Gears of War: E-Day Review

Gears of War: E-Day is the best Xbox 360 game I’ve played in over a decade. I know how that sounds for a brand new release on the latest Xbox, but I mean it as the highest compliment. E-Day takes me back to an era of gaming I cherish with my whole heart. For me, the Xbox 360 meant long co-op nights with a friend: laughing through firefights, going dead silent for cutscenes, and replaying entire sections because one of us died doing something stupid. E-Day captures every ounce of what made that era special, while still being a gorgeous, exhilarating modern game.

In Gears of War: E-Day, it’s day one… emergence day. It’s when everything changed and the monsters from below made themselves known to humanity. Within a few days, nearly every major city and hub of humanity had fallen. It’s a story we have always known about Gears of War, but this is the first time you get to play it from the jump. Marcus, Dom, Mags, and Lucas battle across the city of Kalona to try and fight the locusts hordes to save as many people as they can.

From the moment you boot up this game, you have the ingrained knowledge that you lose this one. It’s an interesting concept to explore in what feels like a doomed scenario. But with each mission, you dig into the meaning of who you become in moments of need. It’s an enthralling story of heroes fighting back against insurmountable odds that keep slamming against you at every turn. The Gears have to figure out back up plans B, C, and even D sometimes when plan A don’t go according to plan. Even knowing the eventual end results of the story the game puts forwards, I always found myself hooked in fully. Even if the game isn’t counting the people you save or anything like that, every shot I took felt like there was a reason to do it. I could feel the drive of being a Gear in the fight alongside characters I ended up falling in love with.

Even when every Gears member is roughly the size of a barge, there is such a loud humanity about every one of the lead characters that makes them relatable, vulnerable, and very human in the face of mass tragedy. With each mission, interaction, and conversation you have with Bravo Squad, you end up learning more and more about the people you’re fighting alongside. It makes the game feel so rewarding because you get so invested in what is going to happen with these, characters especially the new ones. Special shout out to Gill and Daan who you will meet and instantly fall in love with. The stakes of the world feel meaningful because the writing and performances make you fall in love with the characters you follow through all of E-Day.

With the main characters having such weight to them made the co-op experience feel like an essential piece of the game instead of being tacked on. Every squad member gets to inhabit a different character with their own arc instead of a carbon copy of the main protagonist. Each of the four members of Bravo Squad is fully realized so everyone in your co-op team has a driving story to follow alongside their teammates.

The gameplay is essentially the same as it has been since the first Gears of War. This is THE cover shooter and it still does it better than any other franchise. Laying on the ground with your body pressed against what little cover you can find makes firefights feel so much more life or death. The shooting is tight and the melee is as rewarding as ever with some truly gnarly executions. While it’s not doing anything overly fresh, it’s the most polished and refined version of this style of third person shooter on the market. I never found myself bored with one firefight after the next because it always felt new because of the environments.

One strength of Gears of War: E-Day is its focus on Kalona as its setting. You watch the city from its first moments of horde infestation until it’s very last minute. Bravo Squad treks all over the city, often over the same areas a few times. While other games may allow that to be an issue, Gears of War: E-Day makes its one of its greatest strengths narratively. Each pass through an area shows how things have gotten worse in a few short hours since you’ve been there. The beautiful landscapes and cities drown further and further in the sea of bodies that the Locust create to make areas look horrific as time passes. It’s a really spectacular part of the games design to have these major set piece fights take place in areas that are distinct enough that you will quickly notice the changes as you pass back through them later. It’s another way to tell the story without directly having to say it. I sometimes found myself just standing still to take in the horrors that have transpired when returning to a zone that we triumphed in just a few hours prior.

Over the last week of playing Gears of War: E-Day with my buddy Ethan, I have found myself losing track of the time as we played. There were moments where we were both cheering or muttering expletives under our breath as something went horribly wrong. I wasn’t thinking about everything else in life because I was in Kalona trying to get as many people out of the city as I could. I haven’t felt immersed in a co-op experience like that since sitting in my room playing my Xbox 360. Gears of War: E-Day takes simple gameplay mechanics and adds in layer after later of depth with characters and environments that makes it an experience that will stay with you like completing the originals did.