Marcus Fenix says something gruffly, his squad laughs, then a horde of Locust enemies rushes the team. The hulking figure of Marcus roadie-runs towards the nearest hip-high bit of cover, slams his muscly shoulder into the concrete, and starts laying down suppressing fire with his Lancer machine gun. Enemy bodies fall apart in meaty chunks, blood spatters on the stone floor. A grey-skinned drone breaks through the defensive line and levels his Gnasher at you, finger on the trigger. Fenix revs the chainsaw on his Lancer, and cleaves through the warm flesh of this vagrant body in a sluice of wet viscera. I cannot tell if it is 2026, or 2008.
But this isn’t a bad thing. Even the post-trilogy Gears games have never really lived up to the series’ high – that initial, unlikely run of hits between 2006 and 2011. Since the heady days of the early 2010s, there’s not been something so unashamedly silly as Gears to keep us occupied. The days of the co-op over-the-shoulder cover shooter seem confined to the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, as the FPS ate away at its popularity in the generations between.
So for The Coalition to somehow have recaptured that lightning in a bottle with Gears of War: E-Day is pretty impressive; there are few of the original developers left at the studio now, with the original team at Epic far enough removed to leave Gears something of a shell, now being puppeteered by another master entirely. With something like 2019’s Gears 5 – an open world experiment that was good but not quite the Gears I fell in love with when I was 15 – this resulted in a game wearing the right clothes but making the wrong moves. Go back further, to 2016’s Gears 4, and the decision to replace the tactile wetness and flesh-deterioration of the Locust with robotic and stoic mechanical enemies left me completely cold. With E-Day, it feels like the Gears machine has started up with a throaty roar all over again, and is running cleanly on all cylinders – despite all the gore and grit pumping through its valves.
If you managed to get some time with the E-Day beta, you’ll know the bones are solid enough; the shooting is good, the cover mechanics are decent, and the cover-to-cover wall bouncing is as controversial as it ever was. Movement exploits and ‘cheesing’ are as divisive now as they were in the 2010s. And therein lies my assessment of the single-player mode, too, really: if you like Gears back then, you’re going to like this. If you didn’t, precious little has changed.
I’m actually quite impressed how true to the tropes the two-level demo I played was. Marcus Fenix (once again played by Bender/Jake the Dog actor John DiMaggio) comes out with the same unimpressed gruffness as he did in the original series. Every NPC is pissed off and stressed out. People keep handing you things to blow up, disfigure, or otherwise generally maim anyone that isn’t explicitly human-looking. It’s Gears all over again, but prettier, bigger, and assumedly with something to prove.
This story is a prequel (a different prequel to People Can Fly’s 2013 effort, Judgement, mind you) set during humanity’s first encounters with the Locust – the subterranean and suspiciously humanoid race of warlike enemies at the core of (most) Gears stories. The demo I played was set early on in the game, with the premise setting up some genuinely impressive setpieces on inner city bridges and transport hubs that are being overrun by Locust. No one knows what’s going on, civilians and the military are in disarray, but the ever-serious Fenix and his ragtag resistance crew tackle the threat head on. Through a series of skirmishes, ambushes, and broken defensive lines, you can see the confusion and panic spread throughout the city of Kalona.
It may not be set in suffocating tunnels or underground facilities, but there’s a real sense of claustrophobia and tension in how The Coalition drags you from hotspot to hotspot in the middle of the Locust outbreak. Similarly to the original Gears’ trilogy, there’s this really nice pendulum of panic and peace – the contrast of which highlights the impact of both. By ramping up the pressure in a tiny space, and throwing increasingly violent waves of enemies at you, before easing you into a bigger corridor and letting you make more strategic moves, The Coalition feels like it’s giving you a Gears ‘best of’ album. ‘Remember this? The developer says as it puts a shotgun into your hands and asks you to do a perfect reload before blowing up a grub at close range. ‘How about this?’ it asks as you rev up the lancer and saw a stuttering Locust in half. Every weapon in the preview (that’s a Lancer, a Gnasher shotgun, a Snub pistol, a Boomshot, and a new bolt-action DMR-like weapon, too) feels great to use. And, despite being made in Unreal 5 versus the original trilogy’s Unreal 3, they all seem to feel exactly the same. Kudos to the engineers.
Speaking of the engine, though, I tend to think Unreal 5 games all look a bit samey, and that the proliferation of the engine is a net loss to the industry. Everything is a bit too shiny, all the particle effects look homogenised, and there’s this uncanny feeling to the whole thing. Gears of War: E-Day, though, doesn’t fall victim to this: the art direction works harmoniously with the engine, resulting in something that looks… well, just like the original Gears trilogy, really. But a lot nicer.
And that’s the whole experience of E-Day, really: booting it up, popping active reloads and listening to all the big men shouting, it feels exactly like being back in my teenage bedroom in the 2010s. As a cover shooter, so far, it hasn’t surprised me by doing anything new – even if you can get in cover on the floor now. In fact, even the jump button that made me pause during the reveal trailer doesn’t change too much, all considered – it’s just another tool with which you can reposition Marcus before carrying on your assault or defense. In fact, in playing the campaign, it feels like I’m incomprehensibly, impossibly, carrying on a save I left in Gears 2 in 2011. Until this week, I didn’t realise how much I wanted that.
