Part of the GamesRadar+ Summer Preview
Gears of War: E-Day is the video game I have been waiting 10 years for The Coalition to create. It’s hard to believe that the series has already been under the stewardship of this studio for a decade, following Epic Games’ decision to sell the intellectual property to Xbox in 2014. But you know what they say, time flies when you’re dragging a Chainsaw Bayonet through mutating flesh and malfunctioning circuitry.
In that time The Coalition has become a technical powerhouse, has led the Xbox Game Studios transition to Unreal Engine 5, and delivered some pretty entertaining third-person shooters too. Gears of War 4 was a faithful continuation, and Gears 5 a pretty bold experiment in stretching solid foundations across more open-ended environments. I’m a fan, but there have been missteps.
Image credit: Xbox Game Studios
Image credit: Xbox Game Studios
The Swarm never clicked as a forbiddable force that could rival the Locust, and the DeeBees exposed Gears of War’s need for ultra-violence to truly sing. Naturally, the introduction of exploration, wider playspaces, and RPG-lite systems in Gears 5 divided the playerbase. And so The Coalition is doing what I always hoped it would – channeling its reverence for the franchise into making the familiar feel fresh again, all while taking us back to the earliest adventures of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago.
That’s what we’re getting in Gears of War: E-Day. It’s a shooter that wants to honor the legacy of what Gears of War achieved in 2006, all while developing an experience that feels fighting fit as a new game for 2026. Did it take the divisive nature of Gears 5 to push The Coalition in the direction it should arguably have taken right from the outset? The studio has a different perspective.
“We didn’t make E-Day as a reaction to Gears 5,” says Nicole Fawcette, with the studio brand director stressing she doesn’t agree with commentary that suggests The Coalition strayed too far from the Gears formula in 2019. “We’re making E-Day because we had an opportunity to make what we wanted to make. We wanted to take on Emergence Day, and to have players rediscover Marcus and Dom, as we made the pivot to a new engine. That’s what we wanted to do, and it’s exactly what we have done.”
Back to the Beginning
Creative director Matt Searcy tells me that “E-day is a return to Gears of War’s roots” and an attempt to recapture the vibes of the original trilogy. “The best way we could think to do that was to go back to Sera at its darkest hour: the day the Locust came out of the ground.” Emergence Day is an untold story that’s long been at the heart of the Gears of War universe, where a populace already beaten down by the Pendulum Wars is brought to its knees as cities crumble and civilization collapses. Searcy adds: “It’s such a great place to reimagine the tone of what we think makes Gears great.”
Vicious monsters, unbridled brutality, towering architecture, and layered playspaces littered with waist-high debris. Gears of War: E-Day is set entirely in the city of Kalona, following Bravo Squad across three days as it attempts to battle the Locust Horde back to hell. “We put you right into the chaos of E-Day – in the beginning there’s no soldiers around, only people getting torn apart by Wretches. You’ll experience the moment Marcus and Dom first pick up guns, pulling Snubs out of the trunk of an abandoned police car, before setting off into the city where all hell is breaking loose,” says Searcy.
“We believe that Gears plays best in a city,” adds art director Aryan Hanbeck, “and that Kalona is the ultimate battlefield.” Hanbeck points to the more linear structure and consistent playspace as a big point of difference between E-Day and its predecessor. “Gears 5 was more of a globetrotting adventure, you went from desert to forest and so on. A big way that E-Day differs from Gears 5 (and other Gears games) is that this entire game is set in one location.”
“This isn’t an open-world game,” says Searcy. “Something we learned from Gears 5 is that going out on vehicles doesn’t mesh perfectly with Gears, and that the freedom to choose your mission and what you’re doing doesn’t vibe with Gears either.” Searcy tells me that The Coalition is pushing for a tighter alignment between claustrophobic missions and larger combat arenas. “We have very classic mission design – especially on that first night, where you’re fighting back-and-forth in the streets – and there are parts of the game where you get these larger arenas, where multiple city blocks open up to you.”
