Some 20 years ago, the first Gears of War became a massive commercial success and established the Xbox 360 as a dominant gaming console. The heavy, thrashing style of the game’s combat was distinctive. Its battling tactics felt unique. And the franchise flourished.
Gears of War: E-Day takes the series back to the early days of its storyline. It delivers lots of opportunity for local co-op and online multiplayer gaming, while also giving players equal measures of squad-based, third-person shooter action and flat-out, brutal horror to chew on.
This prequel story starts just a few weeks after something called the Pendulum Wars has concluded. Two heroes from that conflict, Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago, show up in the city of Kalona to receive honors for their service. And Dom notes that it’s time for him to step away from service and slip into a civilian life with his wife and children. The two soldiers raise a glass to Dom’s boring, but happy, future. But that good cheer is short-lived, as an unknown, deadly threat begins bursting up from beneath the city streets.
It’s Emergence Day, and monster-like creatures called Locusts are crawling up from the planet’s depths to tear screaming civilians limb from limb and quickly decimate any modicum of armed resistance. Just like that, Marcus and Dom and every other able-bodied man and woman become “Gears”—standard infantry soldiers of the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG)—and they’re ordered to defend humanity to their last breath.
In the game’s campaign mode, players get to choose between Marcus, Dom and newcomers Mags and Lucas. They start out with little more than chunks of metal pipe or some found wrench to battle beasties. But as they go, this quartet acquires a variety of weapons and armor. And after they connect with whatever military is still standing, they work together throughout the action as the Bravo squad.
From there, players take orders and battle through debris-filled streets and burned-out shops and warehouses in a huge collection of firefights. They jump from cover to cover, outflank overwhelming forces and discover the key moves to attain victory. As players get to know their squadmates and the emerging story unfolds, they also seek out weapon and armor mods to customize their character in whatever direction suits them best.
Some of the mods, for instance, can improve a weapon’s range or up-close damage or, perhaps, instantly reload the weapon with every headshot kill. Stacking mods on your armor might offer a health reviving injection when you close-kill an enemy or give you the ability to mark foes on the battlefield. Etc.
As mentioned, gamers can play through the story campaign offline in single player or co-op mode. (It takes about 10 to 14 hours to play through.) However, Gears of War: E-Day offers a variety of online player versus player (PvP) and player versus environment (PvE) modes that require an Xbox Game Pass subscription.
A standout PvP mode is a game called Crucible, where teams fight to obtain a heavy piece of COG equipment and then gain points for the time they control it in a moving and shrinking “active” zone. A popular PvE mode is called Horde Siege, and it features a 12-member team made up of four different classes. This large squad must hold out against waves of onrushing Locust hordes while also fulfilling specific dynamic objectives.
Gears of War: E-Day tells the story of soldiers pulling together in dire times. They fight for one another, and for the lives of as many civilians as possible, against overwhelming forces.
This well-made game gives players a sense of the feelings connected to winning and losing on the battlefield. It imparts the fatigue that soldiers feel from fighting battle after battle on pure adrenaline alone. And it earnestly conveys the feelings associated with comradery and loss in the midst of war. (Those aren’t always positive things, of course, but understanding the sacrifice made by those who protect others is.)
As mentioned, this game delivers both war and horror in spades. And the high-res graphics of Gears of War: E-Day make both of those displays extremely messy.
Huge creatures literally rip their human foes to pieces. They bite off their heads; they throw limbs and chunks of flesh and organs to splatter on walls. The creatures pin bodies and body parts to the walls like trophies. Torn bodies are stacked and piled. Pools of blood paint the scenery.
In one case, a city fountain is decorated with corpses and filled with the victims’ blood to unnerve other human soldiers. In cutscenes, individual soldiers are brutally tormented. Their throats get ripped open, and their faces are destroyed by poured buckets of acid.
Some of the Locust creatures spew corrosive, flesh-dissolving goo and explosive blasts. Dog-sized critters run up close to soldiers and explode in a fiery gush. A large dinosaur-like beast chomps its victims in half. Flying squid-like beasts make kamikaze attacks on human helicopters, ripping the crafts to pieces and sending them hurtling to the ground. Etc.
The firefights are also visceral and frenetic events that feature pistols, grenades, shotguns, machine guns, sniper rifles and other weaponry. Some modded guns deliver massive kill shots that burst a foe’s head like a gushing balloon. There’s a shotgun-like weapon that sprays enemies with an acid substance that melts the flesh off their bodies. A specialized Gears rifle features a chainsaw blade designed to deliver a finishing move that tears gorily through enemy bodies, ripping them into goopy chunks. The large, muscular Gears also stomp smaller Locust, shattering their bones.
The Gears tend to regularly batter gamers with excessively foul language that includes f- and s-words, along with spews of “a–hole,” “b–tard,” “h—” and ‘d–n.” And profane blendings of God’s name garnish the results. Soldiers sometimes tip back a large glass of brew and promise to treat one another to the same for a job well done.
There is something invigorating about the thrashing war games and monster battling of Gears of War: E-Day. But this M-rated game’s horror-like gorefest and profane spews won’t sit easy in an average family room.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
