Though there's still plenty of waist-high cover, ebb-and-flow firefighting, and braindead machismo, Gears E-Day proves that looking back can, indeed, help you look forward, too.

Gears of War: E-Day could very easily have been a rote prequel, the kind of thing that asks questions no-one particularly cares about. We were, after all, introduced to the doomed planet of Sera in 2006's ground-breaking first Gears of War title. But the only thing ground-breaking in E-Day is, well, quite literally the ground: that eponymous 'E' stands for 'Emergence', since E-Day takes us back to the very beginning, when the antagonistic Locust first started crawling out of their holes to wreak havoc on humanity.

But The Coalition doesn't need to be ground-breaking here. Nor does the series' hardcore fanbase want that. Watching the comments and discourse bubble around my Gears of War E-Day campaign review, one thing became very clear to me: Gears doesn't need to be complicated. Gears 5 tried that - it tried to shake off the shackles of the dudebro machismo that defined the original trilogy and the result was fine. But here, as the studio turns about face to go back to gore, provide something genuinely challenging, and inject a bit of life into a floundering Xbox, it perhaps hits upon an uncomfortable truth: a successful Xbox exclusive doesn't really look that different to how it did 20 years ago.

That's not a criticism, per se. I think E-Day is excellent at what it does: it's a cover shooter with Tarantino-esque comedy violence barely held together by a plot that falls apart like so much Locust viscera if you examine it for more than five minutes. But - as I said in my campaign review - that's fun. That's fine. I don't come to Gears for Hugo Award-level narrative conceit, I come for wet headshots, arcade cover shooting, and chainsaw guns that go brrr.

And, by that metric, the game is awesome. I won't retread too much ground talking about the campaign here (which is a somewhat ironic statement, as the game makes you go back-and-forth over the same bridge no less than three times throughout the course of the campaign), and instead I will let that form one pillar of the overall E-Day experience. The other two are 'Versus' and 'Horde Siege' - and I'm starting with the latter, because I think that's the real, exposed heart of Gears.

Horde has been a fixture of the series since it was introduced in Gears of War 2 (2008), where it was a fairly barebones affair: fend off 50 waves of increasingly pissed-off enemies, survive. It's Gears' take on CoD Zombies, effectively, and has been present in every game since - with varying levels of success along the way. But E-Day's reinterpretation of the mode outshines them all, despite a convoluted on-boarding and some janky UI. Instead of four player-teams (or five, for some reason, Gears 5), E-Day teams you up with 11 others, breaking you off into units of four players each. The maps in the mode are taken from the open-ended areas in the campaign - which justifies their existence, since I found them aggravating and a bit pointless in the story mode - and feature multiple objectives.

You know what it reminds me of? Destiny. With multiple 'fireteams' zipping around the map and completing their own objectives, whilst simultaneously dropping in to help other squads here and there, it generates this slightly buzzy, frantic energy - especially when a Corpser or Brumak tunnels up out of nowhere and suddenly all 12 players are forced into repelling this behemoth threat before they can realistically continue with their own missions. Each squad gets to choose its own difficulty, and that scales damage dealt and received to your team. It's possible to have a squad playing 'Allfather' difficulty whilst another is on 'Rookie', and you're both trying to take down the same cursed spider-bastard at once, but having a very different experience in tandem. It's a bit of engineering wizardry that can be activated in Campaign, too. Shout out to Kate Rayner, longstanding Coalition technical director, because she and her team have managed to employ all those Unreal 5 dials and levers in an artisanal way here.

