Gears of War: E-Day is out today on Xbox Series X|S and PC, day one on Game Pass. Standard is $69.99.
Premium early access has been running since October 1.
Scores are the best the series has had since Gears of War 3.
Metacritic has Xbox at 87 from 45 reviews, 91 percent positive and zero negative.
PC is lower, at 83 from 33 reviews.
OpenCritic sits at 87, with 91 percent of critics recommending it, in the 98th percentile of games on the site.
Forbes had the Xbox number at 89 earlier in the week, before more reviews landed.
For context, the original trilogy is 94, 93, and 91.
Gears 4 and Gears 5 both finished at 84.
Pure Xbox, The Outerhaven, and Day One went 10/10.
TMI has it 9/10
IGN and several others are at 9. GameSpot is a 7,
Wccftech a 7.4.
The praise is the campaign: weighty gunplay, modernized movement, Emergence Day as a horror set piece, and a tighter focus on young Marcus and Dom.
The caveat is real.
Horde Siege and Versus were locked during the embargo, so the aggregate is mostly a campaign score.
User reviews on Metacritic are at 8.6, but the site is not taking full user reviews until tomorrow.
On Steam, Premium early access already set a series record at 20,374 concurrent, about double Gears 5’s old peak of 10,196.
English user reviews are Mostly Positive, about 75 percent of roughly 2,350.
Full launch and Game Pass should push that number higher tonight.
One analyst had Steam pre-launch sales around 120,000, which is a weak read if you ignore Game Pass and Xbox.
The other launch note is technical.
The Coalition is using the Series S NVMe SSD as extra RAM so the weaker console can hold the game.
That is getting as much coverage as the score.
