I’ve been eager to get my hands on Gears of War: E-Day’s new Horde mode, Horde Siege, which appears to be a more smartly designed, more engaging iteration. June’s Xbox bonanza first look sold me on the campaign, but the iconic mode has long been my favourite non-campaign mode in Gears. And at least so far – looks to be the most revolutionary Horde ever.
Before I get into my time with it, I have to add a caveat: this hasn’t been the most organised preview event I’ve taken part in. Account authentication and build encryption issues – on two separate occasions – prevented me from delving as deep into it as I could. All told, I only got to play for a little over two hours.
This might be circumstantial, but it’s worth noting Xbox recently cut thousands of jobs, and it’s hard to imagine how that wouldn’t affect the integrity of similar events. This isn’t Xbox’s first digital preview; I’ve been to several over the years, including for the Gears of War series, and I can’t think of anything that comes close to last week’s E-Day event.
My biggest takeaway from playing Horde Siege is that it feels like a standalone game that could easily exist outside E-Day. Classic Horde – i.e., surviving a set number of waves in a small area – always felt like clever re-use of assets. Siege is an evolution that builds on that legacy to offer something entirely new, particularly to those who could never get into Horde.
Siege matches take place in an open world, of a sort: a sprawling (by Gears standards) map with multiple objectives. You start off in one corner with your four-player squad, and immediately receive an objective that sends you to a different area. Your main goal typically revolves around a data-collecting device called the R.I.G. Sometimes you need to lure out Locust to “recalibrate it”, other times you’re tasked with defending it.
Siege maps, meanwhile, make excellent use of their size by dotting secondary objectives around their many sections. I’ve seen enough variety in my limited time to make me excited to tackle all of them in the final build.
There’s a push for quiet exploration in Siege – a stark contrast to classic Horde’s unrelenting onslaughts – underpinned by those secondary objectives. Outside of creating excuses for you to visit areas you may otherwise ignore, they are integral to the flow of gameplay. For one, clearing them awards Squad Perks, in-match stat-boosting modifiers. At the risk of causing you to click off this page, the closest approximation I can think of is, well, MOBAs. Like them, the flow of Siege encourages clearing multiple side objectives to get your character strong enough to tackle bosses and future waves.
What caught me completely off-guard, though, was a slight extraction shooter element: another reward for completing side objectives are Weapon Parts. Unlike Squad Perks, however, they’re entirely useless within the round itself. If you successfully extract with your parts intact (no pun intended), you can later use them to upgrade your weapons.
Yes, extraction is now a core Horde mechanic. It immediately reminded me of the recent iterations of Zombies in Call of Duty, where you get the choice of extracting and keeping your XP every 10 or so waves. It works similarly here, and it’s your only way out. The rush I felt in those three-minute holdouts as everyone waits for the helicopter, fending off wave after wave of Locust, is remarkably similar to late-round extractions in Zombies.
There’s an emphasis on scale here that takes advantage of the large maps. While your immediate concern is your squad, there are three other squads that start at different parts of the map, each tackling their own objectives. It’s common to cross paths with them, and you can certainly help each other, but the real reason three squads are even in the same match is Boss Invasions, which more deliberately bring everyone together against a common – very large – enemy.
These Boss Invasions were another highlight, particularly at the start as everyone pours in to take down the invading boss, whose scale is on the level of major spectacle moments from Gears campaigns. Invasions turn Horde from an intimate test of skill for four players to something akin to Destiny’s Public Events.
My most played mode in the preview, meanwhile, was the aptly named Blitz; a truncated version of Horde that plays out like a speedrun of Siege. Blitz rounds take around 15-20 minutes to complete. Each match picks different objectives from Siege proper to create a condensed version of the real deal, which is part of what made it easy to pick up and enjoy. Blitz exists to offer a straight-to-the-point variant of Siege for those short on time, but it’s a complete experience on its own that you wouldn’t guess is the smaller sibling of a bigger mode.
Horde Siege evidently has plenty to chew on, even if preview event logistics put a damper on my first impression. I can tell I’m going to be spending a lot of time with it.
