Gears of War E-Day Review - Kinda Funny Gamescast

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2:02and our exclusive shows, go to patreon.com. Slash kind of funny. MUSIC What's up, everybody? And welcome in to your kind of funny gamescast for Thursday, October 1st, 2026. It's a Mergence Day. And of course, I'm one of your show hosts, Snowbike Mike. And today I'm joined by one of our incredible guests, friend of the show and freelancer, extraordinaire. It's Kirk McKinnd. How are you, Kirk? Good things, but the new butter sounds of it. As for David Kirk, you were supposed to, you were guessing me, I'm done just five minutes ago. See how much you kicked this cold. You're gonna be great. I'm trying, Kirk, I'm trying my best. You doing good, man. You doing good. Thanks, homie. Hey, it's great to see you. Thank you for joining me today. Of course, it is Emergence Day, Big Dog. It's E Day, which means me and Kirk are going to be talking all things. Years of war, E Day for the big review. It's finally time to jump back into that Xbox green

3:05or Kirk, take a look, take a look. See my sign. See my sign? I'm disappointed. That was a lot of money. I'm just way too much. Let's not talk about it. The comments are noticed that I'm great. I'm sorry, the light is totally here. I'm being flash banged by my PC. It's like really late at night. Do we break? Kirk, of course, if people don't know who you are, your friend of the show, you're a freelancer, can you talk a little bit about what you do where you're right, where you've been so people can follow you? Yeah, sure. I'm on Twitter at Kirk. That's MCK, K-I-R-K. I forgot to put my own name. I write for various places. I'm doing a new stand at IGN at the minute. I do reviews for the Guardian and a bunch of other stuff. Heck yeah, homie. Okay, well, here we are. We're jumping into Gears of War in 20 years of the Gears of War franchise. Really quick, before we jump into the review and talk anything, e-day, can you just give me a rundown of your Gears of War history, your hype level for Gears?

4:06What do you think of the franchise? Yeah, I mean, I really like the franchise as a whole. The first years I thought was incredible. Ever since I saw that Mad World advert, I was really into it. I thought the dark atmosphere was cool. And then I feel like the series has kind of dropped off with each entry really. Two was pretty good. And then after that, diminishing returns, I thought five was fun enough. But that went a little weird in some place in the cliffhanger ending as well. It was a bit what's going on. But I was kind of excited for this reboot to see if it goes back to its roots or not. But I don't quite think it did. So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about it if they can get back to the 20 years ago, right? It's hard to do that, especially with a lot of these IPs from all the big teams of trying to put the nostalgic glasses on Kirk and bring people back into it and make it love it all over again. And yeah, for me, I will never forget what, 2006, when Gears 1 came out, of course, the big commercial that everybody talks about. But just seeing it on screen,

5:07I'll never forget walking into AJ Tessirero's Big Brothers room and fill. And we were all still on Halo. And all of a sudden, there was this new dog in town, right? It was like nothing but blood everywhere, explosions, just the nashers shotgun sound. And he was like, no, my brother plays Gears now. He doesn't play Halo anymore. And I'll never forget that day going, what do you mean? And sure enough, it was on the screen. And it was like one of the coolest, most different looking games at the time than it had ever seen. Because we played so much Halo. And it was like, damn, this is cool. And sure enough, fell in love with the franchise. I've always been a big fan of Gears. Similar to you, kind of fell off a little bit, come four and five. I think they made some decisions. And of course, hard to replicate the original trilogy in that story in a way that captures fans. But I'm excited to talk about E-Day with you. Because yeah, the question is, can they re-light that matching? Get us all excited. We'll find out in just a moment. Of course, this is the kind of funny games cast

6:09each and every weekday we bring you the fun topics of the discussions, reviews, previews that you can come and get involved with, of course, if you're watching live on YouTube, don't be afraid to get involved in the chat with your super chats. You can write questions about the reviews. Your thoughts so far since early access has gone live. You can ask questions that died a little bit deeper into our reviews of Gears of War. E-Day, of course, remember, we couldn't do this without you. All the best friends around the globe. So if you're watching live on Twitch, don't forget to Twitter, subscribe to get ad for reviewing. If you're watching over on YouTube, you can become a kind of funny member. Just like over on Patreon, we get all of our shows ad free and get that exclusive content. So thank you to everyone who supports us to help keep the lights and mics on. And don't forget our Patreon producers who help us so, so much. So thank you to Omega Buster, Delaney, the Somme, Twining, and Michael, Peservento. Let's jump in the topic of the show. Tots, tots, tots, tots, tots, tots, tots, tots, tots. Herk, it's a whole thing. Don't worry about it. I'll do it. You know what I mean? I'll handle it. I'll imagine it's not happening as far as.

