Gears of War: E-Day Campaign Review - Xbox Finally Has Its (second) System Seller

I'll admit, the Gears of War franchise was never my jam, not because Xbox's big, muscular, armoured-up guys fighting hordes of mutants isn't appealing or lacks emotional weight, but because I grew up in a part of the world where the original Xbox and its successor, the 360, simply weren't available.

When the world played Microsoft's iconic trio - Halo, Gears and Fable - my high school mates and I spent our time with Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft, games that were on every screen in now-ancient internet cafes.

That's why I feel Gears of War: E-Day is the perfect entry point for people like me, who never had the chance or interest to engage with Gears before. As a prequel to the entire series, it doesn't ask for any homework. So when The Coalition revealed that E-Day tackles the moment the brutal war between humans and the subterranean Locust began, I knew I had to give it a chance.

Gears of War: E-Day campaign screenshots (4K, PC)

After finishing the roughly 15-hour campaign, I can confidently say that Gears of War: E-Day thoroughly impressed me with its presentation, emotional story, great characters and mind-blowing, Hollywood-style set pieces. It also made me realise that it could be a signal for something much bigger: the return of Xbox, a company that has been trying to find its way for many years.

I believe this is one of the most important and one of the best games Xbox has released in years. It feels like a marquee exclusive the brand desperately needed. It feels like a system seller that will attract new people to the Xbox ecosystem. It feels like a premium, hard-to-ignore title that Xbox can proudly point to and say: that's why Xbox.

Story

To my amazement, Gears of War: E-Day's emotional storytelling is one of its biggest strengths, despite the corny, outdated, steroid-pumped big bad guys and bigger, badder weapons energy that the game can't escape.

Under all that heavy, blood- and mutant-tissue-soaked armour, E-Day's characters are fragile, at times completely broken. It never feels like hard themes for the sake of hard themes, either. The actors deliver genuine emotion, to the point that I got a lump in my throat a couple of times.

And while the story The Coalition presents here is pretty straightforward, the setting is a story in itself. The raw destruction of Kalona, which you witness firsthand, is genuinely a more engaging narrative thread than the "run around the city and follow orders as a good, obedient soldier" setup.

The world and missions are designed so that you revisit several locations over the two days the story spans, and watching a once beautiful piece of architecture turn to ash really made me think about all the havoc and suffering that the people of Gaza have been enduring over the last several years. Those vast, never-ending hills of rubble and concrete are almost reflected in Gears, in its own fictional way.

Some of the writing can feel a bit off, and the iconic one-liners don't always land. At one point, the game tries to provoke a reaction by killing off a character you've only met minutes earlier. Then there's the cutscene where Marcus breaks apart and Mads, the new character, briefly takes the lead of the squad, which felt really out of place. None of that took away from my overall connection with E-Day's story and characters.

The game is set in the hours before the Locust start punching through the ground and tearing the city of Kalona apart. As first responders, Marcus and Dom get into action immediately, and what follows is a rollercoaster ride that takes you across Kalona, down into the depths of the Locust's interconnected tunnels and out to the lush city outskirts as they try to save themselves and their fellow citizens.

Bravo Squad consists of Marcus, Dom, Mads and rookie Lucas. Watching them go from grabbing a round of beers at a local pub, before it all goes to shit, through several heavy moments was a magnificent experience right up until the credits rolled. They're there for each other; they jump into the mouth of horror, and they sometimes make hard decisions, like stepping back when their chances are slim, even if doing nothing means watching people get gruesomely murdered.

It made me understand why Gears is such an incredible franchise, with millions of die-hard fans around the world. Marcus and Dom, the iconic duo whose reveal at the Xbox Showcase 2024 was a real tearjerker for fans, are a truly special partnership. Some of their little chats about old battles, or the families they cherish so much, went over my head, but as a prequel, E-Day doesn't need me to have been there. I could almost feel their bond through the monitor. I'm sure we all have a special person in our lives with whom a single look or word says more than a 20-minute conversation.

Gameplay

I've seen several claims that this is the best Gears of War has felt since the original game. I can't back that up, since I've never played the first Gears, but I can say without a doubt that E-Day feels incredible to play.

The movement is purposefully heavy. You feel every step Marcus takes in his bulky armour. Rolling away from fire into cover or jumping down from a height is like watching a big truck slam into something at full speed. It's impactful and has real weight, without feeling cumbersome or sluggish to control.

A lot of this is thanks to the close, over-the-shoulder third-person perspective. You're up close and personal with Marcus and can almost feel that weight as you move. I've felt something similar in God of War (2018), one of my favourite games of all time, so I guess that explains the praise I'm singing here.

I wasn't blown away by the weapon feel, though. Apart from the iconic Gnasher shotgun, which hits as hard in face-to-face encounters as its name suggests, the weapons were a mixed bag. The Mark 2 Lancer assault rifle, the other signature Gears weapon, felt a bit lightweight and lacked a proper punch. I did enjoy cutting Locust into pieces with the chainsaw attachment, whose origin story we get to see in E-Day. It simply never got old. The sound of the chainsaw, the blood splattering over the screen and Marcus's scream make you want to scream "LET'S GOOOO!" back at the screen, no matter how daft that would look.

