Every Gears of War game released in the last 20 years has made reverent reference to Emergence Day, when alien creatures emerged from the earth, single-minded in their savagery. In E-Day, you’re there to witness it: the police lights, flipped cars, ground tremors, civilians running, aliens pouring out of fissures in the earth and ripping faces off. You’re at ground zero in a squad of four soldiers called Gears – Marcus Fenix, the leader; Dom, who wants to retire; Lucas, a green cadet with a buzzcut; and the dishonourably discharged Mags.
Only this dysfunctional quartet can turn the tide. Instead of answering questions raised by the ending of 2019’s Gears 5, we’re back to the start to find out why Marcus has a scar on his lip and why these soldiers started strapping chainsaws on to their assault rifles. Anything that was left to the imagination is here, for you to point at and say: “I understood that reference.
This is a thing that I have seen.” This series has lost its way a bit over the years, but the opening hours of E-Day will have you believing that big shoulder pads and ripping into gollum-esque freaks with motor-powered blades are en vogue once again. There are flashes of the horror and grimness of the first couple of Gears games as you’re funnelled between urban fighting arenas, with bountiful flanking routes and chunks of fallen buildings to take cover behind. Long after you realise it’s all out of ideas, it’s still going.
Because it’s set during and immediately after E-Day, the squad is stuck. You spend most of your time running back and forth across the city in various states of destruction. You cross the same section of bridge three times before the credits roll.
Levels are flipped, daytime turns to night and you run through them again. E-Day’s two attempts at switching things up involve putting you on the gunner seat of a helicopter or making you walk slowly while people talk to you. The setting is a ball and chain that the developers are tethered to.
E-Day is at its best when it turns off the lights, cranks up the horror, and forces you into enclosed spaces, but these moments make up a tiny portion of the game. The bulk of it is spent in large, open areas stuffed to the gills with collectibles. There are hundreds of them and you get a little audio chime whenever one is close.
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