Big shoulder-pads and motor-powered blades are en vogue once again … Marcus in Gears of War E-Day.

The Coalition/Xbox Game StudiosE-Day boasts the best combat in 20 years of Gears games – but everything surrounding it is disappointing Every Gears of War game released in the last 20 years has made reverent reference to Emergence Day, when alien creatures emerged from the earth, single-minded in their savagery.

In E-Day, you’re there to witness it: the police lights, flipped cars, ground tremors, civilians running, aliens pouring out of fissures in the earth and ripping faces off.

You’re at ground zero in a squad of four soldiers called Gears – Marcus Fenix, the leader; Dom, who wants to retire; Lucas, a green cadet with a buzzcut; and the dishonourably discharged Mags.

Only this dysfunctional quartet can turn the tide.

With guns.

Lots of ’em.

Instead of answering questions raised by the ending of 2019’s Gears 5, we’re back to the start to find out why Marcus has a scar on his lip and why these soldiers started strapping chainsaws on to their assault rifles.

Anything that was left to the imagination is here, for you to point at and say: “I understood that reference.

This is a thing that I have seen.” This series has lost its way a bit over the years, but the opening hours of E-Day will have you believing that big shoulder pads and ripping into gollum-esque freaks with motor-powered blades are en vogue once again.

There are flashes of the horror and grimness of the first couple of Gears games as you’re funnelled between urban fighting arenas, with bountiful flanking routes and chunks of fallen buildings to take cover behind.

But then it keeps going.

And going.

Long after you realise it’s all out of ideas, it’s still going.

Because it’s set during and immediately after E-Day, the squad is stuck.

You spend most of your time running back and forth across the city in various states of destruction.

You cross the same section of bridge three times before the credits roll.

Levels are flipped, daytime turns to night and you run through them again.

E-Day’s two attempts at switching things up involve putting you on the gunner seat of a helicopter or making you walk slowly while people talk to you.

The setting is a ball and chain that the developers are tethered to.

E-Day is at its best when it turns off the lights, cranks up the horror, and forces you into enclosed spaces, but these moments make up a tiny portion of the game.

The bulk of it is spent in large, open areas stuffed to the gills with collectibles.

There are hundreds of them and you get a little audio chime whenever one is close.

At one point, there was a particularly poignant cutscene where one of the emotionally stunted characters finally lets it all out and, just as the game transitioned from this emotional beat back to gameplay, the chime drowned out the character’s trauma to tell me there was something to pick up nearby.

These open levels are big enough to require a map to navigate and they’re even peppered with side objectives (usually mini horde missions where you hold off waves of enemies after setting up defences).

In Gears 5, you at least had a vehicle to zip between points of interest.

Here you’re just hoofing it on foot, trying to cover as much of the map as possible without triggering the next cutscene.

If you do happen to stray into the main objective by accident and try to backtrack, you’re hit with a big “mission failed” message for stepping out of bounds.

You basically die.

For exploring.

In a game that constantly tells you to explore.

Emotionally stunted … Gears of War E-Day’s full squad.

Photograph: Xbox Game Studios It’s a shame because if you rip a chainsaw through all the fat and wipe the blood spray from your eyes, there’s good meat on the bones here.

Combat-wise, this is the best the series has ever felt.

Characters move much less clunkily, heaving into cover, sliding under chunks of rubble, even leaping around with grace that the older Marcus Fenix and his creaky knees could only dream of.

Environments crack and splinter as you fight, with glass smashing into shards that litter on the ground.

Cars wobble as they take a hit, petrol stations explode and pillars crumble like the Matrix corridor scene.

Blood and entrails cover everything when the dust settles after a firefight. skip past newsletter promotion after newsletter promotion Cover feels more naturalistic and combat arenas blend nicely into the open sections, blurring the lines between exploration and fighting elegantly.

Guns feel hefty and dangerous – especially the shotgun that spits acid.

Active reloading, which asks you to time a button press for faster weapon reloads and more powerful bullets, remains a smart bit of game design that keeps you locked in as you fight.

There’s a reason Gears of War has survived as a series long enough to earn a prequel.

Its specific flavour of bloody, tactical, cover-based combat isn’t done better anywhere else.

Unfortunately, E-Day is let down by everything around that fighting, resulting in a safe and repetitive experience that shows you all its ideas in the opening hours and never dares to build on them in any meaningful way.

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