Is Gears of War E-Day Worth Getting?

I got about four hours with the Gears of War: E-Day beta this past Sunday, and I spent almost all of it in Siege mode. I’ve loved Horde since it dropped in Gears of War 2, so the second I got in, I knew where I was headed. E-Day lands October 6th, and after this weekend I’m all in.

Let’s start with the thing every Gears player is going to notice first. The roadie run is gone. Completely gone. When I started playing, not doing it felt strange, almost like muscle memory misfiring. But getting around the map felt more natural without it. The old roadie run made you feel like a hulking mass slamming into walls. This just felt like moving. It felt easier to control, and I stopped missing the old way pretty fast.

What they added in its place is the ability to vault and climb onto different levels of the map, and that verticality is something Gears has needed for a long time. It opens up angles you never had before. Even in multiplayer, where I am admittedly not good, I kept trying to climb up and catch someone from a spot they weren’t watching. I wasn’t successful, but it made people play differently than the old slam-to-cover routine.

The new control scheme leans modern. You click the left stick to run now, and jumping and vaulting got moved over to Y. You can flip run back to A in the settings, and I almost bailed to Legacy mode, but I forced myself to stay on modern so I’d actually learn it instead of clinging to old habits. The one thing I miss is vaulting over cover by hitting A again. That took some rewiring. There’s also a slide now that reminds me of Call of Duty or Halo Infinite, and I abused the mess out of it in Siege. Run, hit A again, slide right into a grub, and get some dope kills in the process.

The weapons are where E-Day really got me. Every gun felt like it should. The Retro Lancer, the Mark 1, the prototype Lancer, all of them felt natural in the hand. The Gnasher felt amazing the whole way through. I keep thinking about Halo: Campaign Evolved, where the guns felt a little off to me, just kind of there, no weight to the gunplay. E-Day is the opposite. Everything felt tight. I didn’t get to every weapon, but I got my hands on the Mauler, the human Gatling gun, and had a blast with it.

One small change I loved more than I expected: the active reload moved from up top by your ammo count down closer to your character. You’re not pulling your eyes off the action to hit a perfect reload anymore. It took a second to break the old habit of glancing up, but it feels great, and it’s the kind of little detail that tells you the people making this actually play it. Cue Gary Jules singing “Mad World” in the background, because this is the Gears feeling I fell in love with.

Now to the reason I’m writing this at all. Siege mode. This is not the old locked-off Horde where it’s just you and your squad holding one arena. E-Day drops you into the actual city, and there are four different teams running different missions across the map at the same time. King Ravens overhead, multiple companies pushing to quell this unknown force that just emerged. It feels like what Gears is supposed to be, a mad dash against an unstoppable enemy, and there’s real history baked into these places. Sera, Jacinto, all of it carries weight.

Those other companies aren’t just set dressing either. You see their markers, you can interact with them, and you can get roped into side quests. Take down a target, destroy some intel, that kind of thing. Do them, and your long-form run gets easier because you earn upgrades to buy at the stations. The upgrades are random and different every match, so you’re not grinding the same loop over and over. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes your whole team wanders off to the other side of the map chasing objectives and you’re left doing everything yourself. That happened to me more than once, usually with a pack of Boomers bearing down while I tried to make it to exfil so we could all go home together.

The deployable side of Horde shifted too. There’s less emphasis on fortifying one spot with barbed wire and decoys. You still get decoys and traps that slow enemies down, but Siege is more about surviving the waves as they come than turtling in a corner. When you down enemies they drop energy, and you spend that energy on ammo, deployables, and those side-quest upgrades.

The progression is where I got hooked. Every weapon starts with a mod called Full Metal Jacket, so a perfect reload gives you perfect ammo and a damage boost. As you earn weapon parts from successful runs and side quests, you unlock more, accuracy, faster reloads, whatever fits the gun. What I like is that you’re not just racking up points to hit wave 50 in a single run. You’re building a better gear over time so that when you do go for a crazy endless wave push, and there is a mode for exactly that, you can actually handle it.

There are four classes: assault, breacher, marksman, and medic. I opened with medic, which is usually my lane, and it just would not gel with my Gears playstyle. I swapped to breacher, the shotgun and Mark 1 Lancer combo, and had a way more interesting time. Breacher also gets a cooldown stim that snaps you back to full health right before you die, and I hit that thing more times than I’d like to admit. Reviving teammates is quicker than it’s ever been too, which keeps the pace up.

Underneath all that is a full gear system. The more you play, the more you level and unlock. You get tactical gear with three slots and twelve mods to slot in, plus armor mods on top. The one I ran was spray and pray, which tightens your accuracy and cuts recoil while you’re in cover, and it made a real difference. I’d honestly forgotten how much damage you can do firing from cover in Gears until this reminded me. It let me pin down the smarter enemies, the ones that don’t just rush you, and buy time to move my crew around. In one fight it was basically me and a squad of AI bots that were doing nothing, so I dumped every slow trap I had, bogged down the whole wave, and clawed out a win.

That’s the Siege loop, and I love it. Getting a real group together, pushing wave after wave through the city, tuning your tactical gear and armor mods and weapon upgrades to fit how you actually want to play, that’s going to be a lot of fun to sink into.

I did hop over to multiplayer, and I’ll say it again plainly: I am bad at Gears multiplayer. It’s not my thing. I ran a few Team Deathmatch rounds and got halfway through one Team Conquest. The maps are pulled from parts of the game you’ll see later, full of good lanes and mixed terrain, and the new climbing and vaulting adds tactical options we didn’t have. You can close distance on someone fast, hop over a staircase instead of running the long way, come at them from a direction they don’t expect. The one I played most was a farmers market map with groceries everywhere, and it was pure chaos. I got wrecked. Still had a good time watching how the new movement changes the flow.

There are rough edges. Enemies clipped through geometry, I clipped through trying to curb stomp somebody, small stuff like that. None of it worried me. That’s what a beta is for, and there’s time to clean it up before October 6th. What matters is that the core feels right. The movement, the guns, the little UI touches, and above all Siege mode, all of it points at a game that understands what made Gears great in the first place. Siege sealed the deal for me, and I have zero doubt they’re going to knock the campaign out of the park. You can play it through Game Pass, which is exactly how I got into the beta this weekend.

Did you get into the beta? Are you counting down to the 6th? Let me know.