Hearing the voices of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago was like being sent back in time to the days of the Xbox 360 and the very reason I bought the console. And Gears of War: E-Day very much feels like an attempt by The Coalition to travel back in time as well, to return to what made the series legendary. What we’ve got is the best of The Coalition’s Gears games yet.
REVIEW AT A GLANCE
Developer The Coalition
Publisher Xbox Game Studios
Reviewed On PC
Available On PC, Xbox Series X/S
Release Date 6 Oct, 2026
Price (UK) £59.99
Genre Third-Person Shooter
Review Code None
Quick Take:
The Coalition returns with their best Gears of War game to date, one that harkens back to the OG. It doesn’t capture the same magic and the story doesn’t focus on the right people, but it plays great and looks great.
The story picks up less than a week after the end of the Pendulum Wars. Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago are still trying to deal with the loss of Carlos Santiago and the end of a war that has been ripping apart the entire world for 79 years. Sadly, our lads get roughly five minutes of peace and quiet – just about long enough for Dom to pluck up the courage to tell Marcus over a pint that he is leaving the military- before the Locust tear through the ground and begin the nightmare.
Narratively speaking, The Coalition take no chances with E-Day – there are exactly zero big revelations or additions to the lore, unless you count the underwhelming way that a chainsaw is added to a Lancer. In fact, there isn’t even much of a narrative to discuss, because what the game really focuses on is the initial 48-hours of the invasion, the chaos it brings and humanity’s scramble to respond to a seemingly alien threat from under their feet. Marcus and his squad have to charge back and forth across the city at the behest of the COG higher-ups, rescuing civilians, finding high-value targets and generally just trying not to take a Torque Bow arrow to the face.
It works. The opening act might be the strongest in the entire franchise. Act 2 drops the pace and starts to drag, but Act 3 kicks off with a pretty epic assault on an airfield, and the action doesn’t let up until the final boss battle against… er, whatever the hell this game’s big bad Locust leader is called. Vlad the Impaler or something? He likes impaling people. That’s all the personality he has, and probably all he needs.
E-Day also makes a strong case for the Locust as proper monsters again. They rip people to pieces; Wretches feast on still-living civilians; COG soldiers are impaled on walls and heads are torn off. It’s properly brutal, as Gears of War should be. The game makes great use of the glowing red light spilling from the Locust tunnels, too, silhouetting their massive forms and giving them a horror-movie aura. After so many games in which the Locust had lost some of their mystique, it’s good to see them crawling out of the ground as a genuinely terrifying threat again. And that’s even more impressive when you consider most of us have spent a long time fighting the Locust, so the fact that they feel cool again is no small feat.
The main characters are a more complicated success. Newcomers Mags Carter and Lucas Reyes are likeable additions to the newly minted Bravo squad, give the horrible taste of attempting to fill in for the dynamic duo of Bair and Cole. Lucas is a likeable lad who has only just joined the COG and now finds himself thrust into a nightmare scenario, and he gets a good emotional moment later that explains his enlistment. Mags gets considerably more to work with: her Rustlung, her history in Kalona and the personal losses she carries all give her a life beyond the fighting. The problem is how often the story puts her at the centre of scenes and emotional beats that I expected to belong to Marcus or Dom.
As a Gears fan, I came here to see the beginnings of the Marcus and Dom bromance, which is exactly what the game’s marketing focused on. Instead, Dom spends much of the campaign delivering quippy lines before getting a serious moment quite late on, while Marcus rarely feels like he has much to do in the story. The game hints at a gulf between them because Marcus is keeping a secret from Dom, but it doesn’t make enough of that tension. We should feel Marcus considering whether to tell him and stopping himself, or Dom sensing that something is off without knowing what. It wouldn’t need to be spelt out; the subtext just needs to be there. Instead, Marcus is his usual gravelly, brooding self, and it’s left to the player to do most of the work.
There is a payoff between them in the closing chapters, and it lays the groundwork for a possible new trilogy, but by then it feels like too little, too late. Mags and Lucas aren’t bad characters, and I’m happy to see them continue in the series. I just wanted Marcus and Dom to be the centre of this particular story, as the marketing led me to expect. Instead, it feels like Mags dominates most of the story and the dialogue, while Marcus and Dom are just….well, there because they have to be.
