Gears of War: E-Day Seems To Be Nostalgia Done Right

2026’s slew of summer game showcases is almost over, and while they have provided a pretty robust gamut of options, one flavour has felt prominent this year: nostalgia. A new Resident Evil that’s a remake of an old Dreamcast game. A new God of War that aims to meld together the series' old (2018) and older (2005) approaches. A new Virtua Fighter, the first mainline addition to the series in two decades. A new Crazy Taxi, of all things.

Xbox’s showcase, or at least its opening third, relied on nostalgia more heavily than most. A translucent green Series X console, just like that 2004 special edition Xbox. A remake of 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved, now even shinier than its shiny remaster. Playground’s Fable reboot, featuring the villain from the 2004 original. And Gears of War, rewinding time to put Marcus and Dom back on the frontlines together for the first time since 2011.

There’s little question as to why Xbox is retreating to its glory days, but it’s also obvious why the past has taken such a firm grip of triple-A development in general. The promised big bucks future of live service, which increasingly dominated the state of play for the best part of a decade, is collapsing beneath the entire industry. The next generation of players seem to only be interested in messing around in user-created content machines like Roblox and Fortnite – they couldn’t care less about carefully-constructed level design, character development, or impactful choices.

And so it’s the old-school console audience, now permanently wearing rose-tinted glasses after enduring almost an entire console cycle obsessed with whatever the next "forever game” would be, who are the current liferaft for gaming’s most traditional sector. And, like all the dads who rushed to the cinema for the first time in 25 years to see Top Gun: Maverick, we’ll all fall prey to the nostalgia honey trap.

And when I say “we”, that very much includes myself. I (and probably you, based on the stuff IGN readers seem to flock to) want games that transport us to different worlds. Games that spin a fantastic story with brilliant characters, told through compelling and creative gameplay. It’s why so many of us are here, and it's been the bedrock of triple-A gaming for generations. It never really went away – most of what I play every single year falls into that category – but the never-ending threat of unsustainable budgets, dwindling sales, and the “death of single-player”, no matter how legitimate, has increasingly made these things feel like they're on the brink. As if we’re in danger of losing them. So no wonder we’re nostalgic.

It’s easy to sneer at gaming’s nostalgia trap, and many will. There’s definitely space to critique how it arrests our medium’s development. But I approach every game in the hope that it will excite me, and nostalgia can still do that, provided it’s wielded correctly. For instance, I adore Halo, but can’t say a remake of Combat Evolved was ever on my wish list. Fable, meanwhile, feels far more exciting; a game that takes the ideas that fuelled a beloved original, but reinvents them with the aid of a whole new team with a new, more modern perspective – a Fable in a post-Witcher world.

But of all the throwbacks, it’s Gears of War: E-Day that captivated me the most this year, which has taken me by complete surprise.

When E-Day was first announced in 2024, I wasn’t wholly convinced. While I felt that The Coalition's takeover of Gears following original developer Epic Games’ tenure had shifted it into flawed territory, I was hoping that the studio would have course corrected for the next chapter of Kait’s currently-hanging-from-a-cliff story. Instead, it was going backwards. E-Day’s first gameplay trailer, shown as the opening strike of this year’s showcase, also left me unenthused and disappointed. Not only was this prequel rewinding time in-universe, it also seemed to be rewinding its design, back to an era of cramped, confined corridor shooting. Yes, Gears 5’s open world is rough, but it at least pushed for something new and ambitious. Was The Coalition going to leave that all behind?

Yes. But also no. The 27-minute E-Day Direct that followed Xbox’s showcase turned my disappointment into renewed excitement. Sure, the open world is gone, but this prequel isn’t a retread beholden to a two-generation-old design formula. During the direct, The Coalition’s studio creative director, Matt Searcy, explained that the goal was to create something that “feels like Gears, but plays like new” – the idea of a game that feels nostalgic despite being driven by brand new ideas.

“We took advantage of [Unreal Engine 5] to bring Gears up to speed with where modern gaming is, without losing what makes it authentic,” Searcy told Xbox Wire in a new interview. “You’re playing a sweaty Gears game — but it’s entirely built from scratch to capture the emotional core of those older games.”

While the proof will ultimately be in the playing, there were several things in the Direct to indicate that there’s genuine ambition underpinning E-Day. The game has been built on what the devs term an “empty hard drive” - everything has been built from scratch, and so nothing is shackled to anything from the past for either legacy or development pipeline sake. Everything from cover to reloading to headshots to navigation has been crafted for how it should feel in 2026, not for how it used to be. For instance, you can now slide into or under cover, mantle obstacles higher than your head, leap across chasms and drop down from rooftops – the kind of movement that once would have been considered illegal for the hulking human tanks of the COG.

But it’s E-Day’s approach to its world, the sprawling city of Kalona, that has me the most interested. While I disliked Gears 5’s barren open world, I hoped that The Coalition would build on its foundations to make it work. The studio has not done that. Instead, it’s done something that, at least on paper, seems much better. Like everything else in its “empty hard drive” approach, it’s scrapped what came before and reconsidered what original Gears could be in 2026.

“We’re not an open-world game, but this [Unreal Engine 5] technology has allowed us to build an entire city that feels alive,” Searcy told Xbox Wire. “In previous games, you see linear levels that are often disconnected — you load from one to another, they have different vistas, and don’t feel super cohesive. When we look at Kalona in the [UE5] editor, we can literally lift up the camera and look at this entire, integrated city.”

E-Day is a linear game set in a non-linear city. This should hopefully mean that, as we work through the campaign, Kalona’s districts will feel like actual city streets rather than levels that funnel us from one encounter to the next. The Direct explained that, while there will be linear levels, they will lead us into open districts where we’ll have the freedom to explore. The slides and jumps that create the new, more kinetic combat system are repurposed here to navigate through a more realistically-scaled city neighborhood. At a time when we’ve become so accustomed to the freedom of open-world games but almost sick-to-death of their prevalence, this seems like an ideal reinvention of Gears’ campaign structure.

That increased space opens up more interesting combat opportunities. The Direct showed us how you can approach an encounter head-on, classic Gears style, or seek out a flanking route thanks to optional entrances into a building, or even climb up high to a balcony and snipe from afar. It’s not exactly the “play how you want” sandbox of something like Far Cry, but it’s a widening of the Gears experience only unlocked through a significant rethink of Gears’ playspaces.

The result of all this is something that seems like a 2026 follow-up to the original Gears of War, rather than the series at large – kind of how all these new Alien and Terminator projects try to be a sequel to the good originals and not the bad stuff that came after. Those projects have had mixed results, but I think the approach might work here. I think this is good nostalgia, the kind that revisits beloved ideas without being beholden to them.

A lot of players now talk about how they just want Xbox 360 games with better graphics, and while I understand the sentiment, that’s not what I want. I want new games, built with new tech, crafted with new ideas, that have the heart and soul of Xbox 360 games. Or, as Searcy puts it, a game that “feels like Gears but plays like new — a return to the feelings we had when we played the original games, now reimagined, evolved, and enhanced with the power of a new engine.”

And so I’ve got a good feeling that Gears of War: E-Day may have the juice. And when I say “juice”, I mean gallons and gallons of gloopy red stuff erupting from chainsaw wounds.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.