Gears of War: E-Day Review – Back to Emergence
Rev up your Lancers, a new Gears of War game is finally here, and it only took us seven years.
Twenty years after the original, The Coalition has finally decided to tell the story of Emergence Day. Set 14 years before the first game, just after the Pendulum Wars end, Gears of War: E-Day opens with a young Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago grieving their best friend and brother, Carlos. With the war finally over, they had the unfortunate idea that they’d earned a moment to breathe and a few drinks. Halfway through their beers, screeches erupt outside, and it’s like Marcus and Dom never left the battlefield.
Did The Coalition manage to revive the IP in triumphant fashion? Safe to say, yes.
Gears Goes Horror
Assuming it’s the UIR again, the Bravo Squad, consisting of Marcus and Dom and their new COG friends from the bar, Mags and Lucas, head out to investigate. To their and everyone else’s surprise, Kalona has a new enemy, one literally from below the ground: the Locust.
The first act feels like something out of the Resident Evil franchise, full of gore, dread, and genuine chills. You start in a leather jacket, armed with nothing but a pipe, smashing your way through wretches across Kalona until you reach the Kalona Police Department, which also felt reminiscent of the Resident Evil 2’s RPD. Some of my favorite cutscenes take place in KPD, and the way the game reveals the Drone and its other villains makes Act 1 the high point of the campaign.
Bravo Squad
As for their new friends, Mags Carter is a former Gear who reluctantly picks up the rifle again, while Lucas Reyes is a green communications officer who is desperate to impress Marcus and Dom.
Even so, they are decent additions to the squad. Mags had already left the army and was working at Kalona’s Imulsion refinery. She’s blunt and clearly tired of war before this one even starts. She also gets some of the coolest lore moments, like showing the Bravo Squad how to seal up an emergence hole with a grenade. Lucas is a textbook cadet with a fun fact for every situation. Mags is constantly cutting him down for it, and this is where a lot of the game’s humor comes from. Lucas is a bit flat for most of the campaign, but a moment late in the game finally builds out his arc. I just wish it had come sooner.
Still, both of them often end up overshadowed, because the heart of the game is Marcus and Dom. Marcus is carrying more from the war than he lets on, and Dom is ready to leave COG and go back to Maria and the kids. Gears of War: E-Day forces them together and shows how the bond that we cherished in the original trilogy was formed. By the end, they are no longer two men grieving the same person. They are brothers.
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A City Falling Apart
Fortunately, the campaign retains much of its rawness through the first four acts. You walk through a semi-open world, which improves and builds upon its predecessor from Gears 5, and adds some interesting side quests and collectibles with Locust spread across the map to keep you engaged and experience the demolition of Kalona in real time. This is until you make your way underground and see the Locust’s hideout for yourselves to grasp the gravity of the situation. Bravo Squad then resurfaces to a Kalona that the Locust have leveled in just three days, a city that had survived about 80 years of war.
Each act keeps raising the stakes, and the boss fights are a highlight. The first Brumak fight outside the City Hall is a great early showcase of what follows. You’re fighting a giant beast that isn’t shy about charging straight at you or mauling you with its chain from a distance.
That makes it all the more disappointing that the final act feels rushed. Big moments come and go without room to breathe, and the final boss lacks the scale and menace that I expected. It was just too easy. Still, Act 5 isn’t a letdown per se. What it gets wrong in pacing and spectacle, it partly makes up for with some of the strongest character moments in the game, and doesn’t damage the story The Coalition set out to tell at all.
NNICEE!
Even when the story rarely falters, the gameplay never does. The new movement shows up right away. For the first time, Gears can jump and slide, and it feels oddly familiar, yet so refreshing. The guns are punchy, responsive, and every weapon has real weight behind it. A larger open world means more hard cases tucked around it, which help you unlock mods, adding even more variety to the gunplay. The exploring really does pay off.
My favorite new weapon has to be the Incinerator. You charge it up, and instead of pellets, it spits out burning Imulsion that lights up anything in your way. The Breechshot is a close second, mostly because of the axe attached to it. Mauling a Drone with that axe was sometimes more satisfying than chainsawing with the Lancer.
The only complaint I have is that the developers were too generous with the Supply Caches. Even on Insane, I never ran out of Longshot ammo, so I stuck to it, which felt like a cheat code. A little more scarcity would have pushed me more to experiment with the full arsenal and make it even more challenging.
All of the new additions translate perfectly into Versus and Horde Siege. The new movement took a couple of matches to get used to, but it settled in quickly. Wall-bouncing has been toned down, though you can still pull something of the sort off, and Gnasher is still as fun and dominant as you remember it being. With larger, objective-driven runs, Horde Siege is possibly the biggest upgrade to multiplayer and plays out really well. I believe with the new update, multiplayer will only get better from here.
Built to Show Off
E-Day is one of the best-looking, if not the best-looking game I have ever played on Xbox. Watching these buildings crumble around you, and the variety of setpieces never gets old. I often found myself in awe, taking pauses, and taking screenshots. On Series X, it offers a 30 FPS quality mode, a 40 FPS balanced mode, and a 60 FPS performance mode. I hit some frame drops in balanced mode, mostly in Act 2, but the game felt largely consistent and smooth while playing on the 30 and 60 fps modes. There is also a 120 FPS performance plus mode, which washes out the colors a lot, but it works well for multiplayer with little to no frame drops.
It also sounds as good as it looks. Every gun sounds meaty, and the Lancer revs sound exactly like it did in the original. The score knows when to go hard and when to back off. When you kick off a big fight, metal riffs and pounding drums take over, but in the quieter stretches it pulls back to mournful strings, and walking through what’s left of Kalona hits harder. The classic chime near collectibles was also a great decision and throwback.
Full Circle
After 20 years of hearing about Emergence Day in all of the Gears game, actually living through it in Gears of War: E-Day hits different. It fills a lot of gaps in the lore, and made me look at Marcus and Dom differently. After the credits rolled, I redownloaded the original trilogy and am looking forward to play it with all that in mind.
If you’re a longtime fan, you would love Gears of War: E-Day. If you’ve never played a Gears game, this might be the perfect place to start. It’s where everything begins, and it’s the best the series has felt since the original trilogy.
Pros
- Best storytelling since the original trilogy
- The best gunplay the series has ever had
- Looks and sounds fantastic
Cons
- Underwhelming final boss
- New characters overshadowed
Gears of War: E-Day was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.
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