7:12Let's jump into it. Let's talk all things. Gears of War, e-day. This is going to be our kind of finding review alongside Kirk who's coming in to join me. Of course, early access kicks off now on October 1st. The full release jumps in on October 6th. It's on Xbox PC and on Xbox Game Pass. You can play solo or up to four players in co-op. The setting for you, if you don't know, it's 14 years before Gears of War. Set on Emergence Day, lasting across three nights in the city of Kelona. Fight the Locust Horde as franchise vets, Marcus, and Dom. And of course, two new cast members and beta squad, Reyes and Mags Carter. Of course, I think that gets what it is. Kirk, I'm excited to talk it with you. We're not going to be reviewing multiplayer or Horde. We'll talk about that at the end of the show, but this is going to be the campaign review from me and Kirk. And then we'll talk about multiplayer and Horde at the end as we did not have access to that

8:14during the review period. But Kirk, let's talk about it really quick. Oh, you know what? Before we do that, let me just set the stage from Shinobi 602. Here's some Gears of War, e-day review roundups. Day one gave it a 10 out of 10 tech raptor, gave it a 9.5, but why though gave it a 9.5? Mundo Xbox gave it a 9.5. IGN gave it a 9, voxel gave it a 9, XGN gave it an 8.5. You have steam deck, H2 gave it an 8th, and Guardian gave it a 6. This coming on Metacritic at an 89 in an open critic of 87. Kirk, you and I are going to jump right in. We're going to talk about our thoughts on the game. We're going to deep dive into it. Let's start off with your short quick thoughts. And if you'd like to give me a review score on the kind of funny scale, one through 10, let's do a big dunk and then I'll follow you up. Sure. I mean, my review on the Guardian went for a 3 out of 5 because they do a 5 point scale.

9:17If they add a 10 or a half points, I probably would have gone 6.5 from the kind of funny scale. I'm going to give it an 8.5. I'm going to give it a great, I'm going to give it a capital G great. I really fell in love with this game. I really, really enjoyed Gears War E day. I liked the setting of Colona. I really enjoyed the city and how that was detailed and created. When they said after that summer game fest announcement that that city is full on real and you're going to be running around in it, I was like, I don't understand that. I see it now and I really, really enjoyed what they tried to do blending the linear structure of the original gears mixed now with the Gears 4, Gears 5 kind of open structure

10:21that they had with the areas. And I found Colona and what they did with the open slash linear structure of the missions and kind of just open ended moments to be really, really fun and engaging. I like beta squad. I think they had a lot of good story moments, some good beats. I am surprised that they made me feel for Marcus and Dom again after their original trilogy. I think it's hard to do that with two characters I've known for 20 years. But somehow they set it up on Emergenstay. I think they knocked it out of the park. I do however think that exploration is very cool, but also kind of handholdy and also in your face a lot, Kirk. And I think we're going to talk about it. There is a collectible sound that just won't shut up in this game. There is over 140 collectibles across the five acts. And I'm telling you every time you go somewhere, that collectible sound will ring. It will ring at moments that you don't want it to ring.

11:21And it will ring to make you either want to kind of stop the momentum of the gameplay to go search for these collectibles or you'll just stop looking for the collectibles all and all just so you can keep moving on the game. But that's my thought right there with the 8.5. I really actually liked this game a lot. I did all victim to I wanted to collect them all. I searched for everything and I'm excited to talk more about it with you Kirk. Let's talk about some of the positives. What did you like out of the game? Yeah, I mean the combat and movement is the best is been in the series. They've like sped things up. It's a lot snappier. Like you can jump like just on a whenever you want. So you can jump between like a boss roof and another bit of cover and stuff like that. There's like low covered it. You can crouch up against and shoot over like really low. Like you lay up against it. And all that stuff's really good. It feels much faster than the old gears games which fought a little bit clunky sometimes. It does it. It does it. Right. Like I'm really surprised.

12:21I brought it up when we did the multiplayer beta and the Horde mode beta. But just a simple sprint button moving from a to the stick. There was something about that where like it didn't feel like gears. But of course everything on screen was gears. But just that slight just change made the game either feel snappier and faster or just a little different in my brain. I don't know what it is, but it felt better. Kirk I think in my opinion. Yeah, I think that helps that with you know with the sprint being on the stick A is then slide right. And you can slide and then jump straight into cover or who strengths cover whatever. And just anything that like reduces the gap between moving from an ins cover in a game built around cover and outflanking people is great. So. Yeah, and I think a lot of people will get worried about hearing jump inside of gears. Right, because we've never had a true jump button in gears of war. And sometimes I think your mind quickly goes to a payload jump situation or a call of duty multiplayer with action.

13:22And people go, Oh no, I don't want bunny hop in all of my game. It's definitely not that I think you'd be surprised when you hear jump inside of gears. You actually don't jump that often. You can jump whenever you want, but I never felt the need to jump really all that often. I probably jumped maybe 30 times maximum in this game. It's handy for like like say getting off the top of a bus or something like that, right? Because if you're under fire or your cover gets destroyed because it gets destroyed quite a lot in this game or you're like, you cover becomes a lower cover because the top layer has been knocked off or grenade comes in. You can literally just jump and then you totally out there. Whereas in the old games that would have been really clumsy. So. Yeah, the destructible environments are really well done. There's a lot of destructible pieces of cover that either you or an enemy will get behind and you will force you to move, which I like about that. Let's talk about Cologne of the city. What did you think of the city and how did you think of this kind of open structure meets a linear structure? Yeah, I mean that to me that was kind of the worst part of the game.

14:23I love the idea of it like the idea of a city being torn apart as progress for the story and it changing and it does do that. But it also means you're stumping through the same levels all the time. You cross the same bridge like four times in this game. And not just I'm not you don't just walk across it either. This is a level like a linear. You got you got a fight across the bridge and then you got a fight back across the bridge. Then you got a fight back across the bridge again. And it's like guys come on. Give me a break. I hate this bridge. That's interesting. Kirk. Yeah, it is funny of like the city is fully realized and detailed and you are running around it in this open structure, open zone kind of similar to gears five. Not as big because as you brought up, you have the. What is that? What is that vehicle called? The skiff. The skiff. Yes, which is like the fun pair shoot snowboard as I like to call it back then. But yeah, you don't have that but you have this large structure where yeah, most of the time you will get a new mission, which will be a cross town.

15:25And now you and your crew will run across this open zone, which is quite large. If you played the open beta with the Horde mode close to that size, maybe a little bit larger than the Horde map itself, just a little bit larger. But you're going to run across an entire city that will have things going on, right? Citizens will be screaming running from their lives. There will be small packets of or of locust waiting for you to run into. There will be collectibles and hard cases. We'll talk about in a little bit for you to explore and find. And then there will also be side missions, which will be like, hey, you roll up on a Pizzeria and there will be a bunch of civilians stuck inside who have been fighting for their lives. And you'll call the squad and be like, hey, can we get these people to safety? And of course, the mission will be simple as can be stand there for 92, 3 minutes and kill a bunch of locust until it's clear. And then you'll complete a side mission. But that is kind of the flow of this game of open area, run all the way across the map of Kelona, go to the next linear mission, which will have the big set piece.

16:29And then on the flip side, run back and you can stop for collectibles or side missions, which I liked her. I liked it a lot, actually. Yeah, I felt like it was a bit of a course correction. It was too much of a course correction or not enough, I don't know which, because in the last years, obviously, people complained about the skiff. But I felt like that was, you know, it was kind of like, this isn't gears, but you just, it gets you between the gameplay bits real quick, you know? And that's all it serves to do. Whereas in this, you've got a hoof fit. So if they wanted to make a game that wasn't like Gears 5, they should have made a more linear game. I don't understand why these sandbox bits even exist all because they don't really add anything to the game. It might be so. It's so it's thing you bring that up here because yeah, it does. There's this moment of you leave Gears 5 and the question is, well, what do you do? Right? What is the audience reception of this kind of like open zone, open area gears as opposed to the original trilogy, which is just linear missions, right?

17:30And I think for me personally, I really liked this blend. I told Roger during the review period of like, I liked the blend of what they kind of married with Gears 5 meets the original trilogy. Hey, let's shrink down that open zone. You're not on the skiff snowboarding for multiple minutes in a bear and frozen wasteland with nothing much to do. You are in Kelona, this smaller town. And it gives you the option of, hey, if you don't like this exploration, if you don't want to do the side content, you don't want to run in the open zones. Just run straight to the next mission. You can go right back into the linear area and you're done. Or what I personally found is like, I really liked spending my time at Kelona. I liked seeing the city evolve as you brought up from moment one of e-day to day three of e-day, where the city is a little more destroyed. There are fewer people running in the streets. I did enjoy like hearing gunshot fire from across the town running over to again. But being a emergent side mission where it's like, hey, go help these guys, fortify their

18:31base. Let's hang out with it. I enjoyed that a lot more than Gears 5 where it felt like, hey, use the skiff go all the way across this giant frozen tundra, go set up a relay tower and then continue on. I did like this structure. I think it married both of them well for me where I was like, you know what, I dig this. I like this a lot. And that's fair. And I think the opening of the games are really cool as well when you see emergency day actually happen and you've got like a bit of pipe or a baseball bat or whatever and you're just going ham on on the runs and stuff and it's like, that's pretty cool. But then I think the illusion kind of falls apart after a bit because at first you feel like this is an actual city. You see in civilians running about and stuff. But then you start to see these little spawn doors everywhere that they're just running in and out of constantly. Yeah. So the NPC numbers down and they're just running into this little dark room and then coming out of this little dark room and it kind of breaks the illusion from me a little bit. There was a couple moments where I did giggle of like, okay, that guy's just screaming and running real quick out of nowhere.

19:32That's pretty great. But yeah, it does. It tells a story on the city side of things of day one. There's a lot of stuff by day three. It is completely bare and it's beat down. There's very few survivors running around one on there. One of the chat asks, when you do the side quests, are there progression? Is there anything rewarding for that? Yeah, let's talk about that discoverability and let's talk about this like kind of collectibles Kurt because it's a big thing in this game. You're going to hear a collectible sound a lot and the collectibles. Very interesting, Kurt. They're all their own unique items. So it could be a newspaper. It could be a tourist map. It could be a magazine. It might be a baseball hat, a hard hat. It's like unique items every single time and they all have their own little paragraph back story to it's right. On top of that, you also have these hard cases. And so every time you do a side mission or you explore, you'll usually unlock a hard case from doing the mission and what that hard case is, it's going to unlock a weapon mod or

20:34an armor kit mod that will help your weapons get stronger. Your armor do different things. Your ability, each kind of armor might has its own special unique ability. One is a heel, one is a drone, one is a heel to squad type of heel. I guess one is a stem pack, I should say. And then the other one is heel and revive your squad. And so you'll unlock weapon mods for that, which I found those to be really rewarding. And I liked a lot of them. The collectibles got me kind of frustrated, Kurt, because the sound is constantly going off. And then on top of that, I didn't know what the collectibles look like. So sometimes you're just constantly in a room looking around for just anything and everything and you don't quite know. Is it a contact or is it this magazine? Is it this poster on the wall? I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for. Did you not use the assassin vision? I hated using the assassin vision, Kurt. I can't tell you how beautiful this game is. And then going into the gray static assassin's vision to look for the smallest golden outline

21:38of an item pissed me off every time I did it, big dog. I hated it so much. Yeah. I mean, the collectible champion you mentioned as well. At one point, there was a cutscene. It was meant to be quite upset anyway. And then just as it transitions out smoothly into gameplay, it's like blowing. Like, there's a collectible nail. The collectible sound will ring so much. There's 140 collectibles in there, as I said. And it's going to ring all the time. And the problem is, is the catch is it rings when you're in its area. There must be some sort of like bubble radius around your character, because it will ring when there's the collectible on a floor below you in the next two rooms around from you. So you're like, you'll hear it and you'll go, okay, well, I should be in the same room as it. No, it might be in the next two rooms past you. So just be prepared to keep looking for that. So I did get a little frustrated at the collectibles. I thought they added fun little moments, right? You'll find little nods to other characters and like the world if you read them.

22:39How many people really read the paragraph, Kurt? I don't know, but I did stop and read them after a while. I appreciated the little story. It was telling of emergency. How did you find the like transition in from side missions into main missions and stuff? Because there's a couple of moments I found where you try to do a side mission and you slightly step off the beaten track and a side mission failed. Or if you get pulled into a main mission by accident, because everything happens in the open world, right? So it's all like the lines between triggers are so small sometimes. Yeah, that happened to me once, Kirk, where I was I walked out of bounds on the on the map on the mission, right? And that did frustrate me because yeah, it's a very interesting blend here of everything is still open while you're doing it, except for some very linear missions. But a lot of the time you are still in the open area, open world. And there is a boundary similar to other games you played where you can step out and the countdown will begin of like, Hey, you're stepping on this area. We're going to stop the mission, right? And so for me, that happened once I did find that frustrating of like, I'm clearly just walking around to get a different piece of cover or like going to a different area to look for ammo.

23:47Like I'm not leaving this mission. So it did frustrate me a little bit of like, why would you turn off the mission when you know when this open zone? Just let it ride. Well, about the walk in sucks as well. Couple of walking talks, couple of walking talks. You know what? Surprisingly, I wasn't mad at any of the walking talks because I really did enjoy the characters Kirk. I know we'll kind of want to bring good. Yeah, moving to the story. But like we're talking about two characters that we know their story. I've experienced Dom and Marcus for 20 years now, right? Like there's not much more story you can tell or it's going to be hard to kind of fit in a new story in ahead of all the history you already had. But I think that Max Carter and Lucas Reyes, the other two pieces of beta squad really shining this. Their stories are like really good where I was like, hey, I do want to have this walk and talk. I do want to have these moments where I want to hear your backstory because like they're surprisingly really good. They stand up tall next to Marcus and Dom who are, you know, household names at this point.

24:49I thought they were highlights the new character, honestly, because Dom and Marcus like to say they've been done. We already know what their motivations are really and did we really have to know why Marcus has got a lip scar? Why they start putting chainsaws on lunches like yes, that's not story. That's just remember that thing that you like. There it is. This is great. I mean, true, right? Like we learned that. I think we learned a little bit more about Marcus and Dom as well. And I am surprised. I think you'll, if you jump into this game, I think you'll be surprised of how they tell this story. Every character has a beat. Everyone has their moment, but these other two characters, they really do shine up against the big pillars of Gears of War, which is Marcus and Dom. And those two still have moments as well that I was impressed with, right? I think there's a lot of questions. How do you tell Dom's origin story or kind of story beforehand and same for Marcus? But I think they nailed the story overall for me. I really, really enjoyed. I did like the prequel of Kelona, how it fell in three days, where the team has to go and the decisions that they had to make.

25:52I was pleased with the story overall for sure. I think within the constraints of a prequel that did a pretty good job. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, how tough is that probably to write all that? Like, I mean, to not know what the Locust are, to then have to learn about them, then have to, they're making up the names of them as you go. And you're kind of like, oh, yeah, that's what you call them. And the next one, like, I appreciate that for sure. I think that's the so stuck on the fact that I called them aliens in my headline month. It's I was writing for the Guardian month. There were newspaper audiences. It was a shawt hunt. Aliens, okay? Kirk, I want to talk more things, gears of war, e-day with you. I want to I want to go back to the hard castes and the weapon mods to hear your thoughts on that. I do want to continue to talk about the gameplay and the story. And then we're going to get into multiplayer in a horde mode. But let's do that after a quick word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Proton VPN. Recently, more and more content I've been trying to watch has given me this content isn't available in your region message. And I hate it.

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28:03You stole your freeze to death. That's what with great power comes great to liability. I'm not the earth. Nettie. Digger. See the tree long on now playing only Peter. Richard or under 17 out of middle without parent. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claw.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claw.ai slash Spotify. FX's American Horror Story Returns for an unrivaled 13th installment with the iconic horrors you love to fear and an all-star cast reprising fan favorite roles. Light your candles, draw your pentagrams, and prepare for a supreme surprise. FX's American Horror Story 13

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30:06grade PG-13. Welcome back everyone. I want to start off our second half of this review with a couple questions coming in from the chat. First one, I have OPA tried in and says, did might say how long it took. Kirk, how long did it take you to beat this game? And what were you playing on? There's about 12 hours I played on the PC and yeah, Max settings running, well, no actually, not Max settings, the one down because the Max settings is ludicrous and that sounded terrifying. Okay, hell yeah. I left off. But then PC get ludicrous. Yeah, exactly. There's even a ludicrous setting for the gore on our side. Mine took 10 and a half hours and I would have spent a lot more time in that. I did not do enough side objectives during my run. I really wish I did stop and smell the roses and do all the side objectives. So I was at 10 and a half. I could have gone a lot more on that one. It was cool for me.

