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, ugly, lesbian girl boss protagonist.

If they were honest about 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: Campaign is now completed.

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, you can change it to the Metallica one, but instrumental.
• Verticality – Finally, our characters can jump whenever they want, although 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 it 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, there are a lot, and some of them are really bad, but let me try to write them down.

This game is the perfect bait and switch game. All the videos were showing us 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 who was dishonorably discharged from the army. 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 say she’s black. She doesn’t seem to be black to me; maybe the nose structure could be? Anyway, her skin color wasn’t a problem to me, and I feel really uncomfortable agreeing with and being grouped with every other negative reviewer about this character because most of them veer into the racist border, and her race isn’t my issue with this horrible character.
Her sexuality (or rather, the lack of femininity) shouldn’t be in the game at all. Nobody cares if you like tacos more than souvlaki.

Why do you have to express that in a video game where 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 who won’t make the players want to poke our eyes out with hot needles!
We men love lesbian women! After all, we too are lesbians! We only like women! But not the ugly, butch, short-haired trolls!
Also women love playing hot female characters in video games, just check this AION 2 crap that was released recently.

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 and play it every time she opens her mouth.

• Lucas Reyes – The rookie. A character who is there to be kinda like 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 emotions and make us all feel, “There, there, Lucas, everything will be alright!“, this made me feel furious!
Lucas said he was enlisted with his Gear friends, and because he scored high in the technical part, he was sent to the academy while his friends became COGs and went into 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 it almost the caricature of Dom to say in an angry voice, “You broke protocol?” and I was sure they would 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 went any emotion I had.
Why?
Because Magsatron belittled the situation and completely shut it down.
It is not a little thing to break protocols in the military, resulting in the deaths of a squad. You can’t equivocate this with something sily and trivial and say, “Grow up and move on.”
Dude? You had people killed due to your negligence!
Oh, and he talks ALL THE TIME!
“This enemy looks like a ballsack!”
Yeah, mofo, I know. I am looking at it! We all called it that during the beta weekends. We didn’t wait for you to state the obvious!

Why would I want to play with either of those characters? Both are highly unlikable and do NOT deserve a redemption arc.
Would any of you feel comfortable being in a real squad with either of those retards? Me, certainly not.
I would shoot them between the eyes to save paperwork.

And this is me being kind.

• Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago – Why are they in the game? Why did they use money to hire voice actors for those two characters? They could have used audio from previous games since they are ghosts in the game. The protagonist is clearly Magsatron de facto.

They lured us in to play with those two beloved characters only to have them playable, yes, but with no dialogue, no nerve, and no interaction between the two. They are there just to be there.
Marcus is the leader of the Bravo squad, but not one time does he call the shots or lead.
He just obeys Magsatron mostly and, in Act IV, Lucas.
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 on the dialogue.
As I have now finished the campaign, Marcus and Dom at last get to talk in the very last Act of the game for a very short time.

The game is roughly 80% Magsatron’s story, 15% Lucas Reyes’ story and merely 5% Marcus and Dom’s story.

This game is a total letdown for the player base, an insult to Gears of War, an insult to gamers.
Women don’t need to be bossy and humiliate men in order to show “equality”. There is no “equality” presented in this game.
This is a leftist manifesto story in a video game with only one goal: to poison the minds of the people who play it.
They also made Dom suicidal for some reason.
It is not confirmed that his family is dead in this game, yet in the end of the game he wants to sacrifice himself. This is out of character for the Dom of the books and later games.
Yes, Dom dies through sacrifice in the end of Gears of War 3, but this is many years in the future, where he finds his wife, loses her, only to find her again and this time lose her for good.

This is the moment when Dom actually died, in Gears of War 2.

• Evil white man Colonel – Of course, the bad guy had to be a white man who is absolutely wrong about absolutely everything.

He became a Colonel for no reason after all, right?
He dies before the halfway point of the game.
Of course he had to die.
Patriarchy, am I right?
Who needs experienced military personnel when you have Magsatron, who had the power all along inside her and the patriarchy pushed her down, 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, Captain Akila Gray.

Now listen up: I am ex-military, and I have had women in higher ranks than me.
Nothing wrong with getting orders from women.
In the army, you have to obey your superior in rank, and you do not care about 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:

straight white men = bad
traditional family = bad
ugly women = good
trans = good
PDF files = good
minorities = good
prisoners = good

We live those things in reality. This game also has to push those down our throats as well?
And why do they all have to look like men?
All those girl bosses are ultra-masculine and muscular for some reason. Thankfully this is not an unlike situation as in The Last of Us Part 2 with Abbytron character that she’s bigger than Hulk for fuck’s sake! In a post apocalyptic world without access to steroids and other boosters how did this thing became this large? And men didn’t?
It is sickening, cliché 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 PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe at 1440p, and the game plays well as long as the VRAM doesn’t pass 12GB.

The moment a scene goes to 12.1GB VRAM, the game drops down to 7 FPS.

• 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 in the campaign and in the online parts of the game. I will go into details about the online part below.

