Gears of War: E-Day’s multiplayer sure is more Gears of War

Looks like grubs are back on the menu

That’s at least according to a recent hands-on preview of Gears of War: E-Day, the prequel entry developed by The Coalition and planned for an Oct. 6 release on Windows PC and Xbox Series X. Gears of War, of course, was one of the original bro-y 2000s shooters, known for its machismo, viscera, and roided-up player characters. “Emergence Day,” or “E-Day,” is the inciting event of the series: a violent race of humanoids called the Locust burst out of the planet’s surface and killed 25% of the human population in a single day. Gears of War: E-Day explores that event.

My preview, which ran on Xbox Series X, did not cover any of that, instead focusing on E-Day’s multiplayer offerings. Specifically, I played about three hours of its Horde mode — the PvE component where you team up with a squad and fight against increasingly challenging waves of enemies. Gears of War popularized the existence of horde modes back in the day. Playing E-Day, it’s clear why Gears earned that reputation. Yes, there are several wrinkles that differentiate the latest version, which is now called Horde Siege, from prior iterations. But at the end of the day, it’s Gears of War. You don’t need to change much for Horde to still kick all kinds of ass.

The biggest change is that Horde mode supports 12-player lobbies now, split into three squads of four players. There are three match types: Blitz tasks you with completing a few objectives before extracting with your squad, Siege is basically the same thing except with more objectives, and Horde is a stand-your-ground-and-shoot-everything mode. While the full version of E-Day will feature three maps (with more added in seasonal updates), I only played on one, Golden Quarter.

So it’s a good thing Golden Quarter is enthrallingly glorious: a baroque, Euro-inspired metropolis with wide avenues lined by Haussmann buildings and dotted with parks, bakeries, and sprawling piazzas. You get a real sense of the world the Locust ruined…only, of course, to spend your time running through it all and shooting even more Locust. Golden Quarter is massive, too. Despite playing for hours, I can’t say I traversed the entire thing.

More than previous iterations, Horde Siege has you criss-crossing its maps. Blitz and Siege missions, in particular, give your squad a series of randomly assigned objectives — often of the “defend this area” variety — you have to complete before extracting. At the end of a match, you clear a landing zone and fight off one final wave of Locust before boarding a chopper with your squad. (The chopper invariably has a few turrets on it, so the first players who get there can really do some damage.)

You play through these missions as one of four classes, each of which can be leveled up 30 time. The Assault class is well-rounded, standard Gears, Marcus Fenix types. Breachers focus on close-quarters combat. Marksman starts with the Longshot (the best Gears weapon, fight me) (I don’t mean that; the gearstosterone has infected me). Medics get a burst-fire SMG and a thingy that heals teammates in proximity. Every time you level up, you unlock more weapons and perks to further customize your loadout for that class, and to expand the weapons you can acquire at machines in the middle of matches.

The squad-based nature of lobbies largely makes it feel like you’re playing a match with four people, not 12, though there are moments where Horde Siege veers into pure chaos. Beyond the standard objectives, there are seven types of secondary objectives, some of which change the contours of a match. In one instance, a corpser (those are the 36-foot-tall arachnids) appeared out of nowhere. Seemingly every player in the lobby converged on the fight, raining bullets on it from all angles until it fell, before collecting the reward and going our separate ways back to our squad objectives. In another instance, my squad had to track down and defeat a “high profile target,” which took us into backstreets we’d otherwise never have explored. The randomized nature of events makes it feel like anything could happen at any point.

But this revised mission structure doesn’t undercut that E-Day is Gears as it always has been. Critically, The Coalition hasn’t lost its grip on how a Gears game should feel. Gears of War is set on a planet named Sera (the inverse of “Ares,” the Roman god of, drum roll, WAR). Sera is ostensibly Earth-like in presentation, but not in the numbers: 26-hour days, 440-day years, two moons. It quite literally has a different gravitational pull than Earth. (Gears of War fans like to joke that’s why Gears characters are so comically jacked.) When you jump, you feel like the Hulk leaping into the clouds. Sliding into cover is intentionally clumsy, akin to falling over wearing a 40-pound backpack. There’s an unmistakable heft to Gears of War games, a weight that’s defined the series for 20 years, and E-Day has it.

Due to timing issues, I wasn’t able to get a chance to play E-Day’s competitive multiplayer component (though, frankly, I’ve always been more of a Horde guy anyway). I also have some skepticism about the narrative thrust. E-Day is already a fairly known event in Gears lore, and I’m not sure a prequel campaign will fill in any gaps fans don’t already know. Gears 5 also left on one hell of a cliffhanger. Is a splashy prequel worth kicking the next chapter of Kate Diaz’s story down the road a bit longer? I can’t say for sure just yet. But I can say that sawing through a Locust grub is as awesome as it’s ever been. We’re so back.

Gears of War: E-Day will be released Oct. 6 for Windows PC and Xbox Series X, with early access beginning up to five days early.