31:07Yeah, normal difficulty as well for me. This is a game though for me, Kirk. I don't know how you feel. I want to know what you think. I want to replay this. I had so much fun with this game that I want to replay this co-op with some friends on a harder difficulty right away. I played it on hard, not the hardest setting but hard with a friend in co-op. So I've done that. And you know, that did improve, I think. But yeah, I am probably going to go back to it. I haven't uninstalled it. I'm going to go back to it for the hard mode and for multiplayer to test them out. Of course. They're probably going to be ready good because the core combat feels great. My issue is mostly with the structure of the campaign. So I like that. Yeah, we're going to talk about hard mode and multiplayer at the end of the show. Of course, that was not part of the review period. But we've experienced it during the betas and we'll talk about kind of the news around that. I do want to jump into a super chat from Austin Rossboro, who writes in and says, thanks for the review, y'all. Would you recommend this for a first time gears player? I'm interested in jumping into the franchise here.

32:08Much love. Kirk, what do you think about first-timers jumping into this? Of course, it's a prequel to gears one through three. It doesn't have a bunch of baggage as being a gears what, six or six as well. So what do you think about first-timers jumping in? I think it's absolutely a fine start and off point. And I think that's why Microsoft and the coalition made this game to be honest. Because the laws got so convoluted and stuff that newcomers would find it hard to follow probably. But if they're playing this, they can then jump into five and catch up. So, but yeah, it's a good start and off point. They'll find out that the locals are actually aliens and then they'll be up here. So yeah, I think this is a great jumping on point right here. I think this is a lot of fun, especially with the modern feel. I've gone back to gears one through three. Our of course, co-worker Andy Cortez has recently played them and Kirk, for me, those games do feel a little old. I think they still hold up well, but they are a little bit slower paced. They do feel a little bit dated.

33:09And I remember playing that with Andy thinking, man, I would like to do anything but play through this right now. And so for me, I really did enjoy the structure of this. It felt like I had a little more breathing room, Kirk. I think it's what it is for me of like, I know gears for the linear storytelling and those missions. I really did enjoy running around Colona and like being able to be like, you know what, let's let's mess around. Let's fuck off for a little bit Kirk and let's go jump over and let's go. Let's go do a side mission. Let's go shoot at some guys, find some collectibles and then get back to the linear mission. Because I just had flashbacks of playing years three with Andy a couple of months ago and going, man, this is, this is a little slow for me right now. I'm not happy. It's been a long time since I played the original trilogy. So you're probably right. And like I say, the movement of things much faster in this. But every time it kind of shrunk down, I went linear, you know, and it turned the lights off. It felt like playing aliens or something. And it was really cool. And then when it went back outside and it opened up, I was like, oh, damn, I kind of want that feeling back again, you know.

34:11There was some great feelings. There was some great moments. I think they blended it well. But yeah, there's some really good moments here, especially on emergency day of like, hey, it is really down right now. It's dark. It's not a good situation for these guys to be in. And like they did play that very well of jumping from different story beat, the story beat, making you feel like, hey, are these guys going to get out of it? What is their next move? How are they going to kind of overcome this obstacle? And I liked some of the settings spots that we went to. Yeah, I think, like, say that the city gets kind of repetitive, but they do do quite a bit within the bounds of what they're like, shackles that made for themselves in that setting. And when you go back through the city at the end, and you know, it's more water on and stuff, I think. That's pretty cool. And the visuals are incredible. Like it's one of the best looking games on Xbox, for sure. Yeah, visuals are looking incredible. Just don't stare at the character model's eyes. They're dead inside. There's moments here where you go into a cut scene and you're like,

35:12wow, they look so freaking good. Then you get kicked out of it and the character models look great. And then you see their face and you're like, man, there is no detail in their facial structure here besides a bunch of dead eyes right there. But we're going through Hell Kirk and those eyes on Tell the Story that no one else can tell there. It always made me laugh to look at their eyes. I didn't even notice that, but I noticed the NPCs. They have like these really flat, featureless faces. They look like they've been put for about 20 photos. They probably look like me when it's fucking light. And I'm sorry, I'm too young to be honest. Let's talk about some of the set pieces. What did you think, of course, years known for the linear structure? But we do talk about these action games, having these big, wow, popcorn moments. What did you like? Did you like all of them? Did you, did you invite with everything through Act One through Five? Yeah, like I say, the linear sections were the standouts for me. But this kind of only has one idea to switch up right. Or two, I guess. There's the bits where you've got to defend the place, right?

