Growing up, my family didn’t have much money, which meant getting into video games like my classmates did was difficult. My four siblings and I had to pool all our savings to buy an Xbox 360 in 2012, but we didn’t have much left over for games. However, at the time, you could go to Blockbuster here in Australia and rent a game for an entire week for only a $2 coin.
Scanning the shelves one Friday night, my older brother and I came across Gears of War 3, and that was my introduction to this beloved franchise. Playing the co-op campaign with him was one of the highlights of my upbringing, and why I was so invested in the release of Gears of War: E-Day.
Like so many players, I became attached to Marcus and Dom’s brotherhood, and Dom’s role in the Gears of War trilogy remains one of the most memorable moments I’ve experienced in gaming.
That’s why Gears of War: E-Day immediately captured my attention when it was revealed. By returning to the beginning and focusing on Marcus and Dom during the titular Emergence Day, the game’s marketing promised to give you more time with two characters whose friendship defined an entire generation of Xbox Gaming.
Additionally, Gears of War: E-Day arrives carrying a weight that few Xbox exclusives have had to bear in this generation. As the first major flagship release after the start of Asha Sharma’s much-discussed Xbox exclusives-driven “reset”, the game represents more than just the return of one of gaming’s most iconic franchises.
E-Day serves as the first real test of whether that vision can translate into a console ecosystem worth rallying around. On top of that, this game resets the Gears franchise itself.
After the divisive release of Gears of War 5 over six years ago, The Coalition decided to pivot their current “Swarm Saga” Trilogy to include a prequel, one that explores the events just before, and on the day, when the Locust first emerged from the bowels of the planet.
For longtime fans, the premise of a return to Sera with a story focused on Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago on Emergence Day is both new and nostalgic. This moment in Gears history has been present through fragmented dialogue, collectibles, and flashbacks throughout the series, and now we get to see it for ourselves.
Our review of the Gears of War: E-Day campaign was conducted with the PC version on Steam
Highs
Smart Enemy and Teammate AI
One of the biggest criticisms from previous Gears entries is how your friendly AI ranged from being alright to completely useless. Playing solo with the rest of your squad as AI, instead of having a co-op team, put you at a disadvantage during the campaign, especially on higher difficulties.
The Coalition have now refined your squad’s AI in E-Day. They’re not only much smarter, but also more tactical, able to fend for themselves while rallying behind you and supporting your decisions.
They’ll actively move out of cover when you need the space. They can lay down covering fire and decimate enemies. They even trigger executions on DBNO enemies that are crawling to others to get picked up. My favorite feature is that they’ll even draw fire from some enemies, so you’re not the only one being shot at.
On the flip side, enemy AI has also been tuned. While not on the same level as the F.E.A.R. series or The Division 2, enemies change how you approach them. They can hide behind cover so you have to seek them out, or they might even use projectiles and explosives to drive you out of yours.
There were tense moments when melee Drones, who can tackle you to the ground, would have smoke grenades thrown down by other enemies, which obscures your view before they jump-scare you as they appear in front of you.
Sitting behind the same piece of cover the entire fight becomes a liability, as Locust forces will put pressure on your position until you have to move to avoid attacks, or because your cover has crumbled away, leaving you exposed.
All of this is especially noticeable on higher difficulties, where both friendly and enemy AI become defining factors in every encounter. Your squad’s ability to mostly hold their own lets you focus on priority targets your chosen weaponry handles best, while smarter enemies ensure every push forward comes with degrees of risk.
Satisfying Sound Design and Readability
The sound design in E-Day elevates cinematic quality while also improving combat readability. As you travel through the city of Kalona, gunshots and explosions echo in the distance, filling you with dread about which force is winning.
Every weapon packs an incredible sense of weight, whether it’s the deafening crack of a Longshot round, the eye-shattering spool-up of a Vulcan, or the roar of a chainsaw as you cut through Locust Drones.
While I normally don’t use snipers in games, the Breechshot, and later the Longshot, were an absolute pleasure to use, as the sounds of hitting headshots and gore splattering everywhere were super satisfying. It reminded me of similar sound effects in Outriders, which makes sense since People Can Fly developed both that game and this one.
More importantly, the audio and sound effects act as gameplay tools to help you in battles. They provide subtle cues to help communicate information in the heat of firefights.