These larger missions are described to me as being akin to Black Hawk Dawn. Where “you’re on a single mission, you know where your objective is, but how you get there is up to you,” says Searcy, who notes that you’ll have opportunities to delve deeper into the carnage of the day by assisting civilians and other soldiers if you want to. That’s all a part of The Coalition’s attempt to channel more player choice into E-Day, something the studio wanted to retain from Gears 5.
“Gears and Xbox have been tied so tightly for 20 years now, and it’s an honor and a privilege to be seen as a flagship title in this way”
Matt Searcy, creative director
“One thing that we learned from Gears 5 is that if we want to give players more choice, and to still feel natural to what Gears is, then we need to do it differently to just giving you a vehicle in an open world. I think Gears 5 was really cool, but if we wanted to hit that core Gears DNA we had to increase the density. We had to make every street corner a combat opportunity,” he says.
I’ve seen more of Gears of War: E-Day than what was shown in the Xbox Games Showcase, and I’m mesmerised by what The Coalition is delivering here. The visual fidelity is out of this world, with E-Day positioning itself as a true late-gen system showcase for the Xbox Series X; Kalona seeming like the perfect playground for Gears’ heavy combat, with more fluid movement and vertical playspaces only helping to advance the idea that The Coalition has higher aspirations than ever before.
Starting From Scratch
Putting The Matrix Awakens tech demo and Gears Reloaded remastering experiment to one side, Gears of War: E-Day is the first title from The Coalition to be built natively in Unreal Engine 5. This has given the studio cover to do what it should have done in 2014: rip up the foundations of the franchise in an effort to refine and innovate the mechanics and systems so central to the way that Gears plays.
“We started with an empty hard drive,” says Searcy. There are no ported assets in E-Day. Every animation, sound, mechanic, and system has been rebuilt from scratch. We have built a game that feels like Gears but plays like new. Many of us have worked on Gears for over a decade; we know how the cover system works intimately, we understand the importance of it and have built the game around the same pillars that defined the original trilogy, but we approached E-Day like a new game built for 2026.”
If there was any fear that Gears of War: E-Day would be a continuation of Gears 5 – albeit with a tighter focus – this dedication to starting afresh should put them to bed. E-Days will play quite unlike any Gears of War game before it, as The Coalition makes some much needed quality-of-life improvements to the way that you shift your weight around these utterly gorgeous combat arenas. “Kalona – with its dense, tight streets and more open spaces – let us rethink how a Gear moves through the world,” says Searcy.
Image credit: Xbox Game Studios
Image credit: Xbox Game Studios
“We’ve completely rebuilt our cover and movement systems, with smoother transitions and a bigger range of cover heights and shapes,” he adds. “Our soldiers are basically giant tanks in armor, they slam into cars while weaving through hails of bullets. We wanted to keep that heaviness, but add more fluidity with how you move through the battlefield.” Gears of War: E-Day is making fundamental changes as it introduces denser playspaces. You can now dive into low cover and mantle into more vertical positions, introducing more tactical variety to play; the sprint camera no longer pulls into your shoulder, giving more awareness of the world around you, and E-Day will finally let you slide under and into cover for more fluid, kinetic encounters.
The Coalition isn’t making changes on the margins for Gears of War: E-Day. It’s engineering a series revival that can channel the spirit of the first adventure and still push for genuine evolution of the systems that defined a genre for 20 years. That’s why E-Day has been chosen by Xbox Game Studios to lead the return to console exclusivity – a statement of intent that can remind the world of why Xbox was a platform that shouldn’t, couldn’t be ignored. “We couldn’t be more excited to be an Xbox exclusive,” Searcy tells me. “Gears and Xbox have been tied so tightly for 20 years now, and it’s an honor and a privilege to be seen as a flagship title in this way.”
Gears of War: E-Day is coming to PC and Xbox Series X on October 6, 2026. The latest game from The Coalition is one of the key upcoming Xbox games and we’ll have more insights to share as part of our Summer Games Preview this week.
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