36:12Which is classic gears. You put down torrets and traps and stuff. And you know, they're great. I wish there was more and out. There's still quite a lot of it in there. And the other thing is it puts you on helicopter. And they're going to see which again, gears, they're not before. And I think it does it twice in this. Am I right? I think I remember one really long one. Yes, there might be a second one, right? I know for sure there's a one long helicopter piece here. Yeah, towards it. And there's a bit like, I don't want to spoil it. But there's like a visual moment in that helicopter ride where you go through the clouds. You must not mean. Yes, so yeah. That's one of the standout bits of the game for me. Just like the feeling that gave me. But it was kind of ruined by the game play around hit for me. Because there was like this, you fighting those like flying locust things. And there's one right at the end of the section that just fires two missiles that you're really quick. And if you don't kill it in like five seconds flat, you're back at the start of that section. Watching that same thing again. And then it loses its power a little bit. Oh yeah, there's a there's a couple rough checkpoints here.

37:14If you die, you go back a pretty far away. And you're like, I don't really want to go that far back. But it falls as you do the walk and talks again every time as well. Yes, yes. But yeah, I think the the set pieces are really good. I think they they do very well of bringing back just the gears three or the gears one through three set pieces you know. We're like, yeah, you're up in the helicopter. You're on a train like you you know these moments, but they did really well. I'm bringing a back and making them look great and having them really fun. I liked it all. What did you think? Let's go over back to the collectibles. But let's talk about the weapon mods. These hard cases. What did you think of them adding kind of a different layer of gameplay to everything? You being able to switch up the weapons and your armor sets. Yeah, I really liked that part of it. I thought it was great because you can kind of customize your stuff and put scopes on it so you got a better zoom or better bullets. And you can change like what the active reload does whether it gives it more power or if it like stuns or fire ammo and stuff like that.

38:17And I thought that was really cool. But once you get hold of the the light shotgun that fires acid, none of the other guns are worth using because the emotion is too bad. And this game is really cool. If you have some enemies running up on you with the emulsion shotgun, you better back up quickly because they are going to melt your face off. It's pretty amazing. I was a big fan of it. What do you call it by the way when you get turned into chunks? And that game because that's how you die usually right. You get hit by some kind of missile and you get turned into like 50 chunks. Me and my phone call it getting chunks. And I think chunks is good. That's good. And the chop and chunks one you've been chunks and then it's like check point. Well folks, I mean that's the Nash or shotgun. That's the boom shot is right. Just so fun. So it says games game. This right that's good. Yeah, I really liked the hard cases and they actually, you know, I came out of the Horde mode and multiplayer preview a little down. I didn't really vibe with the Horde mode at first. And we only played a little bit.

39:18I'm excited to dive into it. But this campaign and the hard cases actually made me appreciate the Horde mode and like the new kind of vibe they're going for a lot more, right? I do now understand what the vision is of like being in this open area, Horde mode and then doing the side objectives to go get those weapon mods. Because they do play, they change up these weapons so much. Man, I had a blast trying on new builds, changing up each and every weapon and every weapon in the game. All has these different abilities on it where, yeah, when you go into the weapon mods outfit or at the resupply station, they'll have a top one which will affect the active reload and what those kind of bullets do after. And then each one has one through three different new modifications you can add, whether that be like extended range, more powerful bullets. But I found that on top of that with my armor mods, I was really messing around with some builds where I had one where every critical kill would automatically perfect reload the weapon.

40:20So I paired that with my sniper rifle and every time I got a headshot with the sniper rifle, guess what? I never had to reload again. So it was just worn after another after another. And I really thought that was a ton of fun and I loved, I got, I got really into finding the hard cases. Okay, I got a long shot of fantastic. We got to talk about the web. Stop makes it essential there, that, that mod, man. Like, oh my god, you don't stop. Yeah, you never stop. And like the cool part about that is, right, when you think of critical kills, you might think of just headshots with the sniper, but no, it does more than that, right? If you melee weapon one of the smaller grunts and you explode them into, you know, little gabs or chunks, you can automatically, it automatically reloads the weapon there. So I was using it in different ways as well to get that ammo back on top and moving. And so that really like these hard cases and it made me appreciate what will play in the new horn mode soon enough. I was like, oh, now I am going to get off the main objective and I am going to go and try to get the new weapon cases with my crew.

41:23It's like, I'm into this now. I understand it a lot better, which I like a lot. Yeah, I do think horn mode and the online could elevate this and maybe put a point or two on the game for me. It's just we didn't have access to that journey. Who you pair it unfortunately? I know. Isn't it crazy? I'm so excited to jump into verses in horn mode. Of course, horn siege is going to be the big new game mode with a lot more people. But let's talk about some of the weapons because we have some returning favorites and we also have some new weapons, Kirk. What did you think about the arsenal of weapons that you got the opportunity to use? Come on. Is it the incinerator? The ship on the specials? So yeah, yeah, that's that's the weapon for me. That was the one that I was using that in the long shot all the way through pretty much. I mean, I'll use the classic Lancer as well because Chainsaw and people is always one. But they were my two main ones. I was really I was gutted that he can't put a grenade in a guy's mouth in this one. Like, why did they take that away? We will have to talk about that. Yeah, there is some interesting stuff that the audience of

42:25Gears have found with the latest blog posts. Let me just read the top of that. That is called Emergence Day begins tomorrow. That dropped on September 30th, 2026, which was yesterday, kind of detailing season one and what's to come in beyond for season two. But they did notice all the way at the bottom. There's a small section here called let me find it. Building E-Day from the ground up and and feature development. A lot of people notice that a certain features from previous Gears games are not in this. And so they detailed why they did that and what the details were behind that, which we're going to read in just a moment. But yeah, Kirk really quick on the weapons. Man, I liked all the arsenal in this game. The Emulsion shotgun as you brought up is fantastic. But that gut puncher grenade launcher gun is a ton of fun as well. They really do a great job of marrying the boom shots and the the digger rocket launcher that they had before and they married it into this grenade launcher where you shoot it and you hold

