TL;DR: Gears of War: E-Day’s campaign turns a prequel with no surprises about who survives into a tense, emotional story, backed by superb combat, a brilliant arsenal and the series’ best level design in years. Unreliable AI revives and occasional frame drops hold it back slightly, but this is Gears at its best.

 

Prequels carry a built-in handicap that most studios pretend doesn’t exist. You already know who survives, you already know how the war goes, and you already know that Marcus Fenix will eventually end up in a prison cell waiting for Dom to come get him out. Gears of War: E-Day leans into that handicap instead of trying to dodge it. The Coalition’s new campaign takes the series back to Emergence Day, the moment the Locust tore up through the crust of Sera, and sets it fourteen years before the original 2006 game. What I found most impressive is that it rarely treats its foreknowledge as a problem to solve.

Instead, it uses what you already know as a source of dread, letting you watch characters stumble into a nightmare they can’t possibly understand yet. This review covers the full story campaign, both solo and in co-op. Versus and Horde Siege weren’t available for review ahead of the October 6, 2026 launch, so multiplayer will need its own verdict once the servers are live.

A war ends, and a worse one crawls out of the ground

The setup is smartly understated. Marcus and Dom are wrapping up a ceremonial tour honouring their service after the 79-year Pendulum Wars finally grind to a halt, and both men are trying to work out who they are when there’s nobody left to shoot. Marcus wants to sign back up and hopes his best friend will follow. Dom has a wife, Maria, and two young kids who’ve been growing up without him, and he’s ready to go home. That small, human disagreement does a lot of lifting, because it gives the Locust invasion something specific to destroy beyond buildings and soldiers. When the ground starts shaking, the game does a strong job of capturing both the confusion and the creeping horror of people who have no frame of reference for what’s coming. It’s the Gears equivalent of watching the opening of a disaster movie when you’ve already read the Wikipedia plot summary, except the dramatic irony actually makes it hit harder.

Bravo Squad isn’t just Marcus and Dom’s entourage

The bigger surprise is how much attention goes to the two newcomers. Marcus and Dom fall in with Mags Carter, a former Gear, and Lucas Reyes, a rookie, after all four happen to be drinking in the same bar when the tremors start, and the group is later formalised as Bravo Squad once the COG scrambles to organise a defence. In a prequel built around two established icons, it would have been easy to treat Carter and Reyes as disposable support cast, the kind of characters who exist only to die heroically or deliver exposition. E-Day refuses to do that. Both get extended, meaningful stretches of the campaign dedicated to establishing who they are, and what worked for me is that those sections feel like proper chapters rather than detours. By the later acts, I cared about what happened to them as much as I did about the guys on the box art. That’s a genuine accomplishment for a series that has sometimes struggled to make its supporting cast stick.

The Gears of War: E-Day combat loop still lands like a sledgehammer

Underneath the story, this is unmistakably Gears: snap-to-cover, roadie runs, brutal close-range executions and that heavy, deliberate rhythm that no other third-person shooter has quite managed to copy. The early hours pit you against Wretches and Hammerburst-toting Drones, which serve as a reminder of the fundamentals before things escalate. And escalate they do. As the five-act campaign moves deeper into the invasion, the roster mixes familiar faces with brand-new threats, including enormous frog-like hoppers that lob arcs of acid across the battlefield and several varieties of Heavy. The nastiest of those Heavies carries a Gorehook, a chained hook fired at medium range that usually downs you in a single hit. That enemy alone changes how you read an encounter, because suddenly staying in cover at mid-distance is no longer automatically safe. The pacing of these introductions is clever, steadily raising the stakes so that the squad’s growing panic mirrors your own tightening grip on the controller.

Every gun in the arsenal earns its slot

The weapon lineup is where E-Day really shows off. The Gnasher and the Lancer are present and correct, and the game includes both the original bayonet Lancer and the prototype version with the chainsaw attached, complete with a fun little origin story for how the series’ most iconic gun came to be. Beyond the classics, the Breechshot returns from Gears of War: Judgment and quickly became one of my most dependable picks, because it offers strong range and stopping power without the clunkiness of the Longshot sniper rifle. The Incinerator blasts out a shotgun-style burst of Imulsion that melts anything in front of it, the Ripper fills the light machine gun role, and the Torque Bow is still a gloriously slow-charging, explosive-tipped gamble. The important part is that each weapon has a clear tactical identity rather than being a statistical variation on the last one. In later fights, that variety gave me real choices about how to approach a room, which is exactly what a deep arsenal should do.

Weapon Mods and Tactical Gear add depth without diluting the formula

E-Day’s main mechanical addition is its Weapon Mod and Tactical Gear system, and it’s handled with welcome restraint. Yellow Hard Cases are tucked lightly out of the way across the levels, each containing a mod such as an accuracy booster, a scope or an extended magazine, and optional secondary objectives scattered around the city of Kalona hand out the same rewards. Every weapon has four mod slots that open up as you progress, which encourages constant experimentation as you tune each gun towards the way you like to fight. I found this gave exploration a concrete purpose, because hunting for every Hard Case and clearing every side objective directly improved my loadout. Tactical Gear works on the armour side, offering squad-focused special abilities that recharge on a cooldown. More options unlock over time, but once the Stim arrived, healing me and any nearby teammates for a short window, I never felt any urge to swap it out, which suggests the other choices could use a bit more pull. Generous Supply Caches let you reshuffle weapons and mods frequently, so the system never punishes you for trying something new.

Bosses that make you sweat for the win

That freedom to reconfigure becomes essential during the mini-boss encounters and full boss fights, which are almost uniformly excellent. Like the regular enemy roster, they blend returning threats with new ones, and the best of them are tense, narrow escapes that demand smart use of your loadout and cover. What I appreciated just as much is what the campaign chooses not to do at the end. There’s no lazy finale that throws every enemy type at you again in larger numbers. Instead, the difficulty is distributed across the whole campaign, with real tests of skill along the way and plenty of quieter moments to let the loud stuff breathe. Without spoiling anything, the ending is satisfying, which is a tricky thing to achieve when the survival of the leads was never in question. It also leaves a decade of story between this and Marcus’s imprisonment, which is a lot of untouched territory for future games.

Kalona is the best Gears playground in years

Much of the campaign unfolds in Kalona, a major industrial city, and it’s a big step forward for the series’ level design. Gears 5 experimented with open areas that often felt sparse, a lot of empty ground between the interesting bits. Kalona’s battle spaces are large but packed with detail, and the freedom to move through them feels natural rather than tacked on, because there’s usually something worth investigating around the next corner. Beyond the city, the campaign visits pitch-black Locust tunnels dug beneath the streets, an Imulsion refinery with a genuinely ominous atmosphere, and calm mountaintops that offer a striking contrast to the carnage below. Optional hidden objects come with readable details that sketch out a society that had just started to recover from nearly eight decades of war before the Locust arrived and flattened it in days. It’s the kind of environmental storytelling that rewards curious players without forcing lore on anyone who just wants to keep shooting.

Gears of War: E-Day performance and the AI problem

E-Day is a gorgeous game, but it isn’t flawless on a technical level. On Xbox Series X, there are infrequent but noticeable frame rate hitches even in Performance Mode, which is frustrating in a shooter where timing matters this much. Quality Mode runs at 30fps, and given the hiccups already present in Performance Mode, I’d steer clear of it until a patch or two smooths things out. The more irritating issue is squad AI when you’re downed. Allies will sometimes stand right beside you without picking you up, wander off, or fail to reach you at all while you crawl and mash to stay alive, and a Heavy finishing you off in that situation feels cheap. It doesn’t happen constantly, but it happens often enough across a first run of roughly 15 to 18 hours to be a recurring annoyance. The simplest workaround is co-op, which supports four players online or two-player split-screen on a single Xbox, and human partners make the campaign better regardless. Still, solo players deserve teammates who actually remember the revive button exists.

Who should play Gears of War: E-Day?

Long-time fans are the obvious audience, and this campaign is clearly built with them in mind, from the Lancer’s origin to the returning Breechshot to the fresh perspective on Marcus and Dom’s friendship. That said, the prequel setting makes it a reasonable entry point for newcomers too, since it starts at the very beginning of the Locust war. Anyone who enjoys cover shooters with real weight and a story that takes its characters seriously will find plenty here. Co-op players get the best version of the experience, both for the fun of shared carnage and because it sidesteps the unreliable AI. Players who mainly buy Gears for Versus or Horde should hold off judgement until those modes have been tested on live servers.

Verdict

Gears of War: E-Day pulls off something prequels rarely manage, giving real emotional stakes to characters whose fates are already sealed. Marcus and Dom gain new depth through the pull between duty and family, while Mags Carter and Lucas Reyes earn their place as characters worth caring about. The combat is as punchy as the series has ever been, backed by a varied arsenal, an escalating enemy roster and consistently strong boss fights, while the Weapon Mod and Tactical Gear system adds customisation without disrupting the core rhythm.