Bravo Squad has some good people in it, but it never develops the same easy chemistry as Delta Squad. The original quad-some had plenty of tension between the differing personalities that gave rise to great moments, and plenty of love for each other when it counted. This new group gets along without many issues, and their bond doesn’t feel as real. Perhaps that is unfair, though: Delta had three games to build a foundation. This is just the first game in a presumed new trilogy.
But the lack of Cole yelling about everything is sorely felt, too.
The Coalition has also returned to its open-world ideas from Gears 5. This time, Kalona acts as a small open area, with side objectives and missions that occasionally take you elsewhere before bringing you back. You’re not really wandering off into a vast world, and there’s little reason to explore every corner as you might in a giant RPG. Hardcases contain weapon modifications, but most of the side activities are easy to find and don’t demand much detouring. I’m still not convinced the game needed these open sections, but they work better here than they did in Gears 5.
Kalona’s real purpose is to show what the Locust invasion does to a city. You first see it as the Locust tear through the ground, walking down the incredibly detailed streets as Marcus and crew get their first look at the horror befalling them, then return as it becomes more and more ruined. Bodies litter the streets, walls are blown out, buildings lean precariously, and familiar landmarks crumble under the Horde’s assault. Later, giant ravines carve through the roads, whole buildings lie at the bottom of Locust holes and pretty much everything is on fire, about to be on fire or was on fire. The city itself doesn’t quite develop enough personality to feel like another character, but watching it change gives the campaign a sense of scale that works beautifully.
It also revisits some of The Coalition’s open-world experiments, though E-Day is much more structured than a true open-world game. Most of the campaign is linear, but some chapters open up into larger districts of Kalona, where you can consult a map and choose between several routes to your next objective. You can stick to the main mission or take a detour to help civilians and other Gears, search for collectibles, or find supply caches and weapon mods. These sections give you some freedom to explore the battlefield, but the objectives keep you moving in a clear direction, and the campaign eventually funnels you back into tighter, more traditional levels. It’s a better fit for Gears than the Skiff sections in Gears 5, even if some of the optional activities can feel like another stop on the way to the next order.
Visually, E-Day is spectacular. I played on PC at 2560×1080, mostly on high settings with DLSS and a 60fps cap, and Kalona’s destruction looks fantastic. The red light of the Locust tunnels cutting through deep shadows is particularly striking, making the creatures look as though they’re crawling out of hell. The audio is just as effective at pulling me back into Gears: the clank of armour and boots, the Lancer’s familiar roar, and even the little sounds that signal a checkpoint or collectible all feel right at home.
The cover-based combat still feels spectacular, even if it remains largely unchanged. You know the drill by now: slam into cover, pop out and unload a clip into whichever Locust has decided to stick a body part out. Nailing a perfect active reload and hammering the clip back into place is as gratifying as ever. New weapons, enemy types and weapon modifications add some variety. The modifications are fun to collect, though most don’t radically change how a gun works; a few offer a more meaningful trade-off, like giving up the Longshot’s scope for another ability.
Most importantly, the combat never got old. The Coalition might not deliver on story, but they consistently deliver on strong combat arenas, fun set-pieces and plenty of awesome fights. The campaign finishes with a run of strong set pieces and a return to that bridge — which the squad seems strangely fascinated by — before the final boss. That fight is passable, but it drags as the Locust leader circles towards you while you pour bullets into him. Gears has never been especially consistent with boss fights, and this one doesn’t break the pattern. Thankfully, the action leading up to it is much stronger.
There’s a jump button now, which feels odd to call a major addition in a game where Marcus and company have traditionally moved like tanks with legs. You can clamber over cars and up to ledges, adding a bit of verticality to battles that were usually fought from the ground. The cover system has expanded too, letting you duck behind smaller obstacles or even lie on your back behind a low chunk of concrete. These changes don’t transform the combat, but they make it feel more dynamic.
In Conclusion…
Without a doubt this is the best Gears of War game that The Coalition has crafted, and it’s telling that the best Gears they’ve made is the one that harkens back to the OG. It brings back the bromance of Marcus and Dom, focuses on the Locust being horrifying monsters that crawl out of the ground and plays it safe everywhere.
Unfortunately, it never does hit the same highs as the originals. There’s none of the emotional gut punches that Gears 2 and Gears 3 delivered, and the returning duo of Marcus and Dom don’t get the focus they deserve, constantly overshadowed by two new characters that are decent but nothing more.
But the gameplay delivers. The cover-based shooting is awesome; there’s plenty of visual moments that left me impressed and while the story doesn’t stick in my mind, there were plenty of cool set pieces that did.
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