Should You Play E-Day Before Gears of War?
Gears of War: E-Day is a prequel set on the day the Locust came up out of the ground, and it arrives a full 20 years after the game it leads into. So which comes first? Our answer depends on who you are: newcomers should start with Gears of War: E-Day, lapsed fans should replay Gears of War before it.
The calendar first. Review embargoes lift Thursday, October 1 at 6am Pacific (3pm in Central Europe), and Premium Edition owners can start playing shortly after. The full launch is Tuesday, October 6 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, day one on Game Pass, with Xbox Play Anywhere support. There is no PS5 version. We are not quoting scores, because nobody outside the press has them yet.
What E-Day is
Developed by The Coalition with People Can Fly and built in Unreal Engine 5, E-Day is set on the planet Sera 14 years before the 2006 original, on Emergence Day in the city of Kalona. A young Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago are home from one war when the Locust Horde erupts from below and starts another. John DiMaggio is back as Marcus and Carlos Ferro returns as Dom, and the squad is filled out by Mags Carter and Lucas Reyes. The Coalition keeps using the word horror. Creative director Matt Searcy has compared the story to Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, and told Xbox Wire in June that the squad has no idea what they are shooting at: "There's a lot of 'what the f**k is that?' in this game. They don't know what these things are. They don't know what to call them."
Kalona on the first night
Newcomers: start with E-Day
That quote is the argument. The 2006 game drops you into a war that has been lost for 14 years, with a Marcus who has spent four of them in prison. It assumes you know what the Locust are. E-Day is built to make you feel what the soldiers feel on the first night, and you only get that once. If you already know every enemy's name, you are watching the horror from the far side. Start with the prequel, let it scare you, then play forward.
Lapsed fans: replay the original first
If you played the trilogy on the Xbox 360, flip it. E-Day is an origin story, and origin stories run on dramatic irony. Kalona still looks like a working city in these screenshots, and the prequel's weight comes from knowing what Sera becomes and where Marcus and Dom end up. Replay Gears of War: Reloaded, the 2025 remaster (the one version on PS5, too), or Gears of War: Ultimate Edition if you own it already. It is a single campaign, and you have time before October 6.
Searcy's own pitch to Xbox Wire splits the difference: "You're playing a sweaty Gears game, but it's entirely built from scratch to capture the emotional core of those older games." That emotional core is exactly what a replay tunes you into.
Everything else
After E-Day, go in release order: Gears of War, Gears of War 2 and Gears of War 3 finish Marcus's war. Gears of War 4 jumps 25 years ahead to JD Fenix, and Gears 5 follows Kait Diaz. Two side stories are optional: Gears Tactics, a turn-based game about Kait's father Gabriel Diaz set in the aftermath of E-Day, and Gears of War: Judgment, Baird's early missions. Tactics is the better fit here, since it shows the war right after the one E-Day starts.
