Gears of War: E-Day Review — Great Shooting Buried Under an Exhausting Campaign

Gears of War: E-Day arrives as a prequel nobody asked for, yet its combat systems argue loudly that the series still has mechanical life left in them. The cover-based shooting feels sharper than ever, with button remaps that finally let Marcus Fenix move more nimbly — run on L3, a dedicated climb button, and yes, a jump button. For players who have spent nearly two decades snapping to chest-high walls, these quality-of-life changes alone make the game feel like a revelation in the first few hours.

The problem is that those first few hours never really end. The campaign stretches past the 20-hour mark with a mission structure that rarely evolves beyond "shoot those locusts" or "survive this wave of locusts," and the narrative adds almost nothing to the lore established by the original game's opening cutscene. Multiplayer saves the package from disaster — Horde in particular feels like a smart evolution of the formula — but the solo experience is an exhausting, endless firefight that outstays its welcome, as PC Gamer's review puts it. If you are here for the shooting, you will get your money's worth; if you are here for a story worth telling, you will leave disappointed.

"Marcus Fenix used to have a jump button. Yes, the king of cover-based shooting, a man more rooted to the ground than a scarecrow, spent his youth jumping to some bits of cover."

The jump button itself is a punch‑line to E‑Day’s identity crisis. It’s the one genuine leap a title rooted in stasis has managed, yet the mission it inhabits stubbornly resists moving the franchise forward. Control tweaks—running via L3, a dedicated climb button, tighter dodge‑rolls—are genuinely solid. They wipe out the years‑old annoyance of slipping into flame instead of safety

The new weaponry reinforces that aggression. Acid attacks — whether from massive frog enemies or a new shotgun-style gun that blasts corrosive spray — flush you out of cover with terrifying speed. The Goreshot, a grappling hook that tears torsos from bodies, is gloriously over-the-top and almost makes up for the elite enemies who wield it as an instant-kill cheese tool. Classic guns get loving renovations too: the spike trap's thunk-thunk-thunk windup, the Torque Bow's doomsday drum-roll sound design, and a sniper rifle so sublime the reviewer would reach for it if ever called upon to assassinate God. The shooting is strong enough to sustain the experience — just — though it does get exhausting.

The exhaustion sets in hard once Act 2 arrives and the game settles into standard Gears loop. The opening act flirts with horror — a Resident Evil-style panicked city sequence, a police station, a drone introduction that genuinely lands — but the atmosphere is constantly shattered by intrusive UI. Finding a blood-soaked transit worker's helmet should be a grim moment; instead, all-caps text blazes across the screen: BLOODY TRANSIT WORKER'S HELMET FOUND! The game is terrified you will miss anything, so it marks every collectible on your map and offers an Eagle Vision-style pulse that points directly at it. Gears 5 handled this elegantly with a robot companion and exploration incentives; E-Day regresses to Ubisoft-era map clutter.

The setting does not help. A ruined city is one of gaming's most overdone backdrops, and E-Day lacks the environmental storytelling of The Last of Us Part II or the opening Leon section of Resident Evil 4 Remake to make its blocks feel distinct. By the time you are fighting through extended encounters with a checkpoint far back, the variety deficit becomes impossible to ignore. Gears 5 offered skiff rides, stealth sections, a rotating musical stage — E-Day offers two helicopter turret sections. The 20+ hour campaign is waaaaay too long considering how one-note it is.

"How can a game with such outstanding skull-popping, blood-geysering headshots still have such pitiful damage feedback against elite enemies?"

This is the question that haunts the back half of the campaign. Standard locusts react satisfyingly to every bullet, but elite enemies turn into damage sponges with health bars so long they barely fit on screen. Emptying clip after clip into a monster without feeling any impact until it finally falls over drains the joy from the otherwise outstanding gunplay. The sniper rifle feels like the only weapon with genuine kick against these bullet-spongy cretins — which raises the uncomfortable possibility that you love the rifle not for its design, but because it is the only tool that respects your time. A new enemy with a prominent weak-point eye at least provides honest feedback, but it arrives too late to salvage the rhythm.

Weapon and armor mod slots sound promising on paper — less recoil, better scopes, faster chainsaw revving, a shockwave gizmo that stuns enemies for chainsaw executions and can be modded to set them ablaze — but the delivery system undermines them. Sidequests and hidden cases award mods, yet the game screams HARD CASE NEARBY in all caps and pins the location instantly. There is no discovery, only checklist completion. Checkpoints placed before unskippable dialogue exchanges and Normal difficulty's toothless challenge compound the frustration. Hardcore delivers the compelling fight, but demands you swallow boss encounters that feel like oceans of stale design choices.

"Horde Siege is a fun, smart evolution of what came before, an experience that tries to expand what Gears can be."

Multiplayer is where E-Day remembers what made the series special. The 4-v-4 modes — Conquest's territory control, Demolition's bomb plants — are tight, fast, and demand the shotgun mastery the campaign lets you neglect. Horde Siege takes the classic survival formula and layers in smart evolutions that actually try to expand what Gears can be, rather than just inflating enemy counts. It is the mode that feels like a future for the franchise, not a nostalgia trip. If you have a squad and a headset, this is the reason to buy.

Gears of War: E-Day is a game at war with itself. Its combat systems are the best they have ever been, its control scheme finally respects the player's intent, and its multiplayer proves the formula still has room to grow. Yet the campaign is a bloated, repetitive slog that adds nothing to Marcus Fenix's character and leans on ruined-city tropes the industry has long since exhausted. Microsoft tapped the sign saying "make it 2007 again," and The Coalition delivered exactly that — warts, checkpoint sins, and all. Marcus will need one hell of a drag show to open Gears 6 and make up for this one.