With a plate of chicken tikka masala in hand, I sat at my desk and booted up Gears of War: E-Day. The intro slide set the stakes for the story. On a planet called Sera, generations have fought constant wars over a substance called imulsion. Peace has been achieved just in time to be ruined by a so-called, “deeper threat”. The game opens with a worker heading into an underground train station to find a crew that came down twenty minutes before him. Predictably, he finds what’s left of them along with a ton of wendingo looking creatures that quickly add him to the list of the recently deceased. I turned on my brand new essential oil diffuser, hoping the scent of tea tree oil would drown out the smell of death that I could practically smell through the screen. Soon after, Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago are introduced. Luckily this opening is cutscene heavy which allowed me to enjoy my food while I racked my brain trying to remember what happened when I played Gears of War 2 way back in high school. Luckily, this game serves as a prequel for the whole series. As Marcus and Dom have a drink to commiserate a fallen comrade, tremors begin to rock the city. The duo, as well as two other characters named Mags Carter and Lucas Reyes, rush out to the street to witness the beginning of emergence day. I was finally given control of Mags, the character I selected to control at the campaign start screen, and off the group went to fight the wendigo looking things called crawlers. Almost immediately, my frame rate began fluctuating like the PIM reading of an antenna pointed directly at a metal object. 60, then 5, then 60, then 12, then 30, then 60 for a few seconds, then 0 for a few seconds before repeating the process.
“I don’t know if this is because the game is poorly optimized or if it’s because this pc is six years old and has been used predominantly to visit countless dodgy websites to watch premium live events for a wrestling company I refuse to support financially. Either way, this shit’s running like Fallout 4 on the PS4,” I said to my cat as she stared at me from her cat bed thing. She watched me fiddlefuck around with the graphics settings for about 30 minutes before I resorted to googling the issue. I did find other people having performance issues on PC, so it may just be poor optimization. But the visits to dodgy wrestling websites probably weren’t helping my PC run this game smoothly.
I decided to deal with the frame rate and graphical issues because I still wanted to see what the game was all about. I replayed the intro sequence, a whappin and a whompin the crawlers with a pipe until the squad finds guns. From the very first time I pulled the trigger, I was hooked on the gameplay. The shooting feels phenomenal and the active reload mechanic went a long way in keeping me hooked. I fought both the performance and the Locust as I worked my way through act 1. At the beginning of act 2 the game does something I didn’t expect. While it doesn’t become a fully open world game, it does open up a section of Kalona to be fully explored. I did the handful of side missions available here before moving on. The game only does this a few times but those sections are a good way to break up the linearity of the rest of the game. The vast majority of the rest of the game consists of fighting wave after wave of Locusts as they push deeper and deeper into Kalona. If I had any criticisms of the gameplay, they would be that the game does reuse areas a little too much for my taste. For instance, the game has Bravo squad fight across the same bridge multiple times. It’s an incredibly benign issue considering how much fun I had fighting across said bridge those times.
As far as the story goes, it’s fine. I think even the most feverish Gears fan would say that the story isn’t the selling point of these games. To keep it short, it does its job of justifying the combat sequences. I may even go as far as to say the story is kind of decent actually.
Final thoughts:
Before playing this game, my perception of Gear of War was basically Egoraptor’s Gears of Awesome cartoon. Remember when the internet was cool and not a complete garbage fire? Anyway, whereas my beloved Mass Effect came off as a third person shooter for refined, civilized science fiction enjoyers, Gear of War always came off as a third person shooter for cave people, and therefore, never appealed to me. After playing this game, I can't say I have any interest in going through the series as a whole, but I'll gladly play whatever the next one of these ends up being.
I give a 4.25 on the Meltzer scale.
Likes: Incredibly fun gameplay, customizable difficulty options, plenty of accessibility options
Dislikes: