Gears of War E-Day’s campaign blends fresh combat with the franchise’s most emotional story yet

Imagine if Jaws had started with the boat heading out to kill the shark.

Would Alien be as effective if the movie opened after the chestburster scene had already taken place, and the rest of the crew were chasing down the Xenomorph? Would The Exorcist go down as one of the greatest films ever made if the first scene was the two priests arriving at Regan’s house to perform the exorcism?

Some of the best stories in popular culture are effective because you’re with the characters when their world changes. You’re there with Sam Neill when he sees a brontosaurus for the first time, you see Sarah Connor at a nightclub being attacked by the T-800.

King Kong’s rampage in New York is all the more meaningful because you saw him in his original habitat first and you saw him being captured, so you know he’s a trapped animal rather than just a grumpy old sod.

Of course, sometimes a story won’t start from the beginning, but further down the line, slowly revealing its backstory for the audience along the way. The most obvious example of this is the first Star Wars trilogy – over the course of episodes 4, 5 and 6 of this space opera, the gaps were filled in for the audience, explaining what happened before the characters got to this point.

The original Gears of War went with a similar idea. That first Xbox 360 game, released back in 2006, isn’t about the moment a peaceful world is suddenly being taken over, but instead takes place 14 years after Emergence Day, the day the Locust Horde overran the planet Sera and declared war on humanity.

When we first meet Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago, they’re grizzled veterans – not only after fighting the Locust for nearly a decade and a half, but from fighting in the Pendulum Wars before that. This war is new to us, but they’ve been fighting it their entire adult lives.

22 years after Star Wars was released, George Lucas gave fans Star Wars: Episode I, allowing them to finally see – for better or worse – the events leading up to the movies they loved so much. Now Gears of War fans are about to get the same thing, and even though they may not realise it they’ve waited almost as long – 20 years – to finally experience the events of Emergence Day first-hand.

I recently went hands-on with a small section of the game’s Campaign mode – Act 2 Chapter 1, and a part of Chapter 2 – consisting of just over an hour of gameplay. The second act starts the day after Emergence, during which Marcus, Dom and two series newcomers – formerly discharged Gear Mags Carter and young Gear cadet Lucas Reyes – took down a large Locust creature.

The four head to City Hall and encounter another newcomer, Captain Akila Grey, who tells them they’re now a new unit called Bravo Squad. Before you can say “hey, I’ve heard of that name”, it’s time for Bravo Squad’s first official mission, as they’re tasked with clearing the city’s Legacy Bridge of a swarm of Locust to enable better transport links for the Gears.

Although my hands-on session was brief, it was already clear that this has the potential to be a great single-player campaign. The combat feels like classic Gears of War, but the crucial thing is that it feels the way you remember it playing, rather than the way it actually played.

The game still retains that ‘chunky’ feel from previous Gears titles, but Marcus and co are a lot more limber than before – must be something to do with him being in his early 20s this time and therefore more flexible, I feel seen – meaning the usual cover mechanics are joined by a bunch of new moves.

Now you have a dedicated jump button which lets you climb up and over surfaces, or leap across gaps. You can also now slide across the floor, or lie down and take shelter behind low-ground cover. None of this is particularly ground-breaking in the wider context of the medium, but for Gears it makes moving around much more satisfying and less restrictive.

Combat is tweaked to make it feel more satisfying too. Now when you aim down sights you can press a button to swap your shoulder, while automatic weapons now let you get off a short burst before the recoil kicks in and makes them harder to aim. Again, nothing you haven’t seen before in other series, but the type of changes that give Gears a fresher, more up to date feel.

This all came together in the last part of the hands-on I played, where Bravo Squad reaches Octus Way train station and engages in a multi-level shootout with a bunch of Locust.

This area has a few different levels, staircases and abandoned trains, and once you get used to the extra controls you eventually find yourself running, leaping and climbing all over the place: avoiding snipers by sliding into open train doors, then firing out the windows and opening fire from the cover of the train carriage is really satisfying.

Obviously, a slice as small as this means there are still plenty of unknowns when it comes to Gears E-Day’s campaign. It’s not enough time to see how newcomers Mags and Lucas interact with Marcus and Dom, and it’s also not yet clear how fragile the relationship between Marcus and Dom is at this stage.

Gears fans know that Carlos – Dom’s brother and Marcus’s friend – died fighting near the end of the Pendulum Wars, and while in the other Gears games that was something that happened at least a decade and a half earlier, in E-Day it’s still going to be a pretty fresh wound for Dom and Marcus to deal with, so it’s going to be interesting to see how they support each other – or don’t – throughout this game.

An interview on the official Xbox Wire blog has already hinted that when the game starts Marcus and Dom are quite distant from each other due to Carlos’s death, and that the Emergence forces them to reluctantly team up again.

As much as Gears of War: E-Day is going to be about the arrival of the Locust, it’s also going to be about how these two emotionally distant soldiers, joined by grief for the same person but also kept apart by it, will eventually form the bond we see in later games.

And as satisfying as all the new gameplay mechanics are, this is the thing that should make Gears fans truly excited.