I mostly stuck to the Longshot sniper rifle, which one-shots regular Locust grunts, and the Ripper, which I, well, ripped off a Locust. It's an assault rifle that ramps up its fire rate the longer you hold the trigger, which feels incredibly fun and powerful. It's especially satisfying when you finish a kill with a headshot, which produces that classic squash sound and tells you that you've just turned a Locust's brain to mush.

There are plenty of Locust variants to kill. Regular grunts with shotguns, snipers and assault rifles are the ones you'll be dealing with most, but on top of that you'll shoot flying balloons that spawn globs firing deadly toxic darts, huge frog-like monsters spewing green acid, another big variant lobbing mortar shells at you, and boomers with massive weapons reminiscent of something from Doom. They also have names like Gorehook, which would be an awesome name for a death metal band, I can't lie.

If I had to name my biggest complaint with the gameplay, it's that you often return to the same locations. I visited the large bridge connecting two islands three or four times during the campaign. Each visit was a totally different scenario, with a different time of day and level of destruction, but it's still the same level, and it had gone a bit stale by the time I fought the final boss on that very bridge.

Speaking of the final boss, I won't spoil much, but this is probably one of the most disappointing boss fights I've seen in a AAA game in a while. E-Day spends a fair amount of time building towards it. It presents the boss as a brutal villain called The Impaler, since he impales and brutally murders people, only to give you the most boring, bullet-spongy fight in the entire game. If E-Day hadn't been special all the way up to that point, this fight alone would have dropped the score by half a point, or even a full one. It's that bad.

Visuals and Performance

Gears of War: E-Day is a crowning audiovisual achievement. The only Xbox game this generation that arguably looks better is Hellblade 2, but E-Day delivers its visuals on a much grander scale.

As I said earlier, the city of Kalona is the real star of the story, and a lot of that translates to the visuals. What starts as an industrial city with neon signs, hanging trains and a massive bronze supersoldier statue ends up as a pile of rubble, dust and grey. All of that happens in just two days, and the level of destruction you witness is truly remarkable, unlike anything I've seen in video games.

The game knows it, too, and does its best to give you stunning vistas during helicopter rides and visits to the city outskirts.

It constantly puts you in front of this destruction. You'll watch entire buildings crumble under the grasp of Locust monsters, city blocks swallowed by massive E-holes and the whole city tremble as the invaders drill beneath it.

The destruction, the level of detail and some of the most impressive lighting of this generation make E-Day proper eye candy. It's one of the most stunning games I've seen so far, neck and neck with Resident Evil Requiem.

Part of that is down to Unreal Engine's MegaLights system. E-Day is one of the first AAA games to implement it, and it's apparent immediately. The number of light sources on screen in some areas is jaw-dropping, and it made me realise that until you see such tech in action, you aren't quite aware of how much further developers can push visual fidelity.

All of this eye candy comes at a cost, though. I had severe performance issues throughout the campaign, to the point where I had to keep restarting the game after half an hour of play because the FPS would drop to single digits.

I played on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Nvidia RTX 4080 with 32GB of RAM, with the game installed on a Samsung EVO NVMe SSD. Things became playable with the High preset, frame generation and DLSS at Quality at 4K, but the notorious stutter that plagues almost every Unreal Engine game was sadly constantly present, even though the game was maintaining nearly 100 FPS.

I also tried the Ludicrous preset with DLSS on Balanced and Performance, which got me to around 60 FPS, but the drops every half hour still forced me to restart, so I stuck with High. I tested this several times, and my GPU always had enough VRAM, with no bottleneck anywhere in the hardware, so I can't say what caused the issue.

There were some game-breaking issues too, like the infinite loading during Chapter 2. I fixed it by reloading the chapter and didn't see a similar problem for the rest of the campaign.

It's a shame that the game has so many issues in this department, since performance is something I hold in high regard, and it's the thing that affects my review scores the most. I was surprised, in a negative way, that The Coalition, one of the most prominent Unreal Engine developers, couldn't squeeze out more performance and reach a higher FPS without reaching for frame generation and DLSS.

Conclusion

Gears of War: E-Day is an audiovisual marvel that feels like an Unreal Engine tech demo, backed by a story with just enough emotion, and incredible, Hollywood-style set pieces, to make your jaw drop.

It has its share of problems, from repeated locations to an underwhelming final boss and some surprisingly poor PC performance, but the good outweighs the bad here, and around 90 per cent of my time with it was a remarkable experience.

The new and returning characters work great too, using Emergence Day to create one of the best Gears campaigns you'll ever witness.

It's a game Xbox desperately needed, a prime marquee console exclusive that may help turn the tide in its favour.