Gears of War: E-Day Launches Today on Xbox, PC, and Game Pass

Gears of War: E-Day is launching globally on Xbox, PC, and Game Pass today following its early access release on October 1. This is the first Xbox-exclusive game to be released under the leadership of new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, and it’s also the first new mainline Gears of War game released during this console generation that started six years ago.

With a 87 score on Metacritic, Gears of War: E-Day received solid reviews overall, and the game has a long campaign that’s playable in co-op with up to 3 players. I still haven’t finished the campaign yet, but I shared my hands-on impressions of it last week, and I like it a lot, even though I’m not a big fan of the semi-open world sections. Overall, I’m mostly impressed with the graphics quality and the new action-horror direction that should make you jump out of your boots right from the prologue showing the monstruous Locust horde erupting from the undergrounds.

Gears of War: E-Day also kept its traditional Versus mode, but it also introduces a new Horde Siege PvE mode with up to 12 players across three squads. The game supports crossplay multiplayer across Xbox and PC, and it’s available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.

This year, Microsoft managed release new games for each of its main tentpole franchises: We first had the critically-acclaimed Forza Horizon 6 in May, which was followed in July by by Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remaster of the original Halo game from 2001.

Gears of War: E-Day is coming just a week after the release of Minecraft Dungeons II, a game that barely received any marketing, even though Minecraft is much more popular than the Gears of War series. Still, E-Day is the game the new Xbox leadership team picked up to mark its return to Xbox exclusives after the previous multiplatform strategy didn’t really help the division to get out of its downward spiral.

If you have Game Pass, you should definitely give Gears of War: E-Day a try. The game is really well optimized on Xbox Series X|S consoles, and it’s a great prequel to a game series that made its debut 20 years ago on the Xbox 360. It’s just a bit unfortunate that it’s coming this late into this console generation, at a time when both Halo and Gears of War have fallen out of the spotlight.