It’s almost time for you to dive into Gears of War: E-Day, a title that’s been a long time coming, and perhaps one where the final leg of the journey had you more impatient for it thanks to the first game’s PS5 debut last year.
Well, if you’re wondering about how it’s going to perform on your platform of choice, we can tell you that things are looking, and feeling, real good this time around. There’s a major visual leap that merits further discussion, but not before we get into what’s on offer on each playable platform and how the game makes use of what it’s got with each configuration.
To that end, it’s a good idea to begin with the Xbox Series X and how Marcus’ early days are brought to life on it.
A Range Of Options On The Series X
It’s the usual round of offerings on the Series X, with Quality, Balanced, and Performance being your options, something that’s become a sort of standard for the beefier versions of current-gen hardware.
The Quality Mode sets things at 30fps in exchange for “higher visual fidelity”; Performance goes for 60fps to ensure “smooth motion and responsiveness”, while Balanced targets 40fps while bridging the gap between the other two modes on the visual front, although it does need a 120Hz display. If you’re planning on hosting 3-4 player co-op in the Campaign, it’s worth knowing that even Performance is going to target 30 fps.
We’ve got a few general observations to go over before tackling how each mode performs and which one is our pick for this particular experience. Gears of War: E-Day is a busy game, and there’s an astounding amount of stuff happening on your screen, whether it’s right in front of you or in the background, with the lighting working hard to illuminate each scene with aplomb, while the sound design really sells the action alongside some great voice acting. It looks stunning at night, with atmospheric lighting and rich global illumination bringing Kalona’s devastated streets to life.
Kalona is a city under attack, and the balance between its proud structures that are still untouched by the locust conflict and desolate areas where that fight has already unfolded helps showcase a level of detail that deserves all the praise we can give it. The presentation here definitely lends itself well to the Quality Mode’s visuals, but is that FPS nerf something we could live with in a game like this?
Let’s begin with buildings around Kalona that are still intact. Look at a glass panel on one of them when you’re playing on Quality, and you’re going to see reflections that shift with your own perspective, the light behaving exactly as it would if you were actually there. The gentle glow of the sun serves to better underline the suffocating darkness of the shadows if you’re out in the city at night, chasing down whatever new objective prevents Fenix and his Squad from getting a well-deserved break.
Textures and volumetric effects, of which smoke and fog do occur quite often as you’d expect from a city-turned-warzone, are all very immersive touches that help sell the impression that you’re trying to save a city under siege. Every firefight comes with explosions, particle effects, environmental destruction that happens in real time, and, of course, gunplay that’s quite responsive in the hands while it looks and feels very satisfying to execute on screen.
Of course, the Performance Mode is where that gunplay is really going to shine, and it was the option we defaulted to for most of our playtime. It simply is the best way to enjoy this one’s combat, and while it does achieve that by sacrificing reflections and a bit of visual flair, it isn’t inferior by any means, and looks good enough to make it easy to recommend.
There is the Balanced Option for those of you who can take that dip in frame rates for improved visuals, but it’s going to come down to personal taste. We do recommend trying each one out for yourself since they’re all worthy options to experience a game whose visual polish is a noteworthy upgrade from the last appearance in the franchise.
But it is worth mentioning that performance on the Series X was excellent across the board, with nary any stuttering or dropped frames to dispel the immersion and engagement that comes so easily once E-Day gets some momentum going.
An Absolute Beast On PC
You’re probably thinking that the console version getting as much praise as it has spells good news for those of you playing this one on PC. You’re certainly correct, although there are minor concerns.
Our test machine had an RTX 3080 Ti, Ryzen 9 5900X, and 32 GB RAM, running every setting from High to Ultra for different test scenarios, with 4K output and DLSS set to Ultra Performance. A brief rundown on PC settings options is needed here. There are also a lot of ways to tweak the experience to your liking, with sliders for the effects, reflections, ray tracing geometry, post-processing, motion blur, animation, and cosmetic quality, a bunch of settings around ray tracing, and so many more to allow you to make changes and get the best out of the game on your machine.
Note that E-Day is an extremely demanding game, so our frame rates were hovering around 30 to 50 fps during particularly chaotic combat moments. As expected, these visual improvements create a distinct divide from the console release, solidifying this as the definitive platform for the game.
