The first major new Xbox console exclusive since Microsoft’s move to multiformat is a prequel to the original Gears Of War and we’ve already played the competitive multiplayer.
As Microsoft thrashes about, trying to figure out exactly what sort of a games business it wants to be, the focus of its new management team appears to be returning to the roots of Xbox, a time when things at least appeared to be more functional. The recent release of Halo: Campaign Evolved for PlayStation 5 brought the venerable franchise to a wider audience, albeit with its competitive modes removed. That back-to-basics approach continues with the autumn release of Gears of War: E-Day, except this time they haven’t forgotten the multiplayer.
While the title may sound as though its ludicrously muscular protagonists are planning to attend a daytime dance party, the E actually stands for Emergence. It tells the prequel story of the beginning of the Locust Wars, set 14 years before the events of the original game. We meet a young Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago, who in this timeline look more or less like normal people, rather than absurd cartoon musclemen, although much else about E-Day remains familiar.
While we didn’t get to experience any of the single-player game, we got several hours hands-on with online multiplayer, whose various play modes are likely to be the title’s best shot at longevity. Like the campaign, it takes place in the city of Kalona, a place of shattered baroque domes and classical architecture, that’s been conveniently tunnelled through and partially destroyed by emerging Locusts, leaving a cornucopia of waist height debris to take cover behind.
The city design is excellent, with buildings that look at once lived in and organically placed. It’s reminiscent of the first impressions created by Dishonored’s Dunwall or Half-Life 2’s City 17, although unfortunately, unlike those games, you won’t get to know its nooks and crannies with the same degree of intimacy. Here the city is simply a set of funnels for enemies, driving them through bottlenecks, or around open courtyards where flanking is the order of the day.
Despite being all about taking cover, Gears never lets you get too confident behind any single wall, as enemies flood around the outside of your field of fire, trying to get behind you. It means you’re constantly in motion, a process aided by E-Day’s enhanced parkour abilities. As well being able to mantle over the game’s ubiquitous waist high walls, you can now scale taller parapets and low balconies.
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Characters may not be able to scamper up and over entire buildings, Assassin’s Creed style, but it borrows at least some of that game’s engaging sense of nimbleness, making firefights more energetic and mobile. The original’s roadie run has been re-tooled to incorporate a wider camera angle, maintaining a greater degree of battlefield awareness as you barrel towards the next piece of cover.
It complements the mechanics of its 12-player Horde Siege mode, which sees three teams roam the city completing events and side quests to earn team bonuses, before clearing and holding a landing zone for the evacuation chopper. Jumping aboard you can hose down any remaining Locusts with its miniguns while you wait for the rest of the team to climb onboard so you can claim your final rewards.
Movement feels fast and solid, your slimmer but still chunky soldiers slotting positively behind cover, while guns look and sound dangerous, their recoil and muzzle flashes conferring a real feeling of power. That’s undermined by exceptionally bullet spongey enemies, with Boomers and other larger foes comfortably taking several clips of ammunition directly to the head before they finally keel over. Levelling up does start to help make it feel less like you’re wielding a peashooter, but it’s a gradual process.
The other speciality of the franchise is massive, house-sized bosses, that you’ll need to team up to have any hope of taking out, forcing massive crab-like Corpsers back into the red glowing holes from which they emerge, and whittling away the gunners on the huge mechanical spiders they ride, again making full use of cover to avoid feeling outgunned. Thankfully Kalona has plenty of buildings you can climb, offering vantage points to pour fire onto the onrushing horde.
That also helps make the Marksman character class used in PvE Horde mode feel more useful. With the number of enemies continually popping up behind you it can be tricky to find time to take aim, his sniper rifle also requiring a reload after each individual bullet. In E-Day the extra verticality of its level design makes those moments considerably more satisfying, letting you eke out more time to snipe before being overrun by the snarling mob, which once again features larger enemies alternating with waves of smaller ones who run towards you, some exploding when they get close enough.
Along with an emphasis on cover, Gears is perhaps best known for inventing the active reload, which lightly gamifies clipping in a fresh magazine, using a timed shoulder button press. Here it’s been refined further, the damage bonus accruing at the end of the reload window, letting you trigger it early, sacrificing enhanced ammo in favour of expediency if you find yourself in a tight spot.
In most ways though, E-Day feels like a fairly standard co-op wave shooter, albeit in third rather than first person. The original 2006 game (which this has essentially the same setting as) created most of the standards and tropes that E-Day is following but so many other games have copied it in the intervening decades that any sense of uniqueness has largely evaporated.
The emphasis on taking cover and flanking add some distinctiveness but, thanks to the original Gears Of War, the concept of the cover-based shooter is now a whole sub-genre of its own, and one which E-Day seems to add very little to. The single-player campaign and its co-op options are still the most important part of the game for most people but while this is an entertaining enough multiplayer experience, it’s hard to imagine it doing anything particularly positive for the reputation of the series, or the Xbox format in general.
Formats: Xbox Series X/S (previewed) and PC
Price: £59.99
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: The Coalition and People Can Fly
Release Date: 6th October 2026
Age Rating: 18
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