Gears of War: E-Day beginner guide: cover, Active Reload, weapons and what to play first

What you’re getting into

E-Day is a prequel. It opens 14 years before the first Gears, in the city of Kalona, as the Locust tear up through the streets on Emergence Day. You don’t need the older games. Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago lead, with Mags Carter and Lucas Reyes alongside them, and all four are playable from the first mission. The campaign is mostly linear, with open sections in Kalona where side objectives wait.

Boot Camp

Boot Camp teaches movement, cover and shooting. Do it even if you’ve played every Gears game, because the movement is rebuilt and old muscle memory will cost you. It also gives you the FNG achievement for 15 Gamerscore.

Combat Training is the bigger sandbox. You get more room, different weapons and small groups of Locust to practice on, and four people can run it together.

Check two settings before you start. The Active Reload bar sits under the reticle by default, and you can move it back to the top right if you grew up on the old games. Slide to Cover decides whether a slide ends in cover automatically or leaves it to you.

Difficulty

There are custom options as well, and changing some of them moves your difficulty tier to match. If you already know the series, start on Hardcore. Everyone else should start on Normal, which costs you nothing. The harder settings will still be there for a second run.

Cover and movement

Cover is the rule of the game. Stand in the open and you die. The Locust also flank hard, so sitting behind one wall for a whole fight stops working too.

E-Day rebuilt cover. Tall cover blocks shots. Low ground cover lets you hunker behind small walls and debris, and gaps let you slide through or shoot through a narrow opening. When enemy fire destroys the top of your cover you drop prone and move slower. Entering cover is a commitment, because you can only cancel within 1.5 meters of it. Bouncing between walls doesn’t work like it used to.

Movement is new as well. Sprint opens with a roadie-run start. You can slide out of a sprint and shoot while sliding, jump to a ledge within reach, and mantle or climb without going into cover first. You can’t stop and reverse instantly, and slides can’t be spammed. Use them to get from one piece of cover to the next, not to cross a field.

Before a fight, check four things: where you are, where your next cover is, where the enemies are and how you’d get out. That tip is from Noobfeed’s beginner guide, and it saves more lives than any weapon choice.

Active Reload

1. Press reload. A bar appears with a moving marker.
2. Press reload again when the marker is inside the highlighted zone.
3. Hit it and the reload is faster and the weapon gets a boost. Miss it and the weapon jams, which means a much slower reload.

The timing differs from weapon to weapon, so learn it on the ones you actually carry. Shell weapons work differently. The Gnasher and the Breechshot reload round by round, so you can load one or two and get back to shooting. The Gnasher holds six shells now instead of eight to pay for that. The Hammerburst fires faster after a perfect reload.

Practice it in Boot Camp. A jam in the middle of a fight is how a lot of runs end.

Weapons

Bullets travel now, so lead your target at range. Scopes sway. On automatic weapons, short bursts beat holding the trigger because of recoil. You can swap shoulders while aiming, which helps around corners.

Heavy weapons slow you down, but you can still do most things while carrying one. You can also rip them off turret mounts. Smoke grenades block line of sight for players and AI alike.

Enemies

Drones are the baseline, and elite versions show up with tougher loadouts. Wretches rush you. The armored ones scream and disorient you, so keep a shotgun in hand when they come. Boomers carry more health than before, and once they’re low you can finish them with the Lancer chainsaw.

Seeders are mini-bosses. Lure them out of their holes so their heads are exposed. Reavers either drop Drone squads or walk at you like tanks, and they can leap onto high walls and attack from above. The Bilefrog’s weak point is its mouth, which is why your reticle changes color when you aim there.

In a mixed group, kill or flush out whatever is pushing you off your cover first. That’s usually a flanker or something with a big gun, not the closest target.

Executions are good but they commit you. The animation leaves you open, so clear the area first.

Hard Cases, mods and Tactical Gear

Hard Cases are the campaign’s upgrade pickups. Punch or kick one open to earn mod slots, which you spend at supply caches on your weapons and armor. Mods can cut recoil, add damage, grow the magazine or help your Active Reload. Some weapons only get good after a mod or two, so don’t ignore them.

Tactical Gear, which includes the drone scan and the stim heal, turns up in the campaign too. Save it for the fights that matter. Using it in a quiet corridor wastes the cooldown.

Nothing in the campaign is permanently missable, and the War Journal tracks what you skipped in each chapter. Co-op has one catch. If you join a session partway through a chapter, you don’t get War Journal credit for what your partner found before you arrived, so start chapters together. The October 14 patch fixed co-op progress not tracking, but it can’t re-grant missing collectibles. You can see which ones you’re missing and go get them.

Co-op

Online co-op takes up to four players, and each person plays one member of Bravo Squad. Console players can also play two-player split-screen. Solo, the AI fills the other slots, and the full campaign works that way.

The rule is simple. Stay close enough to revive each other and call out flanks. A squad that spreads out gets picked apart, and the game’s own motto is Never Fight Alone for a reason.

After the story

Horde Siege is the 12-player co-op mode, with three squads of four. Pick a class and a mission playlist, and stay on the difficulty the game suggests for your class level: Rookie for levels 1 to 9, Infantry for 10 to 20, Commander for 20 to 30, and Allfather for max-level classes only. You only keep your Weapon Parts if the squad extracts. Our Horde Siege class builds cover the loadouts.

Versus is 4v4 with Team Deathmatch, Conquest, Demolition and Crucible. Everyone starts with the same loadout, Weapon Mods are off, and the power weapons sit on the map, so controlling them wins rounds. Start in Social or Player vs Bot. Ranked opened on October 13. Leave it alone until you know two or three maps.

Old habits

Returning players will trip over a few things.

• Meat shields and chainsaw duels aren’t in E-Day. The Coalition says they aren’t gone from the series, just not in this launch.
• Private lobbies and leaderboards aren’t at launch either.
• Hopping from cover to cover is slower now because of the 1.5 meter cancel rule.
• The Gnasher’s hipfire is a hybrid of camera and muzzle aim, so shots that look like hits are more likely to hit.