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Gears Of War: E-Day’s Campaign Is Buried In The Past
The best prequels typically share the same thing in common. Whether it's Red Dead Redemption 2, Yakuza 0, Metal Gear Solid 3, or Halo: Reach, each game tells a story that recontextualizes what came before. Revisiting a game after playing its prequel should alter the experience, providing you with new knowledge that changes how you perceive certain characters, places, and scenes.
The events of Red Dead Redemption 2 add emotional weight to the first game and John Marston's mission by humanizing his targets, just as Yakuza 0 deepens the bond between Kazuma Kiryu and Akira Nishikiyama, making the first game's tragic finale much more impactful.
Gears of War: E-Day doesn't do anything like this.
The Coalition's latest venture back to the world of COGs and Locusts is a prequel to the 2006 original with nothing new to say. You already know where it's going: protagonists Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago go to war as the human world of the surface is invaded by the subterranean Locust, and the heroes survive to fight another day. Even then, there aren't any surprises on the way there.
The most notable changes occur within the framework of its third-person, cover-based shooting. It's still distinctly Gears of War--full of meaty men wielding crunchy weapons--just with a few new bells and whistles added to improve aspects of its signature action. It's good, and the increased spectacle is impressive, but it doesn't do enough to elevate to greatness.
For a series that has struggled, or been unwilling, to let go of the past, purposefully going back 14 years prior to the surprise attack that incited the series at least sounded like a solid idea. By tackling the past head-on, with one of the most important days in the series' fictional history, The Coalition gave itself the chance to examine the origins of Marcus, Dom, and the antagonistic Locust Horde from the very moment their fates intertwined.
Instead, E-Day tells a fairly boilerplate story; one that feels like it was written specifically for series newcomers, rather than anyone who's already fought to the conclusion of the Locust War. There's one moment, for instance, when a character explains that throwing a grenade into a Locust-spawning Emergence Hole will close it, while familiar enemy types like Boomers, Tickers, and Reavers--creatures fans have been fighting for two decades--are given grand entrances.
Introducing or refamiliarizing players with certain aspects of the Gear's universe isn't a knock on the game in and of itself, but the heavy emphasis on treating these known quantities as novel is indicative of a wider issue. E-Day seems uninterested in surprising longtime fans or appealing to the series' own history.
Marcus is still as gruff, authority-bucking, and no-nonsense as ever, despite a 14-year gap and everything that happened in between, while Dom's still going through the same emotional beats as before, worrying about the fate of his wife Maria. The pair haven't fully developed the close relationship they share in the original game, and mostly bond over their shared grief for the loss of Dom's brother, but their relationship isn't explored deeply enough to add anything interesting to what we already know.
Even something like the invention of the iconic Mark 2 Lancer--the assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet that has been a staple of the Gears of War games since the beginning--happens off-screen with a character you only briefly meet twice. It's a throwaway scene that demonstrates just how much this prequel feels disappointingly superfluous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTxwN-Ck1Zw
The story is entertaining at face value, with plenty of intense action and cheesy one-liners. There's a horror-tinged element to some of the early missions, as you witness the sheer brutality of the Locust firsthand. And I also like the two new squad members, Mags Carter and Lucas Reyes, even if the game takes a while to touch on their backstories.
It is odd, however, that neither character is ever put in any peril. This is reserved for characters we already know survive, so the stakes remain relatively low throughout E-Day. The story also ends with more questions than answers, seemingly setting up for a sequel or DLC at the very least. Meanwhile, the cliffhanger at the end of Gears 5 remains unaddressed.
Combat is E-Day's strong point. The Locust are still veritable meat bags, with bodies that explode into dense chunks and heads that pop like watermelons–combined with crunchy sound design that's pure dopamine. Classic weapons like the Gnasher shotgun and Longshot sniper rifle are as satisfying as ever, and brutally slicing a Locust in half with the Lancer's chainsaw remains an evergreen delight.
You can also find and equip weapon mods this time, too. This adds slightly more depth to combat, letting you tune gun behavior and add scopes, laser sights, and bayonets to weapons that wouldn't otherwise have them. Perfect reloads, the series' classic mechanic in which you get a damage bonus for hitting the reload button in time with an on-screen prompt, can be altered to grant incendiary ammo or increase the weapon's fire rate. You can also find mods that reduce flinch, speed up reloads, increase damage range, and more. It's a heavily customizable system that gives you the freedom to completely alter how some weapons function or simply boost aspects that play to their strengths.
It's not just your firearms that have been tinkered with, either. Marcus and company are much more agile than they have been in past games, able to slide, jump, quickly mantle over cover, and climb ledges with relative ease. This ties into the game's renewed focus on verticality in its level design, although being nimbler doesn't meaningfully transform how it feels to play Gears.