43:28and you hold it down until you see the grenade. Get somebody or fly into them and they put like this grid on them to let you know like, hey, you're there. And then you just let that thing explode. I use that a lot. I like this new, um, this new, what did they call this? It's not the breed, it might be the breed shot. The breed shot is like this four round, like carbine rifle that married the long shot with an assault rifle that I really liked, but it had an axe on the back. So I could put it on for a little. Yeah. Yeah. When you swing that axe at somebody, it was so cool. And I think they did a great job, Kirk as well, reintroducing enemies and weapons to you throughout this game, right? Like when you jump in the gears and if you've played for the 20 years, you know the characters, you know the weapons you're looking for. And I thought they did a really good job of taking it slow of like, hey, it's e-day. That means you send the smallest troops out first so you start off with the grunts and then you'll move on to the larger, larger guys. And the same for the weapons of like, hey, we're not going to give you X-Fine C weapon off the beginning, but we'll

44:30have a cool set piece moment for you to go, oh snap, it's finally here. I'm so excited to see whatever weapon that maybe no spoils, chap. But you know, you know there's some certain weapons that have to be in this game. And I thought they did a great job of like holding off on that until it's the right time to put it in. Yeah, the cadence at which they give out weapons is really good. And obviously if you really into gears, I mean, I like gears. I'm not a super fun by it. I mean, so your mileage may vary. But I think if you're like a diehard fun of this, you'll really get a lot out of the way that the weapons are introduced in this game. Definitely. Yeah, I think they did a good job on that one. So yeah, you'll see the weapons you love and a lot of new cool weapons to the hook shots. Of course, the big brutes will come out and they have the boom shots, they have the machine gun that you know, but then they also have this hook shot where he fired. Fucking big eyeing crew in it. Yeah, he fires a giant boat anchor at you. And not only does it hit you at the beginning, but then he pulls it back and it rips people apart on the back pole. Very cool. That one was awesome. I liked that a lot as well. You got to get so close to him to use

45:33it. They'll usually get gun down. I try to pull it up. I'm correct. There it was. I was like, I'll shoot this from a mile and a half away. Then I'm going to go halfway. I'm like, oh, shit, I got to get a lot closer. That's not good. Yeah, I loved that. And I also thought I played solo, Kirkshire. I don't know what it looked like on your side with co-op, but when you talk about that, I think they were very generous with the downs. When you go down and you die, right? You do go down to a down state where you can be revived by your teammates, which is normal. But I thought on solo, they did a really good job of like, I get four downs as a solo player, which I'm sure you'd get in co-op, right? Of like four players. Everybody gets one down. It's like two each. It's okay. Yeah, for me, it felt really generous of like, I never felt like I was like out of it, right? I would go down and I might use up one to two, maybe three downs, but I never used up the fourth. The AI were very good of always coming right to me, picking me up right away. I never felt like I was standing there waiting for AI bots to come after me. And funny enough, you can still get executed by the big guy. So it's not like I'm down and I'm just waiting. If you accidentally

46:37walk towards a big guy, they will execute you and you'll restart. So yeah, I like the blend of like, I felt good about it. I felt like I had enough chances. Unless you get junks. Yeah, unless you get shot. The AI though, even on two players, the two AI bots, they come and get your pretty sharpish. The only issue I had with the AI is right towards the end of the game is a bit where you've got to go up a couple of other areas and they just would not come to them out of it as one. We had to like walk up to them and like, herd them like sheep to the other areas. A couple of awkward moments there where I don't understand the game design. I think I clearly understand it from a co-op perspective. We're waiting for all four players to get in as a crew to go and load up the thing. But like when I'm playing solo, like you brought up Kirk, it's like, why am I waiting for these people to get here? If I get up to the button, just load them in, right? And yeah, even on solo, I felt that way. It's like, hey, climb that ladder faster. Like get over here. What are we doing? It was like hurting cats. I think it's sad. Yeah, like I know problem with all the AI

47:40I thought they did well. There was one part at the end. No spoils, but there's a character seen a moment and the character just starts running around. They're like having their moment. And instead of like we're in cover, we're shooting. Maybe you think they do something heroic? No, they just my AI decided I'm going to run from back and forth across the map at all times. What are we doing here? This is your moment. Like do something cool. And they definitely did something weird. And I was like, I don't understand what's happening here. I would like to detail. I know the moment you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. But my friend was controlling that character. So it's just like, it's just being normal. I don't know. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's odd. Yeah. And so yeah, I liked everything. Kirk, what are some of your final thoughts on the campaign itself? I want us to move over to multiplayer and horde mode. But any final thoughts that we might have missed on the campaign that you want to talk about? I don't think so. I think like really at the base of it, you know, because they said they built it from the ground

