Gears of War is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, so there’s no better celebratory release than a new game that takes us back before it all began. Gears of War: E-Day tells the story of Emergence Day, an event that would change the world of Sera forever, as creatures called the Locust broke out of the ground and laid waste to humans. It’s something that has been talked about all through the series, but finally we get to witness it firsthand.
With its release, we were given access to the campaign mode to experience what the new story has to offer. Unfortunately, the review process didn’t include the Horde mode or PvP portions of the release. This will cover the campaign section while we will have a full review when the multiplayer component goes live.
Gears of War: E-Day is structured a little differently from what we’ve become used to. Gears 5 explored the idea of open environments and having a slightly less linear progression to varying success. The Coalition took this and limited it to a handful of different maps, but all centered on the city of Kalona.
Kalona is a big, bustling city where the heroes of the story, Marcus Fenix, Dominic Santiago, Mags Carter and Lucas Reyes all happen to be in the same bar when Emergence Day begins. This is the event that has been referenced ever since the first game twenty years ago, where the Locusts broke through the earth and invaded the “ground walkers.” One would think an event of this magnitude would call for some crazy encounters, and while there are a couple of memorable moments, there are so few and far between.
From a story perspective, this is a great place to revisit as players get to see how things were before everything went wrong. Marcus and Dom are the series’ iconic duo, and we get to learn more about their past in the Coalition, and even though we only get a small look at Mags and Reyes, the two offer a better dynamic than we thought they would, being drastically different from one another.
There are some familiar faces as a young Tai Kaliso joins the fight, but for the most part, the story is filled with a new and able cast ready to throw their bodies at this new and dangerous force. Sadly, the antagonist is middling, to say the least, as he only appears a couple of instances in the story, and it’s mostly just to look menacing.
The campaign of Gears of War: E-Day can take as little as ten hours and as much as twenty to complete. We elected to go through every single side quest and scour each map to collect most of the mods, and it ran roughly twenty-hours in length on Hardcore difficulty, and unfortunately, that extra time felt almost unnecessary.
There are elements where the open areas feel like you’re experiencing a city under fire, where there are civilians running for cover and Locusts engaging with other Gears, but that quickly fades when you realize how empty and lifeless a lot of it is. On the plus side, the architecture of Kalona is pleasant to look at, with a decent variety of different locations to visit.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://hardcoregamer.com/gears-of-war-e-day-campaign-review/
