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Gears of War has been one of Xbox’s longest enduring franchises, having given us one and a half trilogies thus far, and a handful of spin-offs to boot. Although I’ve enjoyed the franchise’s expansion in its sequel trilogy, the reverence I feel for the original games is second-to-none. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the ‘Mad World’ trailer, I’ll never forget the mountainous grind to Seriously…, and I’ll never live down spending too much money when the third game’s special edition launched alongside a special console and an overpriced, plastic Lancer.
The Coalition’s decision to look backward and set the next game before the first, framing it around Emergence Day, and giving us back Marcus and Dom, is an exciting prospect for me. Every Gears title so far has been a technical showpiece, and I expected nothing less from E-Day, which also promises to inject horror back into the series.
Starting with nothing but an empty hard drive, Gears of War: E-Day is the franchise’s first game in a decade that has been built from scratch without using ported assets, and I do think it shows in the lengthy gameplay demo that debuted at this week’s Xbox Games Showcase. Not only does the game look magnificent, but the rebuilt animation and cover system feel like a generational leap from the Gears we once knew.
There are so many new mechanics that all pull together in unison to reinvent the core combat experience of Gears. Whether it’s how cover works, the greater range in high-and-low transitions, sliding into cover, or high mantling over and jumping over obstacles, opens up more approaches to combat and more flanking routes than ever before. Sadly, with a camera angle that sits further back to give a wider view of the action, it’s effectively the end of the roadie run as we knew it. I might be alone, but I felt the run was an integral part of the original trilogy’s design and quite a pivotal part of the game’s cover system.
It is, however, more action-packed and spectacular than ever before, as chaining all of these new possibilities together makes for some ridiculously cinematic moments. This is true whether working through the standard linear Gears missions, like the one pulled from the game’s opening act and showcased this week, or when thrust into arenas or battles that span city blocks. Another interesting point of difference is that this game places the active reload indicators in the middle of the screen; telemetric data suggested a lot of players didn’t engage with the mechanic, and so it has now been placed quite literally front and centre.
And in a more realistic spin on the mechanic, the clip gradually increases as the indicator gets nearer to the damage buff. So, if you’re backed into a corner and are desperate for a quick shell, you can choke off the reload, forgo the damage boost a perfect reload grants, and get back into the fight. I expect this’ll lead to some tense scraps in single-player and multiplayer alike.
With Emergence Day signalling both the arrival of the Locust and the fall of Sera itself, E-Day narrows its vision to the city of Kalona, a coastal metropolis inspired by The Coalition’s hometown of Vancouver. Intended to feel like a character in its own right, we’ll see Kalona fall and crumble over the span of a few days. It might not be an open-world, but Kalona feels like a living place and, by bearing witness to its gradual decline, it’ll give the story a human element that might otherwise be lost in a larger-scale conflict.
If seeing a home torn apart isn’t enough, the Gears can also engage with desperate residents of Kalona, who might need help. There’s a moment where Bravo is taxiing on foot towards an objective, only to find both signs of a struggle and calls for help in a burning apartment block. The game is full of these emergent opportunities to engage with the people of the city, and I expect, as is often the case with prequels, where the stakes can feel rather low, it’s these moments that’ll offer up story reward and set dressing to tell Kalona’s story.
As I just alluded to, I often find it hard to invest myself emotionally in prequel stories, especially if the original cast is on board, as is the case with E-Day, which showcases the earliest years of the friendship between Marcus and Dom, which feels strained due to the death of Dom’s brother, Carlos. Knowing where their bond takes them over the course of three Gears games, I’m hoping the team can find an angle to appeal to series fans. It’s suggested they’ll focus on things like Marcus’s survivor’s guilt relating to Carlos’s death, so I’m interested to see how they depict that, knowing what a gravelly bastard Fenix becomes during the games.
The original reveal carried a promise of returning to the horror aspect that the first game had. In fact, a single still frame from the ‘Mad World’ reveal, depicting Marcus fighting against insurmountable odds, catalyzed E-Day’s rather grave tone. While the Locust clearly look meaner, courtesy of a significant uptick in the game’s fidelity, I didn’t get a sense from the seven-minute demo that the game would be the horrific clawing for survival I’d hoped for. If anything, the enemies seen in the presentation appeared to go down quickly, though I’m hopeful the team is keeping plenty under wraps.
Aside from the campaign, the team also touched on the game’s multiplayer. Although I’m certainly eager to get a look at the new maps and how they’ve managed to balance the grounded, boots-on-the-ground combat of old Gears with the game’s new traversal options, Horde Siege sounds more like my cup of tea. I think a reinvigoration of the Horde formula is long overdue, and this mode, which pulls together three squads for a scaled-up battle pitting players against the environment, is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Although it’s billed as a back-to-roots project, Gears of War: E-Day is shaping up to be a spectacular prelude to the original trilogy and a magnificent reinvention for the franchise. There are more options than ever for players to navigate combat arenas, and I’m so excited for the stories that the city of Kalona gets to tell in what we already know will be a losing battle for her when the game ships exclusively on PC and Xbox consoles this October.