Almost 20 years ago, I rang up my friend and said, “It’s everything you hoped it would be.” I was gushing about Gears of War, the third-person shooter that in November 2006 played like nothing else and was the best-looking Xbox 360 game on the market. There was a gravitational tug to maneuvering the armored soldiers, known as gears, and snapping them into and out of cover. Afterward, returning to the first-person shooters of that period felt like steering a weightless camera.
Gears of War: E-Day, out Tuesday from the studio Coalition, is the eighth entry in the Gears series, not including remakes, and serves as a prequel to the events of that first game. The “E” in the title refers to the emergence of the Locust Horde, an alien army, from underground, beginning their assault on the planet. The campaign in the game is an exercise in nostalgia, albeit a well-crafted one. (For those who remember the desaturated color palette of the early games, the fourth act starts with a large, open level that serves as a visual callback.)
To justify its existence as a worthy prequel, E-Day does two things quite consciously. First, it emphasizes the speed and magnitude of the Locust’s transformation of the world into a hellscape. On a dramatic level, this is what makes the return of Dom Santiago — the brother-in-arms and best friend to the series’s hero, Marcus Fenix — work. As series fans know, Dom died in Gears of War 3. In E-Day, we witness the death of his family, which haunted him throughout the original trilogy.
The second thing that E-Day does is offer the pleasure of seeing characters react with fresh eyes to otherwise well-known mainstays. We see the creation of Gears’ defining weapon (a machine gun/chain saw), and we’re also treated to some amusing first-time enemy encounters. Early on, the gears are sent to a bank to rescue an important doctor, who they believe is holed up in its vault. They first repair to the bank director’s office to enlist his help. While entering the code for the vault, a ticker — a pint-size enemy that scurries about on spindly legs with a tank of explosive material on its back — emerges behind the director. “Shoot it!” he says before it explodes, killing him.
Having played through all of the Gears of War games except Gears Tactics — a real-time strategy game — I can’t say I was jazzed to hop into this one. Truth be told, I felt the same way going into Gears 4 and 5, but just as before, I ended up being charmed in spite of my misgivings over series fatigue.
Measured against other blockbuster games, E-Day stands tall as perhaps the best-looking game on the Xbox Series X|S. The game’s prologue finds Marcus and Dom drinking in a bar and then battling their way through narrow city streets after Locust scouts begin popping up from sinkholes. The opening gives little hint of the grand spaces to come after the two ditch their civvies and link up with other soldiers. E-Day does urban combat about as well as I have ever seen in a game. The smoldering environments are so varied and hyper-detailed that they offer the impression of innumerable back stories tantalizingly out of reach.
Losses, both personal and ambient, rain down on the soldiers throughout the campaign. Brave combatants die; civilians are abandoned to grim fates because of scarce resources. The story beats in the game are bombastic in the way of mass-market entertainment, but they aren’t soulless. My ears perked up pretty much every time the silver-tongued gear Tai Kaliso appeared on the screen. Near the dawn of the invasion, he says: “I sense we are being dragged across a new threshold. There will be no easy answers in the dark.” Then later, after learning of Dom’s personal tragedy, he provides the man with unwanted, stoic comfort: “Loss prepares us for what’s ahead. Fate always has a plan.”
Despite its best-in-class visuals and impressive sense of scale, the campaign in E-Day feels a bit conservative. There aren’t any drivable vehicles, as there were in other Gears games, or really anything that one could point to and say, “Well, I didn’t expect that.” Still, I look forward to notching up the difficulty and playing through it all again with a couple of friends, because video games with enticing cooperative modes are scarce.
Gears of War: E-Day is available on Xbox Series X|S and PC.
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