Landing a final killshot produces a distinct audio cuie that confirms someone behind cover is dead, and grenades emit clear warning signals from both enemies and friendlies. Even something as simple as running low on ammunition pitches the gunshots higher and hollower, until you reload.
My favorite part, though, was Marcus’s classic humorous voicelines, which both uplifted the battle and provided information. You would know if an enemy was downed versus dead, or if you were running low on ammo, just from what he was yelling out as a one-liner.
While these details are minor in isolation, together they make combat feel more responsive and readable, letting players rely on both their hearing and their sight to be more effective.
Weapons, Upgrades and Enemy Design
E-Day does a wonderful job of slowly introducing players to different enemy types, weapons, and the combat system. Early encounters in Act 1 start out intentionally straightforward, introducing players to the basic Locust Crawlers and Drones, while you are only armed with rudimentary melee tools and handguns.
As the story progresses, so do the weapons available, and the types and difficulty of enemies you face. Enemies will begin appearing with body armor and helmets, new weaponry, and specialized abilities that dramatically change both their approach and yours in each fight.
What starts as a cover-based shooting gallery gradually morphs into a series of tactical encounters where you must prioritize different targets over others. Larger heavy enemies need to be avoided and attacked from afar, snipers will prevent you from peeking too long, and enemies that summon adds need to be dropped first to prevent being bumrushed.
The Coalition smartly mirrors the enemy progression with player progression too. New weapons are introduced at a steady pace, as well as armor mods, tactical gear, and grenades. The newly introduced firearms are there to deal with certain threats.
I said before I was using the Breechshot, and then later the Longshot. The reason I made this switch was that enemies started wearing helmets, which meant one shot from the Breechshot didn’t one-shot kill them anymore, whereas the Longshot does.
On top of that, the new modding system lets you min-max certain weapons to fill different roles, or just do what you want with them. You find these mods in the battlefield in Hard Cases, or by doing side missions in certain chapters. You can use them to improve stability, increase the reload speed, change up the scopes, or even modify what the perfect reload bullets do.
Finally, Gears takes the Division 2 philosophy of enemy design, where instead of just making enemies take more damage and deal more, the diversity of abilities they have at their disposal makes each encounter fresh, depending on what enemy types are on the field.
Lows
Frustrating Bugs and Glitches
After appreciating the combat, I want to mention the fairly steady stream of bugs and glitches present throughout the campaign, mainly during combat. While most were manageable, some major ones were disruptive enough to pull me out of the experience and dampen the game's overall enjoyment.
First off, while I said your friendly AI is smart, they do sometimes glitch out on geometry, especially cover. A lot of the time, they’ll start sliding out of cover instead of staying behind, or they’ll moonwalk along mine and shove me out.
For my own combat controls, Marcus often wants to start standing up out of cover. Cover won’t always work, and Crawlers could phase through it and start attacking me. Shots and explosions also phase through, which conflicts with the reason cover exists.
Additionally, this game has the same issue as some Halo games, where the environment geometry doesn’t match the hitboxes. Enemies will be in full view of your shots but won’t take damage, as bullet holes appear floating in the air.
Perhaps the biggest annoyance is that interacting with things has a delay, or doesn’t work at all. While this is a minor annoyance during exploration, as it breaks your momentum, it completely destroys the struggle or self-revive from working, causing you to die even when you still have plenty of revives left.
I’m sure these will be fixed in future patches and updates, especially since this is a live-service game with multiplayer modes, but it made the campaign a struggle to continue through, and I’m surprised I never rage quit.
Missing the Point of a Prequel
Despite the marketing of E-Day centering on the origin story of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago, the game spends surprisingly little time developing their backstory or relationship.
Beyond combat callouts and the occasional cutscene line, Marcus and Dom rarely interact in meaningful ways. The camaraderie that defines the original trilogy is largely absent, which makes it hard to invest in their journey beyond nostalgia or seeing these beloved characters together again.
Mainly, this is due to the amount of focus given to the never-before-seen characters, particularly Mags. While some characters here are mentioned in previous games or in the books the games are based on, Mags has never been mentioned in either.
Mags is introduced as a low-ranking Gears soldier who was dishonorably discharged years ago near the end of the Pendulum Wars for reasons later revealed.
While she has a sympathetic backstory and a handful of strong scenes, I found her one of the story’s weakest characters overall, especially considering she’s a main member of your squad.
Much of her dialogue consists of shutting down jokes, making cynical remarks, or just generally bringing down the mood whenever another character injects personality into this bleak world.
