Gears of War: E-Day: a new foundation, and a lot of missing rooms

There is a line that keeps coming up in E-Day's negative reviews, and it is more interesting than a list of bugs.

A player reports that the studio justifies the missing features by explaining the game was built from scratch. Then he adds: "tons of game developers make games from scratch."

That is this game's entire tension in two lines. The foundation is new and it is excellent. The house built on it has fewer rooms than the last one.

What E-Day tells

Fourteen years before the first Gears of War. Emergence Day, the day the Locust Horde erupts from below and the planet tips over in twenty-four hours.

You play Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago before they became monuments. It is an origin story, and it is the right subject: the whole series rests on a founding trauma we had never seen, only been told about.

The tone follows. Darker, grittier, with reimagined enemies meant to restore fear, which is the most sensible thing you could do with a series that had become, episode by episode, a spectacle shooter rather than military horror.

The game is rebuilt entirely in Unreal Engine 5, and it shows. The positive reviews are full of praise for the art direction and the density of the environments, and several players on modest machines report good performance.

The movement, and this is the real win

If you only take one thing away: E-Day has the best movement in the series.

The cover system is still there, it is the DNA and nobody touched it. But traversal has been modernised: you jump, vault, slide and flank with a freedom and verticality previous entries never allowed.

And it is one of the rare points where positive and negative reviews agree. Even the angriest player, the one demanding his money back and listing everything missing, writes in brackets that the movement is fantastic.

When your detractors sign off on your central mechanic, you have got the hardest part right.

Horde Siege

This is the big co-op overhaul, and it is ambitious.

You pick one of four classes, Assault, Marksman, Medic or Breacher, then drop in as a four-player squad to push back the Locust. Multiple squads can coordinate on shared objectives and bring down world bosses. Surviving earns rewards, customisation, and improves your loadout for the next match.

On paper, that is the logical evolution: bigger, more players, larger maps.

In practice it has a cost, and the veterans spotted it immediately.

Classic fifty-wave Horde no longer exists. For part of the audience that was the main mode, the one that justified the purchase, and it has been replaced rather than joined.

Add absences that grate: the meat shield, chainsaw duels, and a noticeably narrower bestiary. One player claims to be fighting the same seven enemies on repeat and counts a tenth of the guns of recent entries. His figures are a player's estimate rather than official data, but the general observation recurs too often to dismiss.

And there are only six maps. That is thin for a game whose longevity rests half on online replayability.

Versus

PvP returns 4v4, on all-new maps, with refined modes, a ranked ladder for those who want to invest and social playlists for everyone else.

With the new movement, exchanges are smoother and more legible than in previous entries, and it is the part of the game long-time players defend most spontaneously. One player who came purely for Versus after playing every Gears in existence simply says he is having fun.

The reported black mark: no private matches. For a competitive community used to organising its own games, that is a hard omission to understand.

The technical state, and it has to be addressed

This is what stops this review scoring higher, and it is serious.

The reports are numerous and consistent: freezes, crashes, crashes to desktop, red error screens. Several players describe co-op sessions impossible to finish without an incident.

Two cases deserve quoting because they are specific.

A hard lock after roughly two hours of play, requiring a forced close, with the loss of that session's progress. The player describing it is otherwise very happy with the game, running at 60 to 80 frames per second on very high settings, and still leaves a negative review because of it. You can see why.

A shader compilation time exceeding an hour before the first match, reported on a high-end graphics card.

Add cutscenes that stutter in campaign, the inability to alt-tab during campaign, co-op missions that fail to register as completed, and a Demolition mode where the bomb drops under the scenery.

None of this is permanent. All of it is fixable. But it is the state in which a 69.99 euro game landed in the hands of the people who pre-ordered it, and several of them note that the beta already showed these problems.

And the story

This is where I am most torn.

Showing Emergence Day was an excellent idea, and the campaign's best sequences have that quality of civilisational collapse the series had not attempted since the first game.

But part of the day-one audience faults the script for lingering on new characters rather than the ones they came for. When you sell an origin story about Marcus and Dom, devoting a lot of time to unfamiliar figures is a gamble, and it does not land with everybody.

So where does it land

3,546 positive reviews out of 4,642, a little over three in four, and more than twenty thousand people online at once. That is a broadly favourable reception with a very loud and, it must be said, very well-argued minority.

My view is this.

E-Day gets the two hardest things right: it moves beautifully and it has finally put fear back into Gears of War. The technical base is laid for the coming decade, and the movement is so good it makes the older entries feel stiff.

And it arrives with limbs missing. No fifty-wave Horde, no private matches, six maps, a reduced bestiary, and a technical launch that costs people who love the game entire sessions.

Studios that start from scratch often ship a thinner entry than the last one, then spend the following two years filling it in. That is probably what will happen here, and it will probably be very good.

But you do not review the version from two years' time. At seventy euros, wait for a major patch or a sale, unless Versus is your sole reason for living, in which case you are going to have a very good time right now.

Dropped the bomb under the scenery in Demolition? Come and laugh about it on the InsertCoins Discord.