Oh the memories of playing Gears of Wars on Xbox 360. Single player, multiplayer and co-op were way ahead of their time clear back then. All these years later and here we are with where the story truly began. Gears of War: E-Day already earned a 10/10 from us on the strength of what it is as a game. The weight of the combat, the way it handles its own history, the sheer brutal confidence of it. But playing it on PC with NVIDIA's tech running underneath turns a great game into something closer to a showcase, and it's worth talking about separately because the pairing here is genuinely special.
From the tech side of the house, we ran it across two very different setups, an RTX 5090 build and an RTX 5070 build, and the thing that stuck with us is how little the gap mattered to the experience. Obviously the 5090 flexes. That's what it's for. But the 5070 held up far better than we expected on a game that looks this good, and that's the part worth paying attention to.
A lot of showcase titles look incredible in screenshots taken on hardware nobody owns. This one actually delivers on cards real people are buying, not just the super spendy top of the stack 5090.
And boy does it look incredible. I just can’t stress this enough. Emergence Day is a nasty, smoke-choked, falling-apart kind of setting, and the lighting work sells it completely. Fires throw light that behaves properly across rubble and armor. Interiors feel claustrophobic because the shadows are doing real work rather than being painted on. It’s truly a work of terrifying art in almost every scene.
There's a particular quality to the way the ruined cities catch light that we haven't seen matched anywhere this year, and it holds up whether you're standing still admiring it or sprinting through a firefight with Locust pouring out of a hole in the ground.
This game is special. It is truly lightning in a bottle. The Coalition built something that honors what made Gears matter in the first place, NVIDIA gave it the technical foundation to look the way it deserves to, and the result is one of the best-looking games on PC running smoothly on hardware that doesn't require a second mortgage. NVIDIA keeps setting the floor higher for what we expect from PC gaming, and E-Day is the clearest example of the benefits of said platform.
Gears is back baby, and it has never looked better!
