Though there's still plenty of waist-high cover, ebb-and-flow firefighting, and braindead machismo, Gears E-Day proves that looking back can, indeed, help you look forward, too.

Gears of War: E-Day could very easily have been a rote prequel, the kind of thing that asks questions no-one particularly cares about. We were, after all, introduced to the doomed planet of Sera in 2006's ground-breaking first Gears of War title. But the only thing ground-breaking in E-Day is, well, quite literally the ground: that eponymous 'E' stands for 'Emergence', since E-Day takes us back to the very beginning, when the antagonistic Locust first started crawling out of their holes to wreak havoc on humanity.

But The Coalition doesn't need to be ground-breaking here. Nor does the series' hardcore fanbase want that. Watching the comments and discourse bubble around my Gears of War E-Day campaign review, one thing became very clear to me: Gears doesn't need to be complicated. Gears 5 tried that - it tried to shake off the shackles of the dudebro machismo that defined the original trilogy and the result was fine. But here, as the studio turns about face to go back to gore, provide something genuinely challenging, and inject a bit of life into a floundering Xbox, it perhaps hits upon an uncomfortable truth: a successful Xbox exclusive doesn't really look that different to how it did 20 years ago.

That's not a criticism, per se. I think E-Day is excellent at what it does: it's a cover shooter with Tarantino-esque comedy violence barely held together by a plot that falls apart like so much Locust viscera if you examine it for more than five minutes.

Source link