Seven years after Gears 5, Marcus Fenix is back — and this time he’s going back to where it all started. Gears of War: E-Day launched today on Xbox Series X|S and PC, and Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscribers can play it right now at no extra cost.
E-Day is a prequel, set fourteen years before the original Gears of War. Players follow a young Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago as Emergence Day unfolds — the day the Locust horde erupted from underground and plunged the planet Sera into all-out war. Because it tells the origin story from the ground floor, E-Day works as a jumping-on point even if you’ve never touched the series, while longtime fans get younger, rougher versions of two characters they already know by heart.
The Coalition kept the series’ signature cover-based shooting but tightened it up. Marcus can now jump and slide mid-fight, which makes firefights faster and less static than in the older entries. Reviewers also praised the campaign’s brutal setpieces, its grim tone, and the visuals — some are calling it the best-looking game an Xbox studio has ever shipped.
The review numbers back that up. With the review embargo lifting October 1, E-Day settled at an 87 on Metacritic across more than 50 reviews, and around 88 on OpenCritic with roughly nine in ten critics recommending it. That’s the best score for a mainline Gears game since Gears of War 3 in 2011 — comfortably ahead of Gears 4 and Gears 5, which both landed at 84.
There’s one caveat worth knowing before you download: these reviews are a campaign verdict only. Multiplayer servers — including the new 12-player Horde Siege co-op mode and ranked Versus — were offline during the review period, so critics never got to test them. Some outlets held back their final scores for that reason. Given how central online play has always been to Gears, the full verdict on E-Day will have to wait until after launch week.
If you’d rather buy than subscribe, the standard edition is $69.99 on Steam and the Xbox app. Premium Edition owners have been playing since October 1. Either way, Emergence Day has arrived — and fourteen years later, it’s still not safe to come out from cover.
Sources: TechTimes review roundup (https://www.techtimes.com/articles/328619/20261006/gears-war-e-day-review-roundup-campaign-earns-87-metacritic-score.htm), Gagadget reviews roundup (https://gagadget.com/en/728272-gears-of-war-e-day-reviews-are-in-and-the-shooting-is-the-star/), Game8 review (https://game8.co/reviews/gears-of-war-e-day/gears-of-war-e-day-review)