• There is NO classic Horde mode – In my pre-review, I wrote that I hoped there would be the new Horde Siege mode and the classic Horde 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 over who will complete their challenges first 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 closing 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 at the nearest Fabricator.

This way, you lose XP, you do not help, and you can’t do challenges while you are dead.
I, for one, try to help my teammates. Most of the times I have died, it was while trying to help them up.
Maybe it is my issue and I shouldn’t try to help. Maybe I should just leave them dead as they leave me.
Could they think I suck at the game because I have a lower 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 where half the team was AFK, which makes it completely impossible for the two remaining players to complete anything.

There is no mechanism to kick AFK players…

• Most reviews take events of the game out of context – The first day the game was out, I was playing from the first minute it was available.

I had a browser open on my second screen, and I was looking for content about this game. 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 playing it on a loop to show how woke this game is.
The game is woke, but not as woke as the reviews make it out to be.
There is a scene at Magsatron’s apartment – and I puked when it did a close-up to her ugly face for her to use the inhaler – and the rookie tells Magsatron that she looks great for her age.

Again, eeeeeewwwwwwwwww!!!

No, she doesn’t look great. I don’t think this Magsatron looked great at any point in her life, not even as a fetus.
And she tells him something along the lines of, “Why don’t you come talk shit when your balls 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 portray 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.
Please don’t watch reviews of the game that are super political.
Yes, the game is woke, as I said many times.
There is no reason to flame it without valid facts.

• Sudden wipes/deaths/revives in Horde – This has now happened to me far too many times to call it a coincidence or say that I wasn’t paying attention on screen.

I play the game, I am covered, we have cleared the enemies, I use the pulse to check for enemies, there is nobody there, and without getting any damage indication, BAM, dead.
Completely dead.
Not downed.
This has happened to me both with me being the only one affected, with my whole team being affected, and we have also gotten revives without having any healer around to use the perk.
It is super annoying. It made me lose perfect scores far too many times.
And one time, for me, it was like I was getting downed and revived on a loop about four times.
The fifth time, I became a dog tag.
No enemy on screen.
This bug existed during the beta weekends as well.

• Enemies spawn out of thin air anywhere – This is perhaps one of the worst things I have seen. This was happening in the beta weekends, and it was one of the most common topics on the Steam discussion page.

I will try to paint a picture.
My team and I go to the objective’s location. It is full of enemies.
We kill them all and take the place.
We start the mission, turn our backs to that room since we have just cleared it, and we try to focus on the front and sides that are open and most likely for the enemy to arrive from.
The mission starts, and the enemy indeed comes from where we expect.
We open fire and try to kill them, only to be downed or killed by enemies spawning on our backs!
Enemies do NOT just spawn from E-Holes. They also spawn from various doors that we, as players, can’t interact with, but which become spawn points for the enemy.
BUT the game also doesn’t have an issue spawning an enemy out of thin air.
I have seen it plenty of times.

• Can’t complain about LGBTQ+ in the game’s chat = ban – This hasn’t happened to me, and most likely it won’t happen to me.

If you see, I put the LGBTQ+ flags below in the indifferent things of the game.
But there are reports of people being either temporarily or permanently banned from the online modes of the game for just saying, “WTF with the flags?”
Which is a valid question.
Not to loop again: if you are LGBTQ+, good for you!
Why does the rest of the world need to know that in a game that takes place on the fictional planet Sera and where humanity fights for survival?

• Dead AI in the campaign – The AI companions in the campaign are completely passive and retarded.

They don’t assist like 99% of the time. Even if the enemy is in their faces and they use a shotgun, they will miss the shot.
And worse yet? When I got downed by an enemy, it took them an enormous amount of time to revive me, and in a few cases I completely died because they never came to revive me.
To add to that, I watched a reviewer saying, “You can’t die in this game, they revive you so fast!”
NO, just NO.
Maybe one time in 100 they revived me fast?

• Early quitters – Now this is not new in E-Day, all previous horde modes had early quitters but I can’t help to raise this issue. Sure, people can invite their friends to take the place of the person or persons who left the game but this happens very rarely in any horde game. I too had a Crash To Desktop (CTD) a couple of times after the most recent patch but I kinda doubt that this is the case every time.

The indifferent things in Gears of War: E-Day

• LGBTQ+ flags – I know this will get me in trouble with both haters and supporters of the LGBTQ+ communities.

I don’t understand what LGBTQ+ flags from the United States of America of the 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 be a horrible human being.
Also, country flags shouldn’t be in the game.
Our world’s countries do not exist on Sera, therefore they 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 versus 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 are 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 a generous:

7/10

And that is because, in the end, Marcus and Dom actually speak.
This saved it from being a 6.
I can’t recommend it to hardcore fans of the series.
Your expectations, as mine were, will be subverted badly, 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 worst 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 at war for many years before E-Day?
They never thought to make barbed-wire fences? Or fences in general, to name 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 kids.
The people who love Gears of War are usually people like me: military or ex-military people and people who love shooter games.
This excuse doesn’t fly with any of us.