Critics Love Gears of War: E-Day. Steam Players Are More Divided.

The short version

• Critics put Gears of War: E-Day at 88 on OpenCritic.
• On Steam it's Mostly Positive: about 78% of 3,972 user reviews as of October 7.
• Real complaints: missing series staples, the story, and how Marcus and Dom are written.
• