As I write this, I just wrapped up my run-through of Gears of War: E-Day, start to finish. Although, I have yet to experience the full actual game.
For the review build, Gears of War: E-Day's new siege mode is disabled, as is versus multiplayer. It felt odd to me to score a game I haven't fully played yet; as such, this will be a review-in-progress pending the launch state of versus and siege mode, which I presume goes live with the game itself on October 6, 2026.
Gears of War: E-Day is something of an important game for Xbox. It carries the flag for Microsoft's return to exclusive Xbox Series X|S games, and likely has some oversized pressure upon it to deliver. We're not here to review that aspect of the product, though — only what is here sitting in front of me.
And my feelings are a bit mixed.
Gears of War: E-Day has some of the most stunning visuals I've ever seen committed to the medium, with absolutely immaculate lighting treatment, immense and meticulous city detailing, and gorgeous character work. The gunplay is also fantastic, smoothing off some of the series' rough edges with boosted mobility, without sacrificing the Gears feel.
But the overall gameplay structure does the overall game a pretty sizeable disservice in my view, preventing it from reaching its full potential.
Gears of War: E-Day review — Story, Art, and Tech
Gears of War: E-Day takes place over a decade before Gears of War 1, offering us a front-row seat to the brutal and genocidal opening to the Locust's attack on humanity.
The city of Kalona serves as ground zero for that invasion. Kalona is known as a city of science and technological progress, and was instrumental in developing the COG's weapons tech and industrial war economy during the civil war against the UIR. E-Day takes place six weeks after the UIR surrenders, and Dominic Santiago and Marcus Fenix are picking up the pieces and mourning lost friends and family.
The character work on offer in E-Day is absolutely top-shelf. The trauma of loss and the shock of the Locust invasion comes through incredibly well in every single aspect of the game's delivery. The cityscape is immaculately detailed, with interiors fully rendered with a lived-in feel, complemented by some of the best lighting I've ever seen in a video game. Well and truly, Gears of War: E-Day is at the absolute apex of Unreal Engine technological prowess, and the game deserves awards on that basis alone, most likely.
Rendering the city in so much detail really helps serve the story. Gears of War's more recent games take place in a ruined world, where the Locust have effectively already won and decimated humanity and most of its cities. For E-Day, The Coalition had to show a city that was still thriving and populated, and the horrors therein.
From the very first cutscene, The Coalition pulls no punches: this is a horror story, a war story, and a tale of survival and desperation. The COG army is decimated and blindsided, besieged by an unknown threat that they immediately underestimate as monsters without a plan, only to discover later just how smart and organized the Locust actually are.
Civilian NPCs litter the city, sometimes fleeing, sometimes in dismembered puddles on the ground. The reactions from the characters and their development throughout the game really help to elevate that sense of loss and fear — they're not the battle-hardened survivors of the original Gears trilogy. They're young, war-weary from fighting the UIR, and in some cases wholly traumatized already.
I don't want to give too much away about the story, but this very much felt like the first game in a new planned trilogy ... there were aspects of the delivery that suffered as a result. Some plot threads felt designed to be resolved in future games (or DLC?), leaving me wanting somewhat. But the fact that I am eager to learn more about this Emergence Day story arc is probably a plus. It would be far worse if I didn't care, and I find myself caring a lot about the new characters, their struggles, their past lives, and what will ultimately end up happening to them ... given that some clearly aren't present in future installments.
Gears of War: E-Day's setting, visuals, and story delivery represent its best aspects. The game's performance on Xbox Series X is top-tier, with slowdown only occurring during some particularly heavy sequences towards the end. I didn't experience a single crash, and it's great to see a modern game offer split-screen co-op in the modern age as an option.
The new characters are interesting and engaging, and finding out new layers of existing characters is also rewarding as a long-time fan. I think Gears of War: E-Day could've benefitted from leaning more into civilian-oriented side stories potentially ... but as I'm going to explain in the gameplay section, Gears of War: E-Day is let down a fair bit by its gameplay structure all up.
Gears of War: E-Day review — Campaign Gameplay
Let's get the good stuff out of the way first: this is still very much Gears of War. Everything you've loved previously about Gears is still here, and in most cases, elevated to the 11th degree.
E-Day boosts the player character's mobility by a huge amount. Sprint is now more instantaneous and on the left stick like a standard modern shooter. Cover is far more dynamic than it was previously, with the ability to take cover in lower spaces than before, making environments feel more varied and natural. You can now also climb and vault, allowing The Coalition to build on the game's verticality. Given that Kalona is a city-state with large buildings and urban environments, having these features serves the game incredibly well.
The gunplay is also very polished. Chainsaw-ing dudes in half is more rewarding than ever, with almost embarrassingly satisfying sound treatment and chunky gore physics. Watching a severed torso flip onto the floor never gets old.