The process is gamified by 'energy' drops; the more energy you have, the more weapons, ammo, defensive installations, or squad upgrades you can buy. You choose a class before deployment, and then you can spend your 'energy' to kit yourself out more as the siege continues. There have been so many emergent moments in my 15 hours of playing this mode, I'm a little taken aback. The highlight was running to my extraction point after clearing our group's objective, seeing another squad nearly get wiped by a minigun-toting Grinder, and landing a perfect headshot to splatter its brains all over the concrete. A slide, a roll, and I revive one ally. A hop over some low cover and I've got another. A tight corner swat turn gets me the third. I then 'roadie run' to the chopper with one second left before extraction, whilst my own fireteam covers my ass with suppressing fire from the helicopter. "Enjoy the ride, Gears," the game prompts me, as my watch tells me I've entered a 'cardio' session.

I've not experienced such multiplayer synergy since my Destiny 2 days; it's enough to keep me playing into the future. I think Gears will remain on my harddrive just for Horde Siege, if I'm honest - there's no better way of blowing off steam after a rough day than teaming up with a group of randos (yep, the matchmaking is solid) and popping Locust heads. Between the level design - or is it urban planning? - and three-tier cover mechanics, Versus and Siege feel fresh enough compared to past Gears games to be worth investigating (even if you thought all this juvenile musclebound bloodletting was behind you).

I've never thought so much about a jump button in all my life. Gears, it turns out, really needed one. It sounds small fry, but cover shooters are always such a drag when the clunky controls force you into certain death: in the 360 games, it always felt like you were moving digital characters around an analogue world - Marcus moved like a rook on a chessboard but the floor was actually just real ground all along. E-Day makes everyone more acrobatic - maybe it's because they're not quite Rob Liefeld-esque steroid-addled abominations at this point - which makes climbing or mantling over cover more intuitive. Slides and rolls glue you to cover that's actually quite far away, which makes everything feel more cinematic and intentional. And even incendiary grenades, emulsion-powered shotguns and other fancy wares make cover-swapping an integral part of the strategy: you can't camp, in any mode, otherwise you're going to get skewered.

Which brings us to Versus. Gears PvP was always either Very Fun or Very Annoying, depending on how well you're doing. But that binary has been offset by these new acrobatic Gears you find yourself controlling - leaping over insta-death pits is exhilarating. Moreso if you land and charge up your Torque Bow to land an insta-kill headshot on an unsuspecting greenhorn cowering in fear across the gap. And even more so if the bolt that pierced the rookie's head then lands in the leg of a seasoned vet who runs into his teammate and explodes them both. That, right there, is uniquely Gears.

The flip side is, of course, when it happens to you. Or when you encounter a sweaty tryhard 'wall-bouncer' that manages to wipe your squad in seconds. Or when you mistime a jump and fall into an instadeath pit. Or when you run out of ammo whilst defending a 'king of the hill' flavoured objective and find yourself using a disgusting gun you've touched exactly once in the past 35 hours of playtime. It's part of the experience, sure, but… eurgh. 'Back to Horde Siege', I mutter, as chunks of my skull decorate xX_yourmum69_Xx's shop-bought premium skin.

The same tidal nature present in Campaign maps onto the rest of the E-Day package: for everything I want to celebrate, there's something that just about undercuts it. Horde Siege is a phenomenal interpretation of the Gears formula, but the UI, onboarding and pacing is a little wonky. Versus is a tight, focused exploration of PvP cover-shooting, but there are balance and mechanical issues that make it hard for more casual players to enjoy. The Campaign is pacy and well-designed and fun, but with baffling checkpoints and a couple of repetitive beats.

Gears of War: E-Day is a game of contrasts: conservative by its very nature, but with enough technical proficiency and iterative thinking to make its old-fashioned ideas feel competent and engaging. Bleeding edge graphics with 20-year-old design sensibilities drip into this bloody crucible of familiarity that does nostalgia right. It's telling that a successful Xbox exclusive looks the same in 2026 as it did in 2006, but that isn't a mark against The Coalition and the retro-modern chimera its spawned here - this beast stands proudly on its own two feet, as a living example of how you appeal to a generation of gamers that had its cake and ate it. And that's no mean feat.

A copy of Gears of War E-Day was provided for this review by Xbox.