E-Day is still a cover shooter. You now have more varied ways of moving from cover to cover, but the moment-to-moment action isn't all that different from what it was back in 2006, with an emphasis on popping up to take opportune shots or maneuvering to flank dug-in enemies. It's surprising how well the Gears formula holds up 20 years later, but also reveals how little has changed.
Gears 5 previously broke the series' mold by introducing open sandbox environments that allowed you to tackle objectives in the order of your choosing and explore vast areas aboard vehicles. E-Day follows suit but reins things in considerably, ditching the vehicles and focusing on smaller spaces. The entire game takes place in and around the city of Kalona, alternating between explorable open areas and more linear missions.
When you're free to traverse blocks of the city, you'll find myriad collectibles and occasional side missions, but these sections mostly just bring the game's frenetic pace to a halt. The side missions lack variety, typically tasking you with surviving waves of enemies, and with many shops and apartments sharing the same layout, there's little of interest to find by exploring every nook and cranny. Teaming with other players helps, as you can spread out and find everything much faster, but co-op is obviously optional.
It's a shame, because Kalona's architecture is visually fascinating, mixing classical European-style buildings with more modern industrial factories--not to mention a gothic edge. You also get to see it gradually destroyed by revisiting the same locations a few hours apart. Witnessing a street where you once had a firefight turn into a giant sinkhole that cuts through the metro and beyond is an effective sight, showing how quickly the Locust decimated the city.
This is the one area where E-Day does something interesting with its open-ended sections. Otherwise, its linear missions are far superior, honing in on that classic Gears action while going big on spectacle with some cinematic flair. These moments are Gears of War: E-Day at its very best.
The game's multiplayer is also of the classic variety, although the overall package is decidedly uneven. Versus mode offers the kind of competitive PvP thrills you'd expect from Gears: all-out gore with very little fluff. I appreciate its old-school approach, foregoing battle passes and custom loadouts for a back-to-basics feel. However, an in-game store full of cosmetics to purchase does belie the decision to skip any sort of premium pass.
Matches are 4v4, and every player starts with the same weapons and equipment, with power weapons strewn across each map for players to pick up. Aside from team deathmatch, there are a few objective-based scraps, too, including the king of the hill-esque Conquest and a bomb-planting mode. The maps are decent, following the basic three-lane design to create bottlenecked areas ripe for tense firefights, whether you're battling across rooftops or taking cover behind overturned desks in a disheveled police station.
Competing against other players can be fun, but much like 20 years ago, the meta still favors close-quarters duels with Gnashers, pushing the campaign's focus on positioning and cover to one side. Without skill-based matchmaking, matches also tend to be wildly unbalanced, often pitting level 50 players up against those just starting out. You can't search for specific game modes either, and there's no server browser or private lobbies to speak of. Couple this with only six maps, and Versus feels fairly barebones at launch.
The new Horde Siege mode fares much better, dropping three teams of four into Kalona to fight back the Locust on multiple fronts. Each squad has its own primary objective, which typically involves surviving waves of enemies while protecting a key target, but there are also optional excursions found throughout each of the sprawling city maps. One might challenge your team to take down a tough, high-value target, while another tasks you with defusing Locust explosives.
All of this presents a persistent battleground as you move between objectives and cross paths with other squads. Sometimes you might help your fellow COGs clear a landing zone so they can extract via helicopter, or you might stumble upon an area where another team's leftover fortifications can now be reused as you face down another ferocious horde. Some games force everyone to come together to prevent an invasion, putting 12 players on the frontline against giant bosses. It's very dynamic and engaging.
Horde Siege also taps into the modern progression system that Versus lacks. Players can choose from four distinct classes, encompassing everything from close-range breachers to sniper-based marksmen. Your choice of class dictates your starting weapons and equipment, but you can customize your loadout as you level up, unlocking various weapon mods and combat buffs to strengthen your chosen build and eventually tackle the mode's higher difficulty levels. It remains to be seen whether Horde Siege has legs long-term, but I haven't tired of it after more than a few hours.
There might be some new ideas in E-Day's campaign and multiplayer, but you also get the feeling that The Coalition isn't trying to reinvent the wheel. That's fine, but this also made me realize that my appetite for this kind of game just isn't as strong as it was, say, 10 years ago. There are only so many times you can man a gun turret before you never want to see another one again. For better or worse, E-Day is distinctly Gears, and I had a good time with it, even if the story is disappointing and the open areas are fairly dull. But that's all it is: a good game, propped up by combat that hasn't changed all that much over the past 20 years. That's enough to skate by, but I wish Gears of War would dig deeper.
1 week ago