Her treatment of the fourth squad member, Lucas Reyes, doesn’t help matters. He is another brand-new character not in any Gears entries, and a cadet with no combat experience who is added to your squad.
Throughout the campaign, she frequently talks down to him, dismisses every comment, and generally acts antagonistically toward one of the game’s most likable characters. It’s disheartening to see a rookie character constantly belittled during a war he was dragged into against his will, when he’s just trying to help.
Many other characters also overshadow Marcus and Dom, which undermines the reason prequels exist. However, those characters are at least humorous, enjoyable, and have great personalities, and some of them appear in previous Gears media, like Tai and Hoffman.
The resulting narrative successfully displays the chaos of Emergence Day, the creation of anti-Locust weapons, and the fall of Kalona, but rarely explores the characters who should be at the heart of it. Dom and Marcus are pushed into the background, and the emotional foundation of the original trilogy is left largely unexplored.
This would have worked for a standalone Gears game that doesn’t feature these two legacy characters, but for a game marketed as a Dom and Marcus prequel, it’s a missed opportunity.
Genre Identity Crisis
Gears 5 drew criticism at launch for introducing a semi-open-world structure to the series, where your squad traveled through large areas in a shared vehicle to reach the next objective. The Coalition seems to have taken that criticism on board, but went in the wrong direction.
Rather than doubling down on that exploration or dropping it entirely, the game mixes three different designs, which can leave the longer chapters of Acts 2-4 with bumpy momentum.
The first design philosophy is the classic Gears of War. These missions feature large combat arenas connected by mostly linear pathways, creating the tightly paced cover-shooter experience that defined the original trilogy. You move from encounter to encounter with little deviation, and these sections hone in on more cutscenes and story beats.
The second structure is closer to The Division series. Certain chapters turn Kalona into a more open environment, letting players explore the city at their own pace while completing main missions, side missions, environmental puzzles, and optional NPC encounters. These sections are also significantly longer than normal chapters and encourage players to venture off the critical path.
Finally, the third is reminiscent of a Saber Interactive game such as World War Z, Toxic Commando, or Space Marine 2. These are usually relegated to side missions, but some story missions incorporate the same structure too. Players deploy turrets, place spike-trap fortifications, and establish kill zones before surviving an onslaught of incoming enemies.
While all three types are fun on their own, the game’s structure and momentum lack cohesion because it constantly swaps between the types of game it’s trying to be. The combat and enemy encounters stay the same for the most part, but the actual navigation and objective design change with each type.
It would have been nice if The Coalition had decided to focus on just one type of game and flesh out all the systems behind that genre, so to speak, and each type gives you a window into what the game could have been.
Our Score
6.5/10 (A Promising Shooter That Never Reaches Its Potential)
Gears of War: E-Day is a game of contradictions. On the one hand, it’s the strongest the series has felt mechanically since Gears of War 3. The Coalition has delivered fantastic combat, smarter AI, progression systems that feel fun and rewarding, and sound design that crafts the franchise’s most intense battles. On the other hand, an uneven story, technical issues, and a campaign structure that experiments too much hold the overall experience back.
As a prequel centered on Marcus and Dom, there are moments when the narrative should have spent more time exploring what made the duo so memorable, though the game often chooses to broaden its focus by introducing new characters and perspectives.
During my time with E-Day, I had to play the campaign solo because finding enough players for a full co-op campaign squad was difficult, which is disappointing for a franchise whose identity has always been associated with cooperative play.
While the game remains enjoyable with AI teammates, the best moments from Gears have traditionally come with friends and family in couch co-op, like my own upbringing, but that experience is hard to replicate when the player base isn’t there.
Ultimately, Gears of War: E-Day succeeds as a great shooter but falls short of being the definitive Marcus and Dom prequel many fans, including myself, hoped for. It’s an enjoyable return to the planet of Sera, packed with spectacular combat and impressive production values. Yet, it’s also a reminder that gameplay excellence alone can’t carry a story-driven franchise.
E-Day delivers some of the strongest combat, presentation, and moment-to-moment gameplay the series has ever seen. Yet despite nailing the war, it often struggles with the very thing that should have made this prequel special, the story behind it.
For now, it stands as a game I hoped would be great but ultimately left me wanting more. I'm hoping it's enough to let the franchise survive.
Reviewed by Jack Briggs (originally published October 9, 2026)
