Gears of War: E-Day Reviews Are In: 86 on Metacritic And a Great Return to Form

The review embargo for Gears of War: E-Day lifted Wednesday, and the verdict is loud: 86 on Metacritic, with 90% of critiques positive and no negatives so far. That makes the prequel the best-reviewed Gears of War since Gears of War 3 (91) in 2011, in a dead heat with Gears 4's 86. The full launch is Tuesday, October 6, but this is not a waiting game: the Premium Edition's Early Access period is live right now, and it comes bundled with the start of Season 1: Emergence and the new 12-player Horde Siege mode.

What Critics Are Saying

The campaign is the story of the story. DayOne's review (100) calls it "the best Gears has ever felt to play, and the best it's ever looked and sounded on the big screen," closing with a line we will paraphrase into print-friendly form: the reviewer thinks it is a masterpiece. MondoXbox (95) went further down the podium argument: "Already among the franchise's finest entries, it could become a serious Game of the Year contender if its content-rich multiplayer matches the campaign's quality."

The most quietly important quote comes from Console Creatures (90): "It feels like the first true Coalition Gears of War game." That is the exact tension this studio has carried since it inherited the franchise from Epic Games, and the review says the studio finally made the game it wanted to make rather than an imitation of the Epic trilogy.

On mechanics, GameOver.gr (90) highlights a deceptively small change: a dedicated jump button that "elevates the moveset and tactical possibilities of the cover-based gameplay." After two decades of sprint-and-stick, Gears is adding actual verticality.

But it's not all perfect tens. The most repeated complaint so far is performance polish: Final Weapon (90) reports frame drops on console, and a few mixed reviews note the campaign's darker tone lands with different degrees of success. The PC build also ships with a demanding hardware envelope, though the store page backs it up with DLSS 4.5 and FSR support, a built-in benchmark mode, and full Steam Deck and Xbox Ally optimization. None of this is launch-blocking at review time, but it is worth watching before you buy on a lower-spec box.

Season 1: Emergence Is Already Running

The launch window is not just the campaign. Season 1: Emergence went live with Early Access, headlined by Horde Siege, the reimagined 12-player evolution of the classic wave survival mode. It is set on The Coalition's largest Horde map ever, complete with four classes (Assault, Marksman, Medic, Breacher), multi-squad shared objectives, and world bosses. Versus has been rebuilt around refined 4v4 playlists with modernized movement, and the studio has already teased a longer seasonal roadmap plus something special for the franchise's 20th anniversary in 2026.

Turning Things Around for Xbox?

Two things are happening at once here. The first is that Microsoft's fall lineup finally has its tentpole: a flagship Gears that headlines the October slate, with the analyst conversation already circling how Game Pass will cannibalize some of its direct sales on Xbox. The second, and more interesting, is a 20-year-old franchise choosing to look backward to move forward. E-Day rewinds to 14 years before the original game's events, rebuilding Emergence Day itself as a horror story about two young soldiers, Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago, before the war turned them into legends. Rewound to the origin, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, and scored like a revival: that is a rare combination, and reviewers are treating it as such.

The pattern this generation has been that Xbox's biggest single-series wins are the ones where a studio was allowed to dig in: the Gears franchise spent the last several years as an identity question the studio's own fans kept relitigating. An 86 with zero negatives and a top-heavy score distribution says the identity question got answered. If the multiplayer half of the game holds up under a live population, Game of the Year conversation is not hype. What deserves equal attention is the roadmap bet: shipping Season 1 content simultaneously with Early Access, before the Tuesday headline launch, is a live-service cadence Gears has never attempted, and it signals.

As a long time Gears fan, all the way back to that Mad World ad, I couldn't be more excited for E-Day. I'm especially looking forward to playing through the campaign with my brother-in-law, just like we did with the first trilogy.

Here's to Dom and Marcus, welcome back boys.

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