Gears of War: E-Day vs Gears 5: How They Compare

Gears of War: E-Day is a prequel set 14 years before the original trilogy, while Gears 5 is a direct sequel built around Kait Diaz's connection to the Swarm — so the short answer is that they aren't really competing for the same slot in your library. E-Day currently sits at 87 on Metacritic for its Xbox Series X version, versus 84 for Gears 5 on Xbox One, and it adds a weapon-modding system and a reworked four-class Horde Siege mode that Gears 5 never had. If you already own Gears 5, E-Day is worth adding rather than replacing it; if you're new to the series, E-Day's Emergence Day setting is the better on-ramp.

Setting and Story: Prequel vs. Sequel

Gears of War: E-Day rewinds the timeline to Emergence Day itself, the moment the Locust Horde first erupts from beneath the planet Sera. The Coalition's own Xbox game page confirms the story is set fourteen years before the first Gears of War and puts players in control of a young Marcus Fenix and Dominic "Dom" Santiago as they try to survive that first day of the invasion.

Gears 5, by contrast, picks up years after Gears of War 4 and follows Kait Diaz as she investigates her family's mysterious ties to the enemy, eventually uncovering her connection to the Swarm. Where E-Day is an origin story for characters longtime fans already know, Gears 5 is a forward-looking story about a new protagonist discovering something nobody expected. Neither game requires you to have played the other first, but E-Day's chronological position means it can double as a starting point for newcomers who want the series' earliest events before jumping into later entries.

That structural difference matters for how each game is paced dramatically, too. E-Day is framed around a single catastrophic day, so the stakes escalate within hours rather than years, and the tone leans harder into dread and improvisation as Marcus and Dom react to a threat nobody in the world understands yet. Gears 5's arc, spanning a much longer in-universe timeline, is built more around Kait's personal mystery and her slow-burn discovery of what she actually is, with the Swarm's full scope revealed gradually rather than in one explosive opening. If you care more about tight, contained horror-tinged pacing, E-Day's premise plays to that; if you want a longer character arc with payoff built up across an entire game, Gears 5 still does that job.

Campaign Structure: Linear Horror vs. Open Acts

E-Day keeps its campaign confined to a single location, the fictional city of Kalona, and leans into a tighter, more linear structure that several previews have compared to the claustrophobic, survival-horror tone of the first Gears of War. Gears 5 experimented with semi-open sections you could explore with a Skiff vehicle between story beats, giving its campaign a more sprawling feel. If you preferred Gears 5's detours and side content, E-Day's tighter pacing will feel like a deliberate step backward in scale, even though reviewers have generally credited it with sharper pacing.

This is also a case where "smaller" doesn't mean "shorter." Early reviews describe E-Day's campaign as comparable in length to a standard Gears entry, just spent entirely within Kalona's streets, sewers and collapsing infrastructure instead of being spread across multiple distinct regions the way Gears 5's Skiff sections allowed. The trade-off is less environmental variety in exchange for a more consistently tense, controlled pace, since the developers don't need to manage transitions between open traversal and combat set pieces the way Gears 5's campaign did.

Campaign Co-Op: Online and Split-Screen

This is one of the clearest mechanical differences. According to Xbox's own E-Day product page, the campaign supports up to four players in online co-op, plus two-player split-screen that's limited to Xbox consoles (no split-screen on PC). Gears 5's official Xbox store listing caps campaign co-op at three players, whether online or in split-screen. So E-Day actually supports one more player online than Gears 5 did, even though its local split-screen cap is lower than some fans expected going into launch.

Horde Siege, Multiplayer and Weapon Mods

E-Day's headline multiplayer addition is Horde Siege, a reworked take on the series' wave-survival mode that consolidates the class system down to four roles — Assault, Breacher, Marksman and Medic — and supports up to twelve players across its largest maps, per The Coalition's own multiplayer reveal. Each class unlocks its own track of weapon mods as you level it up, and those unlocked mods carry over between Horde Siege sessions. Gears 5's Horde mode used a five-class system (Scout, Engineer, Soldier, Heavy, Sniper) but had no equivalent weapon-mod economy, making E-Day's Horde Siege a meaningfully different, more build-focused mode rather than a straight reskin.

Versus multiplayer is present in both games with the series' usual mix of modes, but E-Day's version launched with no battle pass, a detail The Coalition has called out directly in pre-launch messaging as a departure from recent live-service trends in the genre. Crossplay also works differently than it used to: E-Day's co-op and multiplayer are cross-platform between Xbox and PC out of the box, which means Xbox and PC players can queue into Horde Siege, Versus or campaign co-op together without separate matchmaking pools. Gears 5 added crossplay support later in its life cycle through updates rather than having it available at launch.

