Gears of War: E-Day Review – Another Cog in the Machine

Gears of War: E-Day promises a return to the basics for the franchise, and does just that. When it’s at its best, the shooting is intense, chaotic, and rewarding. The prequel setting capitalizes on Marcus and Dom’s budding bromance to show the toll the Locust War takes on them right from the start. It also stumbles, offering a few too many prequel tropes while failing to make any interesting mechanical choices with the setting.

Marcus and Dom are sitting in a bar, remembering Dom’s brother, their comrade who died in combat. Marcus and Dom know each other and care for each other, but we haven’t found ourselves in the familial bond they have in Gears of War. The invasion kicks off with a bang, and they are quickly fighting in the streets with the new characters, Mags and Lucas.

Marcus and Dom’s relationship will build, with the emotional impacts of lost friends and the unknown fate of anyone outside of Kalona City. The opening act is when the Locust invasion explodes out of nowhere, plunging the city into immediate chaos. The death and violence are swift, and the fight for survival adds a slight survival horror feel as you roam the city seeking shelter, survivors, or anything else you can find.

Unfortunately, the new ideas offered by the E-Day setting are traded in for a classic Gears experience. Quickly, Marcus gains a scar on his face, grenades destroy E-Holes, and the Lancer has a chainsaw on it. Not only is it uninspired to have the Cog Army figure out 95% of its strategy in the battle against the Locust within the first 48 hours of what would be a long war, but it also takes away the freshness in the mechanics.

You are quickly suited up in armor, taking orders from command, and blasting your way through the Locust army on a series of missions. During the traditional, linear sections of the campaign, this is still a ton of fun. Mowing down an overwhelming amount of enemies as they smartly push, flank, and overwhelm you in a firefight. Playing the entire campaign in split-screen co-op, not only was this great with a friend, but the split-screen experience runs smoothly and still looks incredible.

The shooting and gunplay have received small, but largely successful additions. The old-school Roadie Run is now a more conventional sprint, with full camera controls while moving. The arenas feature more verticality, with enemies or you often positioned at different elevations, changing the feel from fight to fight, keeping it fresh. There is also now a jump, which feels largely underutilized, and a sprint slide, which makes flanking far more efficient and successful.

There are two larger, open zone sections where you can take on side missions and find collectibles and weapon parts on the way. The pitch of scavenging for supplies and stumbling across other squads in the city, fighting through the chaos, is an exciting one. However the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

These sections lack something key to an engaging open-zone-style area, which is discovery. Every single objective has a giant icon on it, often blinking at you. When these side missions offer small stories and minor rewards, it’s tough to feel excited about running to another firefight. The collectibles you can find pop up giant icons when you get within a wide range of them as well. This all makes the experience feel tedious and flat, because when you’re running to each of these, you aren’t fighting Locust. Since you aren’t exactly putting an effort into finding side missions and collectibles, it feels like downtime without any purpose. These larger levels space out the firefights more than the linear sections without adding something interesting into those gaps.

As the story continues, Dom begins to grapple with the fact that his family was in another city, the capital Ephyra, during the invasion, and he has no way to reach them or confirm what’s happening in the city. While the Cog Army tells him they are safe, the destruction of Kalona and the size of the Locust forces make it clear that probably isn’t true. Marcus being there for Dom and seeing Dom’s grief in the moment is incredibly well done and paints a beautiful friendship forged through shared suffering.

The character stories, including the bits of backstory we get for Mags and Lucas, carry the narrative of E-Day. Since this is the start of a war spanning quite a few games, you can’t really have too many actual victories throughout the campaign, although the finale does put a nice bow on the end of it.

In addition to the campaign, Gears of War: E-Day also has multiplayer and a new take on Horde, Horde Siege. The competitive multiplayer is the classic 4v4 Gears formula, with some fresh-feeling modes, well-designed maps, and a finely tuned Gnasher shotgun. The firefighting, which is still mostly Gnashers, strikes a nice balance of heavily reducing wall bouncing, where you go in and out of cover rapidly to dodge shots, while adding the nice slide, which adds a fresh move to the dance. The modes encourage close-quarters combat, with fun objectives like holding a charge battery in a moving zone. It’s pretty standard fare as far as Gears multiplayer goes, but it’s a well-executed version by all measures.

Horde Siege is where a much bigger swing can be found, but it’s haunted by the same issues as the open levels in the campaign. Horde Siege uses those levels, dropping three squads of four into them, all on separate missions. You have primary objectives, like defending an area or clearing out a zone, with smaller objectives along the way. The goal is to earn weapon parts to upgrade your guns for future runs and to gain XP for your class, which also upgrades for future runs.

The last couple of Gears games, particularly Gears 5, leaned into meta progression for horde mode. You had classes and cards, earning level-ups to come in better next time. Horde Siege replicates a similar meta progression, but its impact is lessened due to the structure of the matches. The in-match progression is severely limited here. Instead of upgrading defenses over time, feeling like you are getting more powerful over the course of the match and getting upgrades for the future, it’s now primarily pointed at the next match. Because objectives are scattered, defenses are disposable and limited . You unlock squad perks during a match, but you don’t have any influence over what you get, taking away choice.

It also tries to capture the same feeling of multiple squads running into each other in the chaos of war, but the smattering of icons across the screen, the constant icons on the map, and a feed that constantly updates you on what other squads are up to just feel flat. Some mechanics also feel frustrating. After completing all of our objectives, my squad was set to extract, but a Corpse boss invaded the match. This means extraction was disabled for nine minutes while we fought the Corpser, which is a giant bullet sponge. These fights are only tough because the enemy takes very little damage. Even with the full lobby all focused on the objective, it either takes the whole amount of time or, in a few instances, fails, which means no rewards at all. It often feels tedious, especially when the only reward is a small upgrade for the next match.