somebody standing around explaining what we are supposed to feel. The facial animations, voice acting, sound effects and visual effects scream AAA production. We see the destruction around us, but we also hear it. Buildings collapse, people scream, weapons go off and the Locust make all kinds of horrible noises somewhere nearby. With a good pair of earphones and the graphics turned up to Ultra, E-Day becomes ridiculously immersive. You not only see the chaos, you feel like you’re standing in the middle of it, trying to figure out where to go while the world around you is falling apart.
And bloody hell, this might be the best-looking game that has dropped into our laps this half year or so. The environments, lighting, destruction, character models and enemy animations can all look absolutely ridiculous, especially during the larger battles where the game throws everything at us at once.
We played most of the campaign on what we’d consider a fairly modest gaming PC these days: an i5 paired with an RTX 4060 Ti. We played at 1440p with everything set to Ultra, using DLSS and Frame Generation, and most of the time we were comfortably above 60 FPS. We also tried the game on a much better setup with an RTX 5060 Ti and on a considerably weaker machine with an RTX 3050, and the experience was surprisingly solid across the different configurations.
Considering how good the game looks, we were expecting our 4060 Ti to start screaming at some point, but it survived the whole thing. The PC version has plenty of graphics options to play around with, including DLSS, AMD FSR, Frame Generation, ray-traced lighting, reflections and shadows, and an integrated benchmark. We obviously can’t speak for every possible PC configuration, but across the machines we tested, E-Day felt like a well-optimised game rather than another giant release that demands the most expensive hardware available.
But beautiful doesn’t necessarily mean good, especially if the gameplay is terrible. Fear not, dear reader, the gameplay is great.
Gears, only faster
If you’ve played a Gears of War game before, you already know the drill. It is still a third-person, cover-based shooter built around snapping behind cover, popping out to shoot, moving from one piece of cover to another and trying not to get turned into a bloody stain by the overwhelming Locust. Everything feels much more fluid. Movement is faster and more reactive, and Marcus can sprint, jump and move through the environments with much less of the old stiffness. The campaign still has plenty of fairly linear sections where you are constantly moving forward through destroyed streets, buildings and corridors. Being able to move quickly between pieces of cover makes those areas much more enjoyable to navigate.
The dynamic cover system now snaps behind almost any suitable piece of cover. Get behind something low and Marcus can drop down onto the ground, crawl or awkwardly squeeze himself into position before popping out to fire a couple of shots. This is anything but a small thing, and we can’t believe how long we had to wait for it. When surrounded by enemies and trying to move quickly, having the cover system respond properly makes a huge difference.
There are also larger areas where the campaign gives us a little more freedom to explore. These aren’t massive open-world zones, but they’re big enough to make us look around rather than simply follow the obvious path. We can find collectibles, optional objectives and extra things to investigate, and we ended up doing every single one. Not because we needed the rewards, but because we wanted to stay in this world for as long as possible. If not else for the bosses, just look at these beasties!
The Locust
The Locust don’t always behave like targets kindly waiting to be shot at, far from it. Their movements can be surprisingly unpredictable, and they’ll retreat, reposition, surround us and suddenly appear from somewhere we weren’t expecting. They can move quickly, and their animations make them look less like soldiers following a perfectly organised battle plan and more like a bunch of enormous, rabid monsters that have been let loose in the city. We can hear them before we see them, and those screeches and screams coming from somewhere nearby can be enough to make us stop for a second and check every corner.
No need for jump scares here. Our heart attacks come from having something nasty moving around somewhere in the darkness, making sounds that seem to have crawled out of the deepest hellish holes. Once several different enemy types are attacking from different directions, we’re forced to move, find another position, deal with whatever is getting too close and keep an eye on what the enemies are doing. We played the game after work. We started tired and sleepy, but after just five minutes in the game, sleep was the last thing on our mind. That’s how much power the gameplay in Gears of War: E-Day has.
The guns feel fantastic
The familiar Gears arsenal is back, but the guns feel heavier and have more impact. The sound design helps enormously here. Of course, shooting a Locust feels wonderfully good, but shooting one with a weapon that sounds like it weighs twenty kilos and then watching blood and chunks of whatever used to be attached to that Locust fly across the room feels even better.
There is also a weapon and armour modification system built around cases that we can find during the campaign. These can provide statistical improvements for things such as melee attacks, critical hits, reloads and weapon stability. None of this completely changes the way we play, but it does let us build things around the kind of combat we prefer.
What we liked more than the actual numbers was the way some of the upgrades changed the look and feel of our equipment. We could make our loadout more suited to aggressive play, improve things that we were already relying on and occasionally find an upgrade that made us want to experiment with a weapon we’d been ignoring.
There is also tactical gear and an ultimate ability system. Again, this isn’t something that completely reinvents Gears, but it motivates us to think about different strategies during larger encounters. Depending on what we’re carrying, we can heal ourselves or teammates, use a drone to help locate enemies and generally make the battlefield a little more manageable when things get out of hand.
Playing Marcus and Dom alone
For this first part of our review, we played just the campaign, and we played it solo in its entirety, mostly because we couldn’t find a buddy willing to jump in with us, despite E-Day supporting co-op. It’s important to note that we never, not for a minute, felt like we were missing half of the experience.
The AI companions do a pretty good job. They shoot, take cover, move with us and help during fights without constantly getting in the way. There were a few occasions where we were waiting a little too long for somebody to come and revive us, but, hey, we’ve all been in co-op games where our buddy is too busy protecting his own backside to notice that we’re lying on the floor bleeding out.
Gears of War: E-Day takes us back to the moment everything went to hell, and the whole experience does more than just play with our nostalgia. The campaign looks incredible, sounds even better and the faster, smoother combat makes shooting enemies feel great, just like it did in the good old days. We finished every optional objective and did our best to find every collectible because we didn’t want to leave this world. We wanted another street, another fight, another ruined building to explore. It’s great fun, and we couldn’t recommend it more to you!
Our score: 10/10
- Developer: The Coalition
- Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
- Genre: Third-person cover-based shooter
- Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S
- Campaign: Single-player / 2–4 player co-op
- Engine: Unreal Engine 5
- Reviewed on: PC PC testing: RTX 4060 Ti, RTX 5060 Ti, RTX 3050
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