The first major new Xbox console exclusive since Microsoft's shift to multiformat is a prequel to the original Gears Of War, and we've already played the competitive multiplayer. Gears of War: E-Day, set to release on October 6, 2026, for Xbox Series X/S and PC, tells the story of the beginning of the Locust Wars, 14 years before the events of the first game. Players meet a young Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago, who appear more like normal people rather than the absurd cartoon musclemen of later titles.
Multiplayer Hands-On: A Return to Cover-Based Roots
While the single-player campaign wasn't available for preview, we spent several hours with the online multiplayer, which is likely the title's best shot at longevity. The multiplayer takes place in the city of Kalona, a shattered metropolis with baroque domes and classical architecture, conveniently tunnelled and partially destroyed by emerging Locusts, leaving plenty of waist-high debris for cover. The city design is excellent, reminiscent of Dishonored's Dunwall or Half-Life 2's City 17, though players won't get to know its nooks and crannies with the same intimacy. Instead, Kalona serves as a set of funnels for enemies, driving them through bottlenecks or open courtyards where flanking is key.
Despite being all about taking cover, Gears never lets players get too confident behind any single wall, as enemies flood around the outside of your field of fire, trying to get behind you. This keeps you constantly in motion, aided by E-Day's enhanced parkour abilities. In addition to mantling over ubiquitous waist-high walls, players can now scale taller parapets and low balconies, borrowing some of the nimbleness from games like Assassin's Creed, making firefights more energetic and mobile.
Enhanced Movement and Horde Siege Mode
The original's roadie run has been re-tooled with a wider camera angle, maintaining greater battlefield awareness as you barrel towards the next piece of cover. This complements the mechanics of the 12-player Horde Siege mode, where three teams roam the city completing events and side quests to earn team bonuses, before clearing and holding a landing zone for the evacuation chopper. Jumping aboard, you can hose down remaining Locusts with its miniguns while waiting for the rest of the team to climb onboard to claim final rewards.
Movement feels fast and solid, with slimmer but still chunky soldiers slotting positively behind cover. Guns look and sound dangerous, with recoil and muzzle flashes conferring a real feeling of power. However, this is undermined by exceptionally bullet-spongey enemies, with Boomers and other larger foes comfortably taking several clips of ammunition directly to the head before falling. Levelling up helps reduce this feeling, but it's a gradual process.
Boss Fights and Verticality
The franchise's specialty of massive, house-sized bosses returns, forcing players to team up to take them out. You'll need to push massive crab-like Corpsers back into the red glowing holes from which they emerge and whittle away gunners on huge mechanical spiders, again making full use of cover to avoid feeling outgunned. Kalona's many climbable buildings offer vantage points to pour fire onto the onrushing horde, making the Marksman character class used in PvE Horde mode more useful. With enemies continually popping up behind you, the extra verticality lets you eke out more time to snipe before being overrun.
The active reload system, a hallmark of Gears, has been refined. The damage bonus now accrues at the end of the reload window, letting you trigger it early, sacrificing enhanced ammo for expediency in tight spots. In most ways, E-Day feels like a fairly standard co-op wave shooter in third-person, but the original 2006 game created many of the standards and tropes that E-Day follows. So many other games have copied it in the intervening decades that any sense of uniqueness has largely evaporated. The emphasis on cover and flanking adds some distinctiveness, but the cover-based shooter is now a whole sub-genre, and E-Day adds very little to it.
The single-player campaign and its co-op options remain the most important part for most players, but while this is an entertaining enough multiplayer experience, it's hard to imagine it doing anything particularly positive for the reputation of the series or the Xbox format in general.