Engine, Visuals and Technical Changes

E-Day runs on Unreal Engine 5, a generational jump from the Unreal Engine 4 build that powered Gears 5. The Coalition has publicly described E-Day's environment and character fidelity as a major leap over Gears 5, though that specific framing is the developer's own marketing claim rather than an independently measured benchmark, and should be read as such rather than as a verified statistic. What is independently verifiable is the platform support: E-Day is Xbox Series X|S and PC only, with no Xbox One version, while Gears 5 straddled both the Xbox One and Series X|S generations.

Price, Platforms and Game Pass

E-Day's Standard Edition is $69.99 and its Premium Edition is $99.99, with a $30 upgrade path from Standard to Premium, according to Xbox's own game page. It's available on Xbox Series X|S and PC through the Steam page or Microsoft Store, with Xbox Play Anywhere letting you move between console and PC on one purchase. It's included at no extra cost in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass from launch day.

Gears 5 has been out since 2019 and, as a mature back-catalog title, typically sells for a fraction of its original price during Xbox and Steam sales, and it has also cycled in and out of the Game Pass library over the years. If price is your deciding factor, Gears 5 is almost always the cheaper way into the series.

Regional pricing for E-Day follows Xbox's usual tiered structure outside the US as well; check the storefront for your country rather than assuming a straight currency conversion, since Microsoft and Steam both apply region-specific pricing that doesn't always match a simple exchange-rate calculation. If you're on PC specifically, buying through Steam versus the Microsoft Store makes no difference to the price or to Game Pass eligibility, since PC Game Pass covers either storefront's installation path through Xbox Play Anywhere entitlements.

Critical Reception

E-Day's best-reviewed version, on Xbox Series X, holds a Metascore of 87 from 70 critics on Metacritic, with a separately tracked user score of 8.6 from more than 1,800 user ratings at the time of writing. That puts it behind the original Gears of War trilogy's scores but ahead of Gears 5 and Gears of War 4, both of which landed in the mid-80s. Gears 5's Xbox One version sits at 84 from 98 critics on Metacritic. In practical terms, E-Day is being received as the best-reviewed entry in the franchise since Gears of War 3, while Gears 5 remains a solidly rated but not series-leading sequel.

It's worth noting that review aggregates can still shift in the weeks after launch as more outlets publish their verdicts and as early technical issues get patched, so both the 87 and 84 figures above should be treated as current snapshots rather than fixed historical scores. Multiplayer-focused reviews of E-Day, including the Horde Siege mode, were still arriving after most of the campaign-focused critic scores were already published, so the full picture of how critics feel about E-Day's online offerings is likely to keep developing for a while after launch week.

Which Should You Play First?

If you're completely new to Gears of War, E-Day's position at the very start of the timeline makes it a reasonable entry point, and its day-one Game Pass availability lowers the cost of trying it. If you specifically want the Kait Diaz storyline that connects Gears 4 through Gears 5 and beyond, you'll still need to play Gears 5 on its own terms; E-Day doesn't replace or retell that story. Series veterans picking between the two for a replay are better served by E-Day for its updated Horde Siege and weapon mods, and by Gears 5 if they want the more open campaign pacing and the established Kait/Swarm arc.

Budget-conscious players have a third option worth considering: since both titles are available through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, a single subscription gets you access to both without buying either outright, at least for as long as each stays in the rotating Game Pass catalog. That makes a direct side-by-side comparison easy to do yourself before committing to a standalone purchase of either one.

What's Next

The Coalition has said multiplayer support for E-Day will continue with seasonal content drops, starting with the Emergence Pack included in the Premium Edition. Our full review roundup breaks down what individual critics liked and didn't about the campaign, and our launch guide covers early access windows and edition contents in more detail if you're still deciding which version to buy. For another recent exclusive built on a similar prequel-vs-legacy question, see our look at how Phantom Blade Zero compares to Elden Ring.

Written byJonah Reyes

Jonah Reyes leads Pandromeda's gaming coverage: console and handheld hardware, release dates, pricing changes, patch notes and the business moves behind the biggest franchises. He sources every date and price from the platform holders and publishers themselves, and says plainly when something is still only a rumour.

More from Jonah ReyesAll Gaming coverage