Gears of War: E-Day review: Horde gets the strongest praise

Gears of War: E-Day pairs a guided campaign with four-versus-four competitive matches and three cooperative Horde formats. In his October 19, 2026 review, Dzhordzh Petrovich gives Horde his strongest praise, while criticizing the campaign’s character development and reporting specific Xbox and PC performance observations. Read Petrovich’s review.

The campaign follows a fixed route through Kalonna

Petrovich describes a five-act campaign with a set main route through large areas, plus optional missions, secrets, and upgrade modules. It is guided rather than open world, so exploration branches off the main path instead of replacing it.

He praises the environmental detail and mounting spectacle of Kalonna’s fall, but calls the story shallow and says the characters receive little development. Because E-Day depicts the conflict’s origins, Petrovich says newcomers can start here without being troubled by that limited character development.

For a separate estimate of campaign length, see our earlier coverage.

Horde shifts between extraction runs and survival

Petrovich describes three Horde formats. Blitz and Siege are extraction-style runs involving contracts, evacuation, and weapon-part rewards; classic survival instead lasts ten waves.

The mode’s team structure is a major part of its appeal in Petrovich’s account. Up to 12 players can take part across changing squads; players can use nearby voice chat, keep fortifications left behind by people who depart, and join forces when a boss appears. That setup gives a run room to shift from smaller squad objectives to a shared fight.

Horde has four classes: medic, sniper, assault, and breacher. Weapon access depends on class rank. Petrovich’s example is the crossbow, which unlocks for a sniper at level 17 and a medic at level 25. So choosing a class affects when a player can access particular weapons, even as squads change.

Competitive matches are four-versus-four

Petrovich describes competitive play as four-versus-four, with six maps at launch. His review also reports that Xbox competitive matches do not support split-screen. The review’s split-screen account applies instead to the campaign and Horde on Xbox Series X/S.

Xbox options and one PC result

For Xbox story and Horde modes, Petrovich lists options prioritizing resolution, targeting 60 frames per second, or targeting 40 frames per second for displays with variable refresh rate (VRR). Those listed options are separate from his split-screen observations: he saw rare drops from 60 fps in performance mode and no drops from 30 fps in quality mode.

Petrovich also reports that subtitles appeared only on the first player’s screen during split-screen, and that he encountered crashes to the console home screen during scenes or combat. These are observations from his play. His PC test reached 55–60 fps with DLAA enabled and frame generation disabled, a result tied to that test rather than a general PC benchmark.

Players differ on the campaign’s story

Individual responses in a Gears of War Reddit discussion offer a more specific contrast than a single verdict: u/Cuttlefish31, who identified as a longtime fan, praised the campaign’s classic Gears feel, while u/NextLineOfText praised its world-building and pacing but found the ending ineffective.