While the Series X did put up a surprisingly good fight, it cannot hope to match the superior detailing and lighting that add a lot of immersion to the often chaotic scenes you’re going to experience throughout the game. The reflections are more detailed, while a cleaner overall image is sustained very well across the chaos that unfolds, often abruptly enough that we’d have allowed the game a slight margin of error to catch up.
It doesn’t need it, though, as we saw a very stable image no matter how intense things were getting on screen. We’ve mentioned how things can get very busy, but allow us to paint you a picture of a set piece that occurs relatively early in the story. You’re looking down on the city with the barrel of a machine gun in front of you, and the Locust forces are not very happy with your aerial assault.
There are ground troops and explosive cans to take them out with, seeders launching projectiles that you must shoot down almost constantly, Locust soldiers moving around to try and get around your sightlines, the environmental destruction that stems from explosions along with particle effects, all against the backdrop of a city whose crumbling splendor is on proud display.
Those reflections in the glass panels on buildings? They’re noticeably better on PC, as are the ones in puddles that you step in from time to time. Rays of light aren’t just from the sun or lamps, but from Marcus’s armor and the world around him, all of them lighting up the world with a glow that’s very welcome in narrative moments where things are tense, and the shadows feature deep black levels that enhance contrast and highlight the ruined state of Kalona’s infrastructure.
The shadows and volumetrics are another highlight, along with excellent detailing and brilliant visual design that really help sell the setting of a city facing a siege against an enemy that is able to brush aside its defences with relative ease. Of course, getting into a battle is as smooth as it can get, and the new cover mechanics and movement systems really come to life with the improved visual fidelity on PC.
Even so, with so much happening during heavy action, noticeable performance drops occur from time to time. We wouldn’t call those game-breaking, but they were momentary lapses that stood out given how well the rest of the experience was presented and polished.
All in all, it’s very impressive that E-Day has been able to present such a level of visual quality on our PC while sustaining performance consistently enough, with only minor issues to break the spell Kalona casts on you.
Taking Gears Into The Future
You might be wondering about how well E-Day stacks up against Gears 5, especially after the latter received that upgrade for the Series X that made it quite the looker. However, The Coalition’s latest offering benefits from being an exclusively current-gen title, with improved detailing on the world and character models marking a tangible upgrade over its predecessor.
That’s quite a compliment given how Gears 5 was already so darn good at bringing the franchise’s signature blend of chaos and melancholic beauty to life. That chaos is another difference, and the sheer amount of environmental detail that shifts alongside the tide of battle is something you’re going to notice quite quickly in E-Day.
Of course, the new movement, animations, cover system, and the general quality of gunplay are also upgrades that are going to stand out. When you consider all of that against better textures, lighting systems, and the overall polish on the presentation, E-Day is definitely a step forward for the franchise’s design language, and is sure to contribute to everything we see from the franchise after it.
Kalona’s a big part of that, and is a design choice that allows The Coalition to retain enough creative control over what unfolds in front of you while allowing for a bit of player agency alongside levels designed to sustain the intensity of each fight no matter how long it lasts. Its architecture boasts of a time when humanity’s peaceful era led to some real progress, all of it now put at risk by the events of The Emergence.
As ground zero for the events of the franchise that follow its demise, Kalona City is the perfect stage for E-Day to tell its story. It’s how the game manages to present a sense of scale and spectacle while also managing to sell each fight as a desperate struggle for control of an area. It crumbles around you as the action unfolds, a constant reminder of the stakes for which you’re fighting. It’s the facilitator of a generational leap for the franchise, and a great one at that.
Know that we don’t say that lightly. Gears of War: E-Day is a game that comes together very well, bringing the excellence of individual technical systems to a canvas that makes even a fight that unfolds organically feel like it’s been scripted. It’s Gears as you know it, but graphically dialed up to make that familiar experience push forward into a future where further innovations now feel like they’re an inevitability.
Those performance drops on PC didn’t bother us, but they are an area where the game could use a bit of fine-tuning. Of course, there’s always the possibility that they melt away with more powerful hardware or at a lower resolution, but despite those minor flaws, across every supported platform, this game represents a clear evolution.
Finding the right balance between graphical fidelity and smooth performance is straightforward on Xbox Series X, thanks to its versatile display options, while its PC version shows you what it can do when you really push it to its limits.
No matter which one you’re playing, Gears of War: E-Day is a great tech showcase and is quite clearly one of the best-looking games of this generation.
