Hello my fellow gladiators of the digital arena aka internet!

This is going to be a long review, it will have spoilers and it won’t look good. But this is a reaction to their actions.
They ought to know how the fans of the series would react to the atrocities they committed to this game and yet they did it on purpose.
No sympathies from me towards the developers who have been fired, you guys deserved far worse than just getting fired.
This game is the perfect bait & switch game. They sold us nostalgia with Marcus and Dom and we got a butch lesbian girl boss protagonist.
If they were honest with this, I bet very few people would have bought the game.

A few days ago I wrote an article as a pre-review with what I hoped and what I fear about the E-Day game, and a few months ago I wrote about how it felt playing the beta weekends and the issues I have noticed and voiced my concerns about.

Please read them as well in your free time and at your own pace.
Note: I am still playing the campaign, I am about 65% in it so edits will happen as I discover more about the characters and the story

Now let’s get the good things out first because the negative things are plenty and much worse than what I anticipated. Unfortunately.

Good things in the new Gears of War: E-Day

• Visually stunning – at times jaws are dropping!
• Great audio with the optional theme sound to change to that of Metallica but instrumental.
• Verticality – Finally our characters can jump but whenever they want and it is buggy.
• Many hours long campaign – this can be tiring to some but I love it!
• Semi open world – The maps are large and we are free to roam around and gather collectibles.
• Feeling of actually being in a city under siege.
• A lot of new weapons – But kinda breaks immersion when we know that very few of them remain in the next games.
• A lot of new enemies – While the plethora of new enemies is good, the majority of them do not persist in the next games.
• Lots of gore & violence – At last a game for adults. I am sick and tired of war games being for little kids.

Now the…bad things in the new Gears of War: E-Day

Oh boy, they are a lot and some of them really bad but let me try to write them down.
This game is the perfect bait and switch game. All the videos were showing to us a Marcus and Dom but the game is not about them at all.

• Mags Carter (Magsatron from now on)- A butch, ugly and lesbian girl boss character. She is not in the books or in later games and a lot of things such as closing the E-Holes (emergence holes) have now been attributed to her. She’s there to boss around Marcus, Dom and Lucas. I have watched reviews that they say she’s black. She doesn’t seem to be black, maybe the nose structure? Her skin color to me wasn’t a problem and I feel really uncomfortable to agree and be placed with every other negative reviewer about this character because most of them verse on the racist border.
  Her sexuality (or rather lack of) shouldn’t be in the game at all. Nobody cares if you like tacos than souvlaki. Why do you have to express that in a video game that humanity fights for survival? How does this help anyone? Or you? Hint: It doesn’t. It only creates people who will attack your character for good reasons.
  Are you forced to have a lesbian character in the game? Fine. Can’t you at least put an attractive lesbian instead of this Magsatron thing?
  There is a site about hamsters that could give you lots of lesbian women that won’t make the players to want to poke our eyes out with hot needles!
  We men love Lesbian women! After all we too are lesbians too! We only like women! But not the ugly, butch, short haired trolls!
  Every time Magsatron talks, the “Shut up Meg!” from Family Guy comes to my mind and I should add this sound effect to my twitch stream.
• Lucas Reyes – The rookie. A character who is there to be kinda Damon Baird, the engineer of the team, he only gets mocked and shut off by Magsatron and later on by Marcus and Dom as well. At Act IV he gets to explain something from his background and while they try to appeal to our emotion and make us all feel “there there Lucas, everything will be alright!” this made me feel furious!
  Lucas said he was with his Gear friends and because he scored high in the technical part he went to the academy while his friends became COGs and went to the battle. He used his knowledge to “hack” into the comms system in order to chat with them only to get them killed down the line because the radio gave up their position. This made almost the caricature of Dom to say in an angry voice “You broke protocol?” and I was sure they will argue and create some tension in the team for the first time and…Magsatron…the new bait and switch protagonist shut the whole conversation down by saying “oh you did something wrong, we all do wrong things, let it go, grow up!”… down the drain any emotion I had, why? Because the Magsatron belittled the situation and turned it completely off.
  It is not a little thing to break protocols in the military resulting in the deaths of a squad. You can’t equivocate this and say “grow up and move on”, dude? You had people killed due to your negligence! Why would I want to play with either of those characters?
• Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago – Why are they in the game? Why did they use money to hire voice actors for those 2 characters? They could have used audio from previous games since they are nothing in the game. The protagonist is clearly Magsatron de facto.
  They lured us in to play with those 2 beloved characters only to have them playable yes but no dialogue, no nerve, no interaction between the two. They are there just to be there. Marcus is the leader of the Bravo squad but not one time he called the shots or lead.
  He just obeys Magsatron. Sure there are some passive dialogues among the characters but those are hit or miss since most of them happen during battle scenes and of course the focus is on the battle and not in the dialogues.
  I am roughly 65% through the campaign as I write this, and so far Marcus and Dom feel almost completely irrelevant to the story.
• Evil white man general – Of course and the bad guy had to be a white man who is absolutely wrong in absolutely everything. He became a general for no reason after all. He dies before the half of the game. Of course he had to die. Patriarchy am I right?
• Girl bosses – It is not just Magsatron who bosses people around but another female character who is always right and has to command us around. Now listen up, I am ex-military and I have had women in higher ranks than me. Nothing wrong about getting orders from women. In the army you have to obey your superior in rank and you do not care for the gender but the way it has been done in this game is just to push the “message” that we see in everything that is left oriented: white men = bad, ugly women = good.
  It is sickening, cliche and has been done and repeated far too many times, do something original for once.
• Very bad performance – My pc is well within the specs: Ryzen 7 9800x3D, 64GB DDR5 Ram, nVidia RTX 3080 ti 12GB VRAM, 2TB pci-e gen 5.0 NVMe at 1440p and the game plays well as long as the VRAM doesn’t pass the 12GB VRAM. The moment a scene goes 12.1GB VRAM the game drops down to 7FPS.
• Bugs & glitches – The game has an enormous amount of bugs and glitches, some of them were also in the beta weekend which makes me think they never cared about reading the logs, they just do those events as a promotion. Otherwise there is no excuse for this mess.
  The problems exist both the campaign and the online parts of the game. I will go into details about the online part bellow.
• There is NO classical Horde mode – in my pre-review I wrote that I hoped there will be the new Horde Siege mode and the classical Siege mode, unfortunately this is not the case. It only has the new horde mode which is not as good. As a matter of fact it is the worst horde mode ever.
• No private lobbies – This one sucks hard! I want to complete some challenges the game has and I can’t because it is not just me but also the other players who want to complete those challenges leaving us all to fight each other for who will complete what instead of focusing on the enemy. I don’t know if they will add private lobbies that we can play solo later on but for the moment good luck to close 50 e-holes with frags when 12 players throw grenades at the same time for the same reason…
• Little to no coordination among teammates – In this horde mode people play for themselves mostly, they don’t help the team, they don’t revive and sometimes they pick up your dog tag and just keep it in their inventory instead of reviving you to the nearest fabricator. This way you lose exp, you do not help, you can’t do challenges while you are dead. I for one try to help my teammates, most of the times I have died was trying to help them up. Maybe it is my issue and I shouldn’t try to help, just leave them dead as they leave me. Maybe they think I suck at the game being lower in the kill count but how can I keep up my kill count when they fall all the time and I have to revive them?
  I have been in matches that half the team was AFK which makes it completely impossible for the 2 remaining players to complete anything. There is no mechanism to kick AFK players…
• Most reviews that take events of the game out of context – the first day the game was out and I was playing from the first minute it was on, I had a browser to my 2nd screen and I was looking for content, I am curious as to how there were reviews about the game while the game was just out and I was playing it at the same time and at a fast pace?! And they are mostly talking about a scene and play it on a loop to show how woke this game is.
  The game is woke but not as woke as the reviews make it so. There is a scene at Magsatron’s apartment -and I puked when it did close up to her ugly face- and the rookie tells to Magsatron that she’s not that bad for her age, again (eeeeeewwwwwwwwww), and she tells him something in the line of “to talk to me like that you have to wait for your balls to drop first”. Early reviewers take only this part to push out a message that the game is woke and puts men down…but this isn’t what happened! Please find the full scene yourselves and you will see that at least in this case, the reviews are wrong! I am not asking you to take my word for it, look it up! In that scene I laughed, Marcus and Dom also laughed, it didn’t feel forced or mean as they try to push it. And I did say about Lucas that he is a character to be mocked and put down, well, there you have it! But it is not an attack on all men and it is not without a reason that this dialogue exists.

The indifferent things in Gears of War: E-Day

• LGBTQ+ flags – I know this will get me in trouble from both haters and supporters of the LGBTQ+ communities. I don’t understand what LGBTQ+ flags from United States of America of 21st century have to do with the game? They shouldn’t be in the game because they are irrelevant to the game. Do they bother me? Not at all! They are in the flags category all the way to the bottom.
  For someone to start hating the game for this…I am sorry whoever you are but you must a horrible human being. Also country flags shouldn’t be in the game. Our world’s countries do not exist on Sera therefore shouldn’t be in the game as well.
• Versus mode – I have said this also in my previous articles about this game. I am not a PvP player, I played some matches vs bots for the challenges. It is a mode I do not enjoy. Loads of people love it, for me it is indifferent. Kudos to those of you who like it!

Closing thoughts & final verdict

My closing thoughts about the game is that I love that game despite its many negatives. It should have been better, it should have been the story we wanted with Marcus & Dom. Unfortunately this is a Magsatron Carter story. They pulled the perfect bait and switch on us.
I give the game so far a generous:

7/10

I can’t recommend it to hardcore fans of the series, your expectations (as mine) will be subverted bad and there are far too many IFs to make a scenario that would make this a decent game. The original trilogy remains the best there is but I would put this one above Judgement, 4 and 5 for the campaign. As for Horde? This is the worse Horde mode ever.
Their excuse for no fences and other deployables is that this enemy is new to them and now they are learning how to fight them…but really? Wasn’t humanity already for many years in war before E-Day? They never thought to make barbwire fences? or fences in general to name a just a few missing things?
Just say that you wanted to push this Magsatron character down our throats and cut the crap. You are not talking to little girls, the people who love Gears of War are usually people like me, military people and people who love shooter games. This excuse doesn’t fly to any of us.

Note again: Campaign is about 65% completion, final verdict might change.