Gears of War: E-Day Reviews Are In: Best Gears in 15 Years, but the Campaign Drags

Featured image: Official key art via GearsofWar.com / The Coalition

Gears of War: E-Day is already playable, and the early verdict is clear enough to repeat in one breath: the shooting is the best the series has ever felt, and the campaign around it is not. Early access opened on October 1 for Premium Edition owners, the full launch follows on October 6, and the reviews have landed in a very specific place. They are good, not great, and almost every critic says the same thing about why.

Add a ray tracing requirement for PC, a studio bracing for layoffs the week its biggest game in seven years ships, and a surprisingly long roadmap, and there is a lot to unpack. Here is what matters before you spend your weekend with Marcus Fenix.

What the reviews actually say

With 50 critic reviews in, Gears of War: E-Day sits at 88 on Metacritic. That does not touch the 94, 93 and 91 earned by Epic’s original trilogy, but it beats everything the series has done since. It clears Gears of War: Judgment (79) and both Gears of War 4 and Gears 5 (84 each), plus spin-offs like Gears Tactics. In pure numbers, GamesRadar+ notes it is the best-reviewed entry since the Epic era.

Pure Xbox and Eurogamer Germany handed out full marks, and most scored reviews are tagged “Positive.” Only three are “Mixed.” Many outlets have published unscored reviews-in-progress while they wait to test multiplayer, so the number is not final. GamesRadar+ features editor Andy Brown calls it “the best cover shooter I’ve played since Xbox 360,” and praises a “groundbreaking adaptive cover system” that makes shootouts dynamically chaotic.

The sharper critiques come from PC-focused outlets. PC Gamer’s review in progress sums it up as good shooting with a campaign that turns into a slog. Wccftech’s review goes further, arguing the game feels like a step back from Gears 5 in several ways, even while calling the third-person shooting better than ever.

A prequel that plays it straight

E-Day is set at the end of the 79-year Pendulum Wars. The COG has just won, and Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago are drinking in a Kalona pub, honoring Dom’s late brother Carlos, when the Locust first tear up through the streets. Two strangers join them, the recently enlisted comms specialist Lucas Reyes and the retired refinery worker Mag Carter, who is dealing with a respiratory disease called Rustlung. Together they form Bravo Squad.

On paper, that is a great premise. Lore fans get to see the Locust’s first recorded appearance above ground. In practice, Wccftech’s reviewer argues the soldiers react the way soldiers do, quickly and professionally, which drains the horror out of a sudden monster invasion. The squad is well portrayed, but Marcus stays the same impenetrable supersoldier he has always been, and the plot is “not memorable in any way.”

Combat is the reason to play

Every review agrees on this part. Movement is more fluid than in Gears 5, with sprint slides, gap jumps, climbing on structures and vehicles, and low-ground cover that all feed the classic cover shooter loop. Enemy AI is ruthless on Hardcore and above. Side missions are often the toughest fights in the game, and finishing them or finding yellow Hard Case crates rewards you with weapon and armor mods.

The weak point is your own squad. Teammates revive you inconsistently, especially when a Rager has you pinned, and they deal little damage by design so the player stays the star. They can be downed but are not killed until the final boss, where suddenly losing any of them ends the run.

The longest Gears campaign, and not always for good reasons

Wccftech’s reviewer spent more than 20 hours in the campaign, the longest of any Gears game, thanks to open areas explored on foot (there are no drivable vehicles). The catch is that the side content has minimal narrative payoff. You often never learn the names of the civilians you rescue, and saving them or ignoring them makes no difference to the story or the gameplay. That is why PC Gamer’s word for the whole experience is “slog.”

PC requirements and performance

The Coalition has published the full spec table, and the most important line is not about a specific card. A hardware ray tracing capable GPU is required, and cards without dedicated ray tracing hardware are simply not supported. The game uses ray traced reflections, shadows and Lumen-powered global illumination. It supports DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4 and Intel XeSS 3.0 at launch, and it also needs a solid state drive, with 115 GB of free space.

The jump to 4K Ultra is the real cliff, with an RTX 5070 Ti or RX 7900 XT and 12 GB of VRAM targeting a steady 60 fps. A 3D V-Cache CPU is recommended there. On the more modest end, an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 is enough for 1080p at Medium.

Performance is a less happy story. Wccftech reports frequent stuttering during the open refinery map in Act 4, which it describes as the familiar Unreal Engine 5 traversal stutter. The built-in benchmark was tested with DLSS Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and 6X mode, which creates more generated frames but fewer base frames, though with less frame-time variance. The review also says E-Day performs worse than The Witcher 3 Remastered and Cyberpunk 2077 on RED Engine, a comparison that gets more interesting given that The Witcher 3 got its own free remaster just days ago and has had its own performance complaints since. A Game Ready driver is already available.

The roadmap: what comes after October 6

The Coalition has laid out the first two seasons. Season 1 started during the beta and carries the standard modes and maps until December 1. It includes three two-week events, Halloween, 20 Years of Gears and Thanksgibbing, each with a special Versus mode, a Horde mission and rewards. Season 2, called Legacy, celebrates the franchise’s 20th anniversary and promises a “special birthday gift” for all players on November 7.

Editions and how to play

E-Day is available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Steam, and it is included on day one with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. There are Standard, Premium and Collector’s editions. The Premium Edition adds five days of early access, the Emergence Customization Pack, four additional seasonal packs, 1,000 Iron and a Bravo Squad weapon pack for the campaign. The Collector’s Edition adds a 15-inch statue of Marcus and Dom, replica COG tags and a custom SteelBook. Online campaign co-op, Horde Siege and Versus may require a Game Pass subscription with online multiplayer. If you rely on Xbox’s cloud for any of this, remember that Xbox is putting tier-based time limits on cloud gaming starting in November.

The cloud over The Coalition

The release arrives at an uncomfortable moment. Eurogamer reports that staff at The Coalition fear being let go after launch, and that some would not put it past Microsoft to withhold bonuses. Story director Juan Vaca was laid off after the game went gold. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has said 3,200 jobs would be cut during a broad restructuring, which has already hit Halo Studios, Obsidian, Bethesda and Ninja Theory. If you want the bigger picture, we covered how Bethesda took control of Obsidian as part of the same shake-up.

Should you play it?

If you love cover shooters, yes. The moment-to-moment gunplay is the best the series has delivered, and it is already easy to jump in through Game Pass. If you are after a gripping story or a tight, polished PC port, temper expectations: the narrative is a step back from Gears 5, side content is forgettable and the UE5 stutter may not get fixed. For PC owners without a ray tracing capable card, the choice has already been made for you.

The next week will tell. Multiplayer reviews, post-launch patches and the first Horde Siege and Versus events will show whether E-Day grows into the foundation The Coalition wants, and whether the studio gets the chance to build on it.