I keep going back and forth on Gears of War: E-Day.

One minute I’m loving how little it seems to care about “reinventing” Gears, and every moment of Marcus, Dom, a Lancer, some waist-high cover and a room full of Locust is just an absolute blast. Then a few hours later I start wondering whether that’s also the problem.

Because E-Day feels very, very familiar. It’s slicker, it looks incredible, movement feels better, the combat has been tightened up all over the place... But underneath all of that, it’s still very recognisably Gears.

That’s the bit I can’t figure out. Sometimes all that familiarity feels like exactly what I wanted from E-Day. Other times it feels like Gears just doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

E-Day really does feel like Gears went back to 2006

Marcus, Dom, Locust, cover-to-cover firefights and big linear set pieces. E-Day knows exactly what kind of Gears game it wants to be.

Okay, so it obviously doesn’t literally play like a game from 2006. Movement and cover are smoother, fights give you more room to move around, and the whole thing generally feels much better in your hands.

But if you played those original games, you fall back into the old rhythm almost immediately. Find some cover, wait for an opening, pop a Locust head with the Longshot, botch an active reload you absolutely thought you hit and occasionally deal with a problem by putting a chainsaw through it.

The Verge put it perfectly:

“E-Day is a 2006 version of Gears rendered with the technology of 2026.”

They meant that as a compliment, and the longer I play, the easier that is to understand.

This might be exactly what Gears needed

The shooting is excellent, and I think E-Day is the best Gears has ever felt to play.

What helps is how straightforward the whole thing is. There are so many shooters now trying to be five different games at once that a big-budget game being happy to give you great third-person firefights feels really refreshing. Gears doesn’t need a battle royale or an extraction mode, and I’m not convinced it ever needed a bigger, more open world either.

Even the multiplayer stands out a little now just by still being Gears multiplayer. The rest of the shooter genre has changed so much around it that something this familiar can almost feel unusual. PC Gamer described it earlier this year as “so old, it feels new again”, which feels pretty accurate.

When E-Day gives you a good arena, a bunch of Locust and enough tools to make a mess, I’m not sitting there wishing it was more ambitious. VGC makes basically the same case: basically saying that some series are better when they keep changing, while others are better when they know what works and stick with it. Gears is one of the latter.

And maybe that really is enough. Maybe Gears just needed another really good Gears game.

But “another really good Gears game” is kind of the problem too

That familiarity feels great in the middle of a firefight. Outside those fights, it can start to make E-Day feel pretty limited.

PC Gamer has the harshest version of that criticism:

“Gears has never felt better to play, or more creatively stagnant.”

I don’t completely agree with that, but I understand it. Once the novelty of seeing Emergence Day, younger Marcus and Dom and the first Locust starts wearing off, there’s still an awful lot here that I’ve done before.

Gears 5 was messy in places, but at least it was trying to push at the edges of what a Gears campaign could be with bigger areas, more freedom and more exploration. Not all of it worked, but you could see the series testing things. E-Day pulls back from a lot of that, and the strange thing is that the more it pulls back, the better it often gets.

Some of the more exploratory parts have been among the things reviewers are less convinced by, while the straightforward, tightly controlled firefights are getting most of the praise. The Guardian put it pretty bluntly:

“best combat in 20 years of Gears games – but everything surrounding it is disappointing.” I wouldn’t go that far, but I understand why that review gets there.

The parts of E-Day that feel most like classic Gears are also the parts that seem to work best.

The real question is whether “really good Gears” is enough

Nobody seems to be arguing that the old formula stopped working. The split is over whether making that formula better is enough of a reason for Gears to keep doing the same thing.

A good fight with a Lancer, Gnasher or Longshot still works. Marcus and Dom still work. The Locust still work. None of that suddenly becomes a problem just because it’s 2026.

GamesRadar looks at E-Day and sees an “ode to big-screen action” that puts Gears back at the cutting edge of third-person shooters. PC Gamer looks at a lot of the same game and sees something creatively stuck.

That’s really what the argument comes down to for me: is simply a good Gears game "good enough"?

So is it brilliantly old-school or just plain old?

If what you wanted was classic Gears made better, E-Day being stuck in the past probably isn’t going to bother you much.

If you miss big, mostly straightforward shooter campaigns, if Marcus and Dom are the Gears characters you care about most, and if another room full of Locust still sounds fun, E-Day gives you plenty of that. If you wanted E-Day to show you what comes after Gears 5, though, I can see the same familiarity becoming frustrating pretty quickly.

I’m curious how other people feel about all this. When a series has been around this long, do you want it to keep finding new things to do, or are you happy getting a really good version of the thing you already loved?