Gears of War E-Day – REVIEW

Reviewed on: PC

Gears of War E-Day returns with the familiar formula while trying to give the franchise a fresh boost.

Specs

What is Gears of War E-Day

Gears of War: E-Day is the latest game in the franchise that was the face of the Xbox 360, bringing back the cover shooter that defined the genre and raising the bar for technical polish in Xbox games.

This time, the story takes place at the moment the inhabitants of the planet Sera discover the existence of the Locust, the creatures that live underground and that, at the start of this game, don’t even have that name yet.

As the trailers show, Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago appear younger, but already war veterans, and now they have to gun down these newly discovered enemies.

Gameplay

In Gears of War E-Day we get the third-person cover shooter that is the franchise’s trademark: you use the scenery as cover to protect yourself while looking for an opening to answer the enemies’ fire with your own.

Cover is controlled with the A button, and the new thing is that the Y button is now used to jump, or to vault over obstacles when you are in cover.

I admit it took me a while to get used to it, because I remember that the A button used to handle the whole cover process, and I used the stick to point where I wanted to go.

Now you have to use the Y button depending on which direction you want to leave cover. It is a bit confusing at first, but you get used to it after a while.

They added an RPG-style gear system in which you can equip “perks” on your armor for all kinds of advantages, and each weapon also has its own set of perks, which change its attributes or even its damage type. The perks are in special crates around the levels, so you first need to find them before you can equip or swap weapon and armor upgrades.

I also liked that some sections are semi-open, with a large map you can roam freely, running into situations that trigger side missions across the map.

That changes the feeling a bit that the game is just one big corridor connected to another corridor.

But if you are already tired of the franchise and were hoping for a reinvention, forget it.

What we have here is basically the same gameplay as the first game, with few changes.

That may be good for some people, but it won’t attract new players who were perhaps waiting for big changes to get into the franchise.

Visuals, sound and performance

Gorgeous visuals, with an excellent soundtrack to go with them.

I liked that the game is no longer just “all gray” like some of the old games were. Even though a good part of the game takes place in the same area, the environments are colorful and extremely detailed.

The character models are excellent, and I really liked the sound effects, including the Brazilian Portuguese dub.

Performance on PC was satisfactory. I didn’t tinker much with the settings, but the game ran on “High” at 90fps almost all the time, with a few occasional stutters dropping to 40-50fps. But that was very rare.

Performance aside, I ran into some silly bugs, like reaching an area, defeating the enemies, and the prompt to open the door never appearing, leaving me stuck in that scene.

Luckily, all it took was reloading the SAVEPOINT and the game went back to normal so I could move on.

But I skipped a side mission because of a bug that wasn’t fixed even by closing the game and restarting the PC.

After accepting the mission and hitting a button, a platform was supposed to start moving, but it wouldn’t budge.

And if I walked away from the mission area, I got a warning that the mission would fail, but in practice “failing” meant being forced to load the checkpoint and go back to the moment before accepting the mission.

What could be better

I read a lot of tantrums online before I started playing. And after finishing the game I understood one thing:

It doesn’t matter if the new character is a lesbian, one-eyed, or has asthma. Or if her background nearly filled the minorities bingo card. None of that has any influence inside the game.

The new character is just annoying. Period.

They tried to make a badass character, but when she goes into action she is inconvenient and doesn’t seem to fit the scene, the place or the moment.

I think the character needed better development, making her less annoying and handling the moments when she appears and interacts with the other characters better.

After all, the other new member of Bravo Team isn’t nearly as annoying as she is.

That said, everyone knows the face of Gears of War has always been Marcus Fenix.

My impression was that, at the start, her role as a protagonist felt very forced.

But later, closer to the end of the game, she was more involved with Bravo Team and really felt like a teammate. The dialogue and interactions improved a lot.