48:43up again, which is why it's missing some features and stuff. They built it because they need to reword the movement and the gunplay and everything. And if this is the basis of the future series, I think now that they've got it locked in, the next game will be really fucking good. It's just that this is, you know, this is their first baby in that sense. So I agree with you right there. Yeah, let's let's jump over to that blog post right now. Of course, maybe you saw the news last night started breaking after this blog post posted. I saw a lot of people talking on the multiplayer side. We're worried about ranked mode. Ranked mode is coming next week after pre-release. So you will get a ranked mode very early. But what Kirk is talking about, I'm going to read directly from the blog post here on the gears. It says building E-Day from the ground up and feature development. As we stated before, we started E-Day with an empty hard drive building our entire gameplay sandbox from scratch to ensure a more unified gameplay experience across campaign PvE and PvP. This new sandbox also allowed for innovation in cover combat

49:49and enemies. The trade off being that including every legacy feature from Gears of War was not possible for launch. Those features like meat shields, chainsaw tools, select weapons from a franchise is past or select weapons from the franchise is past and online work like private online works like private lobbies and leaderboards are not going to be are not gone from the franchise. Our team is working hard to deliver the strongest and most stable launch experience we can with an eye to how and what to deliver and improve on fan favorite features either post launch or in our next title. So yeah, as Kirk brought up, right, you are going to notice a number of features that maybe your super gears die hard that you would notice right? No meat shields, no chainsaw tools, no private lobbies and leaderboards here at day one. But they're going to kind of restart and build off of that and start adding in these features later on post launch and in the next title.

50:51I think Kirk a lot of die hard fans didn't love hearing the news of certain features that they love not being in the game and that's where we saw a lot of conversation late last night. Yeah, I mean, I didn't even notice the meat shields thing like and so I saw that blog post. I said, oh yeah, shit, of course, but the one thing that I was good about was like I said earlier with the grenade, do you used to be able to like melee someone with a grenade and it just stick in the mouth and that's just completely gone now. I run up to someone and I just kick them and then they shotgunned me. So yeah, I didn't notice much of that. You bring up the grenade melee, which I love sticking people with those spiky grenades. I didn't do that once this entire time. I felt like I was at a medium to long range most of my playthrough or if I was up close, it was with the Nash or shotgun. But yeah, chainsaw tools, meat shields. I didn't notice that throughout the campaign. I was really missing. I did notice that I thought the executions were kind of lacking Kirk. I felt like I saw a lot of the same executions or it felt like he was missing kind of those

51:52over the top executions that I thought I know Gears of War 4. It felt very muted and minimum whenever I do an execution on some of these enemies. Yeah, I think when you get the chainsaw, it's pretty good because the chainsaw is always fun to rip through people but usually, other than that, it's a variation of like curb stomp or sometimes it just kicks them and they are awesome. Yeah, I guess that's enough. Yeah, so it looks like, hey, as they stated, we started Gears of War e-day with an empty hard drive building our entire gameplay sandbox from scratch to ensure a more unified gameplay experience. As Kirk, you said, I'm excited for the future. Right, I think this game is very good. I like this game a lot and if this is going to be the feel, the look of the game moving forward, I'm excited for that. I do look forward to having the conversation with you again, Kirk, on what they do next, right? Is it going to be this marriage once again of this small open world slash linear campaign or will they choose one or the other and just

52:55double down on that feature? I don't know where they'll take the feedback and what they'll do but right now I leave this going. I'm excited to play more Gears and that's a positive. Yeah, I hope they get to making a warm up with, you know, that story lead got laid off just before this came out. You don't know what's going to happen over there unfortunately, but I do hope they get another shot. Yeah, that's a whole nother conversation, a whole nother can of waxes, right? I can't of worms right there. They're Kirk. I will save that for another day. For me right now, I do, I agree. I hope they get more. I hope we see more. I think this is a really good jumping off point for the franchise and the series of, hey, this is a good game. People are going to like it. Hopefully they'll enjoy multiplayer in Horde mode and let's build off that because you got something solid at its core. Let's see where they go from here. Absolutely. Let's wrap up the podcast. Where can everybody find you? Any final thoughts that we missed? And let's get out of here for the day. I have no more thoughts left in my head. It's like, what time is it? Off-A, that's like my bedtime almost, but you can find me at McKirk,

53:59MCK, K-I-R-K on Twitter. Please don't send me a abuse about nothing. And that's it. Be nice to big Kirk, all right? Talk to video games that are buzzing away with them. I want to give a couple of shout outs really quick. Shout out to Aill, 91.57 on the Super Chat. It says Kirk, thanks for jumping on the kind of funny review and sharing your review with us. I'm very excited to try this game out. And then Sandy Crayne writes in and says, we need Marcus and Dom, need a DLC called V-Day and let them date during Valentine's Day. Thank you for that. Yeah. Kirk, it's been a blast with you. Thank you for jumping on the review. Very looking forward to everyone playing this game. And most importantly, you and I get into jumping to multiplayer in Horde mode. That's next. We didn't get to play that in all during the review. So I'm pumped up to play that. I'm sure we will be playing that here on kind of funny next week. But if you're watching live on Twitch and on YouTube, guess what? The fun of Gears of War, E-Day, doesn't stop. As Andy and Ray Narveyes Jr. are going to kick off their campaign right now here live on Twitch and on YouTube. Here are kind of funny games.

55:02We'll go enjoy that with that. This is your games cast. Have a wonderful day. Leave some comments down below. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Goodbye, everyone. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. And Thropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at clawed.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's clawed.ai slash Spotify.

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