Hello fellow Gladiators!
Today I want to share a tale, a journey about Gears of War: E-Day. A pre-review, if you will, just hours before it unlocks.
In this piece, I want to touch on my tough road to buying the game (again), my previous critique of the beta, what I hope they have changed, and what I still deeply fear about the game.
💳 The Financial Sacrifice (Not Sponsored!)
So today after I got paid, I tried to pay off my credit card – which, for the first time in the last 5 years, hit the limit due to unforeseen events and bad planning on my part. Despite that, I managed to grab the Premium Edition.
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No, dropping 99.99 Euros wasn’t an easy call, and the debt on my card increased by buying the game.
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I am only sharing this to let you guys know: this is not a sponsored review.
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I love Gears of War games, and I had to sacrifice a lot to buy it.
🔄 Why I Bought It (Again) After Refunding
I bought the game once it was available on Steam for the Beta Weekends. In my review back then, I said it left me cold, and I want to be clear: I do not expect the game to have been fixed miraculously in that short amount of time. I still expect a mediocre-at-best Horde Siege mode. (The Versus mode was always indifferent to me, so I can’t comment much on that).
After the beta weekends and seeing how the new Horde Siege modes turned out, I refunded my Steam pre-order for two reasons:
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Financial reasons: I still am in a bad situation.
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Sending a message: I wanted to send a message to the developers about Horde mode – what they did was in the very wrong direction.
I really don’t mind if they want to add this mode as extra, but the classical Horde should also be there, and in the end, we’ll see which one people like more: classical Horde, or a mode where nobody follows any rules (e.g., 12 people on the same map but everybody is alone, with side missions popping up just because 1 member of the squad decided to run to the other side of town to start it).
🎬 The Campaign & The Hype
We didn’t get to play the campaign during the beta weekends. As far as I remember, Gears of War beta weekends before launch were always exclusively for versus modes, so having the Horde Siege mode was a surprise this time. The campaign wasn’t expected in the beta anyway.
I have seen videos, for example, this official gameplay demo:
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Of course it excites me! I don’t get nostalgia to prevent nintendopithecus attacks, how can I be nostalgic of something I haven’t experienced?
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FOMO? You can say that.
So for the campaign, at least from what I’ve watched online and in reviews from people at various summer gaming events, I have mixed feelings. Of course, 2 or even 20 minutes can’t speak for the rest of the game, not that everything I saw was bad; if it was bad, I wouldn’t have pre-ordered the game.
The Character Issue:
There are some problems with it, for example, the new squad member, Mags Carter. Oh boy… I read her biography in the beta Horde Siege menu, but damn, she is really ugly!
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I have the books, I know the lore, Mags Carter isn’t in any of them.
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The Gears of War universe in general has very good characters that could have been featured, but nope, they had to give us a trash-can-head woman who was discharged for her injuries, and now she’s part of the squad and will be everywhere we go.
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If we play a 4-player co-op campaign, 1 of the 4 players will have to play with this character. Sure, that player won’t see her face, but we will!
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And I wish Mags Carter and that mayor (who is a bit prettier than Mags, but still not a good-looking character) were the only issues.
⚠️ What I Fear About the Game
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The Campaign: It remains a mystery so far. I just hope it will be good and follow the lore.
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The Horde Siege Mode: This remains my biggest fear by far, based on what I experienced firsthand in the two beta weekends. It was mediocre at very best.
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Performance Issues: Performance wasn’t very good. Of course, it didn’t have frame generation for whatever reason, but still, it wasn’t good on my Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 3080 Ti with 64GB of RAM, running from an NVMe PCIe Gen 5.0 drive.
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Chaotic Maps & Disorganized Squads: The maps are chaotic in a bad way, and crossing paths with other players was tricky at best. When I tried to play Horde with random players, my squad every time ran off in different directions, abandoning the designated area, and I was left all alone to defend it. Why do players abandon the main objective? You’ll have to ask them about that!
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Randoms & Daily Tasks: I also fear that people will join a Horde game just to do their daily tasks and leave early, a classic issue in every Horde mode. Unless we play with friends and agree beforehand to go to Wave 50 (like the older Horde modes), random players always destroy the game and the fun for the rest of us.
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No Soul in Horde: This is exactly what I saw in the beta weekends. There was no soul in the Horde Siege mode: nothing to build, nothing to maintain, no engineer, just a bunch of Damage Dealers buying off the fabricator bullets and grenades. This is wrong on so many levels and not enjoyable on top of that!
✨ What I Hope For the Game
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Squad Customization: I hope we can change characters in the squad. Needless to say, if this is the case, Mags is out for good…well, unless the other choices are even worse than Mags, but I doubt it. But I can hope we have the ability to change squad members.
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Campaign Skins: I hope we can change skins for characters in the campaign. It can be done in Horde Siege, and it can be done in Versus, I hope we can do that in the campaign as well. There is a Mags skin where she wears a full-face helmet: PERFECT! If I can’t get rid of her, I certainly hope I can change her face to something else.
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Classic Horde Mode: Next thing, I really hope they will add a classic Horde mode, preferably from Gears of War 4. Personally, I enjoyed that one the most.
Stay strong my fellow gladiators and stay true!
