Having now played about two hours of Gears of War: E-Day‘s story campaign, I’m not impressed. The upcoming third-person cover shooter handles fine and the demo I played through checked all the hits you’d expect from a story in the genre–intense action, cringy one-liners, lots of blood, a desperate gamble to cross a bridge while being peppered by sniper fire. But of what I’ve seen, it seems like E-Day’s story misses the mark that all prequels should try to hit.
Admittedly, there’s a good idea here: the setting. E-Day is the sixth Gears game but is set about 14 years prior to the events of the first game, during the titular Emergence Day when series antagonist the Locust Horde made its first move against humanity. The game is set in the city of Kalona, which sees you play in open, explorable areas between linear missions. This structure isn’t new for a Gears game, but the series has yet to tackle this structure while remaining solely in a city.
The city features streets that cross into one another, and seems to get more destroyed every time you exit back into it from a more linear mission. Minor characters reappear and you seem to cross back into specific areas over and over. There could be an interesting story there, depending on how E-Day frames this setting. I could see a world in which Kalona feels as much a character as the soldiers you’re fighting alongside, and that could in turn infuse some sort of emotional draw to the game as you see this place you’ve come to know slowly fall apart.
If the game is going to do that, I didn’t see anything like it in my preview. But I’m not sure if that’s because the scope of the demo didn’t include that aspect of the game, or because there’s just not much there to E-Day’s story and setting.
But to get back to my main point, so far, E-Day is not doing what a prequel should do, which is reframe a franchise’s story. If you’re going to make a prequel, it should say something important about its world. It should make you want to go back and experience a series again, now having knowledge that completely transforms how you perceive a scene.
All of the best prequels do this. Halo Reach gave us humanity’s desperation in a way that Halo’s original trilogy never quite did because playing as Master Chief is always a heroic fantasy. Playing Reach and then going back to play Chief’s first adventures adds a melancholic tone to the series, because now you know that so many people had to die just for Chief to meet Cortana. Red Dead Redemption 2 similarly deepens the emotional weight of John Marston’s mission in the first game as it humanizes characters who were just villains previously. And Assassin’s Creed Origins grounds the grandiose machinations of the Assassin Brotherhood as the legacy of a grieving father and mother trying to make sure no one else has to go through watching their kid be killed.
Great prequels, all of them. And E-Day isn’t giving me any of that so far in the two hours I’ve played. As of now, the game is only telling me that the origin for the series’ trademark lancer simply came to be because big man liked chainsaw and so engineer put chainsaw on gun. I didn’t even see it really happen. The cutscene started with the idea of implementing the chainsaw as a weapon and then flashed forward in time a few hours for the scene to end with me getting handed the upgraded lancer. It felt so boring and ordinary, as if the game itself didn’t feel like it had to be concerned about it.
I’d probably be more okay with E-Day if the gameplay were at least second-to-none, but like I said before, it just feels fine. It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with it. The addition of mechanics like sprint sliding and climbing means protagonist Marcus Fenix is more nimble than he’s ever been, but it doesn’t transform how it feels to play Gears. And all the firearms and explosives are still rewardingly big and crunchy murder machines that grind through bone and make heads pop like bloody balloons. Like it’s Gears. And Gears is fine. It’s certainly not the best third-person shooter in the world, but it’s far from the worst.
Where the gameplay is going to shine is the Horde and Versus modes, as senior video producer Jean-Luc noted in their July preview of E-Day. Playing this game with a friend in multiplayer is where I think you’re going to find the fun–I’m not convinced the story campaign is going to keep pace.
If you like these games’ stories, you’ll like this one too. If you can’t stand Gears’ campaigns, I don’t see how E-Day could possibly convince you to be a fan.
E-Day is a wait-and-see for me. Maybe the game will do something cool with its setting that will change my mind and make me want to explore its city streets, but for now anyway, Gears of War: E-Day feels like an easy skip in an already jam-packed October unless my friends and I decide to jump into the online multiplayer.
