Gears of War: E-Day Preview: A Horror Story With a Speedrun Attached

Emergence Day is the event the entire Gears of War series has been standing on top of. It is the morning the Locust came up out of the ground, without warning, in numbers nobody could process, and ended a quarter of the human population inside a day. Every game so far has been set in the long grinding war afterwards, in a world that had already adjusted to the horror and organised itself around it. E-Day goes back to the day itself.

That matters because it changes what the Locust are. In five previous games they are a known quantity: categorised, named, countered, farmed for achievements. On Emergence Day nobody knows what they are, what they want, or how many are coming. The Coalition has been explicit that the tonal target here is the original Gears of War, and specifically the mood of the Mad World trailer, which is still the best thing anyone has ever made in service of this series.

You play as a young Marcus Fenix, with Dom Santiago alongside him, before either of them became the armoured slabs of the later games. Some of the footage shows Marcus in ordinary civilian clothes, which is a genuinely strange sight given the proportions of these characters, and which does the job of telling you this is before everything.

It has been a long wait. Gears 5 landed in 2019, and The Coalition spent a stretch of the intervening years on a project that did not work out before returning to the series it exists to make. E-Day is the result, and by every technical measure it looks like the studio has spent that time well. What is less settled is whether the game's design agrees with the tone it is selling.

Here is the thing that stood out to us, and it comes from putting three separate pieces of coverage next to each other rather than from any one of them.

The Coalition is telling us this is the frightening Gears, the one about an enemy nobody understands arriving on the worst day in human history. At the same time, two design decisions shown in the footage point in the opposite direction. Enemies now die noticeably faster than in previous games. And the player has been made considerably more mobile, with a rebuilt cover system, ultra-low cover, and the ability to climb and jump in ways Gears has never allowed.

This did not go unnoticed by someone worth listening to. Cliff Bleszinski, who created the series, publicly remarked after the showing that enemies were going down too quickly and that the Locust should be stronger. Technical analysts covering the same footage largely disagreed with him, on the reasonable grounds that emptying forty rounds into one enemy is not enjoyable and faster takedowns simply play better.

Both positions are defensible, and that is precisely the problem. They are arguing about fun, and the Locust dying quickly is probably more fun. But it is very difficult to be frightened of something that dies in half a second while you vault over a waist-high wall away from it. Horror runs on the player feeling outmatched. Gears has always been a power fantasy, and every mechanical change shown so far makes the player more powerful, not less.

None of this means the game will fail at its tone. It means the tone is being carried by art direction, lighting, sound and writing, and is being actively worked against by the combat design. That is a hard trick, and it is the thing we would watch most closely at release.

Whatever happens with the tone, the technical side of this game appears genuinely excellent, and it is the part where independent analysis has been most consistently positive.

It runs on Unreal Engine 5 with hardware ray tracing while targeting 60 frames per second, which is not a combination many games manage. Analysts noted the image is unusually clean, largely free of the smearing and noise that tends to follow UE5 games leaning on ray tracing. There was little visible pop-in and the view distances in the city scenes drew particular praise. One reviewer pointed to a shot of Marcus reflected in car glass as direct evidence of hardware ray tracing at work, since neither screen-space reflections nor the software fallback can render a character that way.

The most interesting change, though, is the damage modelling. Every object now carries an extra layer that chips away granularly as you shoot it. Fire at a concrete barrier and it erodes in small pieces rather than snapping into a few predictable chunks. This is not a new idea; it is a return of something Gears of War 2 did well and the series then quietly dropped, and it has been largely absent from shooters since the PlayStation 3 era.

That detail matters more than it sounds. If E-Day does end up feeling brutal and physical, this is likely to be why. Cover crumbling around you under sustained fire changes how a firefight feels in a way that no amount of enemy health ever could. It may be that the technology ends up delivering the tension that the combat balance is giving away.

Very little has been officially shown of multiplayer, but footage has leaked and the competitive Gears community has been picking it apart. What they describe is Gears 5's movement with more on top: wall bouncing now using a shoulder-first animation, the ability to slide and then cancel into a bounce, and chains of slide-bounce-slide-bounce that look considerably faster than anything in the series so far.

For veterans this is exciting. For the game's commercial prospects it is a real risk, and the people raising it are the competitive players themselves rather than outsiders. Their argument is straightforward: Gears multiplayer already has one of the highest mechanical skill floors in any shooter, the wall-bounce meta has historically driven newcomers away within hours, and E-Day appears to be raising that floor rather than lowering it. Some are already pointing at movement exploits visible in leaked footage.

Two further pressures make that worse. E-Day is not releasing on PlayStation, so the pool of new players is limited to Xbox and Steam with crossplay between them. And mouse and keyboard support, which has been a long-running grievance in Gears 4 and 5 because of the aiming advantage it confers, remains an open question alongside anti-cheat.

The likely outcome is that PvP settles into a small, extremely skilled community, as it has before, and that the co-operative Horde mode does the work of holding onto everyone else. That is not a disaster. But it does mean anyone buying this for competitive multiplayer should be realistic about what they are walking into.

More than usual, with one caveat. The Coalition showed roughly ten minutes of essentially uninterrupted gameplay alongside a much longer developer diary, and almost none of it was pre-rendered. In a year of carefully cut trailers, showing that much continuous footage is a meaningful signal of confidence.

The caveat is that the footage was labelled in-game without specifying the hardware. The opening night-time sequence held a consistent 60 frames per second and showed some aliasing, which suggests it was captured on Xbox. Footage in the documentary segment was noticeably less stable, and it is not clear what that was running on. With months of optimisation still to come this is not alarming, but it does mean nobody can say yet how the retail version will perform.

The other honest limitation is that nobody outside the studio has played it. Everything above is an assessment of footage, including the technical praise. Playing a shooter is the only way to know whether its guns feel right, and that has not happened yet.