A Return to Emergence Day
There’s a reason the Gears of War series has had two decades of staying power. When the original game was released in 2006, it premiered some of the most refined third-person cover shooting mechanics gamers had ever seen.
It was fast-paced and gritty, but the burly bros that players spent the game with had heart, despite their penchant for ultraviolently dismembering mutant monstrosities. Gears instantly became a flagship brand for Microsoft’s gaming division, shifting from original developer Epic Games to an in-house studio eventually renamed The Coalition, after the franchise.
Later games like Gears of War 4 and Gears 5 muddled the story, introducing strange familial links between human characters and the mutant Locust leaders. The series’ popularity may have waned since its inception, but hardcore fans clung steadfast to the original story and gameplay style they fell in love with.
That’s probably why The Coalition development team chose to set its new game, Gears of War E-Day, at the beginning of the timeline – it’s a prequel to the 2006 original, exploring how important characters survived the titular E-Day, when the subterranean monsters initially emerged to attack the surface world of Sera.
To its credit, E-Day’s story largely rights the ship, bringing back the band of brothers vibe and grimdark tone that defines the Gears of War series in popular culture. But this uneven sequel is bloated with a bevy of collectibles that sometimes slowed my personal progression to a crawl, and it’s missing any new gameplay hooks that might truly reel me in. This is a highly competent action game that will almost certainly make series veterans happy, but it’s no return to the glory days of Xbox 360 exclusives.
Campaign and Narrative
Gears veterans will already have at least a surface-level understanding of what happens during Emergence Day, the cataclysm that kicks off the events of the series. In the wake of wrapping up a nearly century-long resource war just weeks before the events of this game, amid a mixture of merriment and mourning, the Locust invade and the exhausted military is caught off guard.
When sinkholes simultaneously open up in the largest cities and mutants rise to attack the populace, the good guys are already on the back foot. In the campaign, series regulars Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago are joined by newcomers Jacob Reyes and Mags Carter – simply because they were all having drinks in the same bar when E-Day began to unfold. At least building the game around up-to-four-player co-op is a retro return that’s unequivocally good and fits the series.
This crew links up with a central military outpost to become Bravo squad, and from there the story revolves around staunching the wound: skirmishing with the Locust threat to hold down key locations, aiding supply lines, evacuating civilians and more. Fenix and friends learn about the mutants for the first time, and the budding realization that the Locust swarm is much smarter than the brass initially thought frames the main crew as hauntingly behind the curve.
The canon dictates that this isn’t a story where the good guys win, but players persist regardless. It’s a delightfully dark narrative with just a dash of hope. E-Day may not be a scary game, but it is full of dread and despair – if the original Gears games didn’t exist, the mutated horde would feel like the truly unbeatable threat they’re presented as here.
There’s a difference between traipsing through the ruins of civilization and actively watching it come undone, and E-Day instills in the player a tiny fragment of that existential horror the main characters must feel when they see entire city blocks plunge into the earth. Balancing this type of story with the hulking power fantasy of the moment-to-moment gameplay is no simple task, but it’s probably what The Coalition nailed the hardest here.
Pacing and Exploration
Between linearly navigated action setpieces and grungy boss fights, E-Day’s five-act campaign sets players loose on large swathes of wide-open terrain. There are key objectives to complete that move the narrative along, but your squad has free rein over when and how to approach these missions.
E-Day is not meant to be completed at a breakneck pace. There are literally hundreds of collectibles tucked away in corners throughout the world, and while many of them simply serve as set dressing for lore hounds, others are important arsenal upgrades you’re not going to want to miss out on.
Making sure your weapons and armor are in tip-top shape is an exercise in tedium, especially since story missions won’t take you around the entire level. You’ll have to double back toward the same brown-gray city streets over and over again if you don’t want to chance missing out on a cool new mod for your shotgun or grenade launcher. Walking around empty streets for five minutes after wiping out the nearby Locust threat is boring, there’s no two ways about it.
To be fair, nearby upgrades do get marked on the map once you’re within proximity of them, which usually saves time. But in some cases, those delectable weapon mods are locked behind areas that are inaccessible without completing certain side objectives or main missions, and there’s no blatant tell whether these are accessible now or later. Looping around a building half a dozen times looking for an entrance that doesn’t yet exist is infuriating.
It’s no surprise that the best and most memorable parts of E-Day take place in linear environments, like a spooky forest clearing after a helicopter crash or a winding series of Locust tunnels. These set pieces are action-packed and never caused me to worry about missing out on some important pickup – it’s go time all the time, and E-Day hits its stride when it feels like a fast-paced battle for survival.
The game is at its best when players don’t have to worry about hoovering up loot – stick me in a scripted action sequence with a Gnasher shotgun and some grubs and let’s get on with the carnage already.
Combat and Gameplay Innovations
E-Day excellently modernizes the Gears gameplay formula, mixing stellar graphics and sound design updates with increased cover shooting fluidity to make each warzone feel more immersive.
The insectoid Locusts look more grotesque than ever as they gorge upon human flesh, their leathery skin contrasting with their sharp, wet maws. It’s satisfying to shred through them with high-powered rounds – the meaty crunch of a mutant’s head is the perfect auditory reward for putting down a threat. The basic foundation of Gears has always been constructed around guts and gore, so it’s reassuring that this has been done well.
My favorite gameplay update alters the way cover works, allowing Fenix and friends to lay nearly prone behind small boxes, guardrails and other low cover. If players hide behind a piece of rubble that gets partially destroyed, the characters will automatically seek cover by sinking lower – the animation is fluid and doesn’t interrupt gameplay at all. Eventually, I stopped noticing when this happened altogether, but it’s an appreciable change that makes trading gunfire and explosions feel more natural.
Some of the other changes to the cover system are a bit more gimmicky. There’s a new slide that helps players close distance by exploiting gaps under trucks, but I had mixed success getting it to work consistently in the heat of battle. The new and improved mantling system still feels clunky, and I ended up frustrated more often than not when I routinely attempted to climb Fenix-height walls that just couldn’t be interacted with.
One particularly noteworthy change: Rapidly bouncing back and forth between different cover positions has been completely removed, which will likely be devastating for multiplayer vets who have honed their skills across two decades. That’ll no doubt be a controversial decision, but I think it’ll make one of the game’s core modes more accessible – and make E-Day an easier jumping-on point for folks who have never played Gears before.
Yes indeed, the formula has been refined and gameplay is more fluid than ever before. Combat is frenetic, horde mode has been scaled up. Overall, E-Day features an absurd amount of content to tear into.
But I’m still left looking for something that isn’t here – a bigger shakeup in the gameplay formula. Something that might show me Gears of War isn’t trapped 20 years in the past. Whereas Gears was the major third-person shooter innovator when it was first released, it now feels like bog-standard genre fare after decades of cover shooters that have adopted what the series originally pioneered.
I’m left wishing there were more ways to interact with the environment and fewer invisible walls around holes in the ground. Perhaps E-Day would’ve been better off introducing a new slate of creative weapons indicative of its fresh postwar time period. I’m not sure what the missing piece is, but E-Day often feels like rote repetition of the games that came before it, leaving me as hollowed out as the ground beneath Bravo squad’s feet.
Then again, if The Coalition wants to return to the beginning of the timeline – Emergence Day – perhaps an evolving formula was never in the cards for the Gears series. I just wish I could say that this once-innovative series was able to set a new gold standard once again.