There's a variety of new weapons which are also instant classics. The Locust have been scavenging the battlefields of the Pendulum wars, adapting old UIR guns with horrifyingly inhumane enhancements. As such, that satisfying M1 Garand "ping" returns from the UIR Markza, repurposed into the axe-hilted Locust Breechshot rifle, for example.
The gunplay lets itself down a bit when it comes to fighting some of the game's bigger enemies, though. Drones, wretches, and some of the earlier enemies are by far the most satisfying to fight, reacting to your bullets and even having destructible armor that makes combat feel more dynamic and modern. I'm not sure why The Coalition didn't extend this gameplay style to some of its bigger enemies, which is where I would argue it'd be far more crucial.
Indeed, in Act 1, Gears of War: E-Day starts so strongly, and I was sitting there wondering if this was going to end up being the best game Xbox ever shipped, but over time, that feeling began to unravel.
Reavers, Brumaks, and other larger enemies barely react at all to gunfire, making them feel like robots or bullet sponges — something Gears 4 was heavily criticized for. You end up just watching the enemy's health bar in some cases for at least some semblance of reactivity, instead of the visuals The Coalition's art team painstakingly worked towards. Towards the end of the game, these types of enemies become more common too, robbing the game of some of its dynamism.
Another irritating aspect of Gears of War: E-Day pertains to its open-but-not-actually-open world design, which to me smacks of rushed or changing game design priorities throughout development.
Kalona is a fully realized 3D city, with a huge variety of urban exterior and interior locations. It's a great canvas that The Coalition can build upon when designing future content, potentially both for Siege and Versus mode. The problem is, it doesn't lend itself particularly well to the campaign mode.
Gears of War: E-Day starts incredibly strongly, with a linear cinematic segment that really sets the tone for the game. Then, it opens up into this odd semi-open world structure that seemed interesting in previews, but in practice, it doesn't really reach further than the glimpses we got over the summer.
There's a map that offers the illusion of large explorable spaces, but in practice, all the segments are very linear. Even the side objectives take place in a structured way, undermining the need or desire to really explore. It felt like The Coalition tried to shoehorn in more reasons to explore by spreading weapon mods and collectibles around, but I just found this aspect of the game to be irritating and pace-breaking.
There's dozens upon dozens of weapon mods to find in the field, but half the time it'll be for weapons you don't really want to use. The game pings you with an annoying pop-up every few seconds saying "hardcase nearby," which just served as a distraction given that the reward was mostly just junk items. Even the collectibles were annoying to find, given that you had to jump through several menus then go manually searching for the item you just found from a huge list. There were more mods to find than there was gameplay canvas upon which to place them ... E-Day really would've benefitted from some kind of vendor system instead here, allowing you to buy mods at your leisure, rather than feeling forced into boring hide-and-seek gameplay every 3 minutes.
These might seem like minor gripes, but given that there's not much else "new" here on offer across the general Gears formula, they stand out a bit like a sore thumb.
It doesn't help that, as a result of the game's structure, you end up revisiting the same locations multiple times as part of the story, which felt anticlimactic and choring, particularly towards the end of the game.
The campaign does have some incredibly epic, cinematic, and deeply emotional moments — don't get me wrong. There are some fantastic sequences spread throughout the game, showcasing Emergence in all of its reptilian, subterranean horror. I just wish they'd doubled up on these moments instead of trying this odd "open" world experiment, which seems ill-conceived and poorly executed, with features that detract rather than elevate the overall experience.
Gears of War: E-Day review — Conclusion (so far)
I thoroughly enjoyed Gears of War: E-Day overall, and am already enjoying my second playthrough on a higher difficulty, but I would be lying if I said the game didn't have large issues — particularly given how easily avoided many of them could've been.
Kalona is an immaculate canvas ripe for telling epic stories. The new, horror-laden tone is absolutely the right direction for Gears of War: E-Day. The existential dread oozes throughout every character delivery, and the city design is among the best the medium has ever seen.
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The gameplay structure placed on top of it becomes the problem, that could've used a lot more iteration and forethought. It felt a bit like E-Day was originally intended to be some form of open-world, but at some point, they retreated, leaving it feeling disjointed. The "open world" exploration aspects are unrewarding and more often than not simply frustrating, and a lot more work could've gone into making boss-level enemies more dynamic and interesting to fight.
If I were to score the game based on the campaign alone, I'd probably give it an 8/10 overall — it's still incredibly fun, and the downsides are frustrating but not game-breaking. In any case, we haven't experienced the full package Gears of War: E-Day represents. We still have Siege and Versus to talk about, and it remains to be seen how fun or even functional those will be at launch. Stay tuned.
Gears of War: E-Day launches October 6, 2026, exclusively on Xbox Series X|S on console with Xbox Play Anywhere for PC, it's also coming to Steam and Xbox Game Pass.
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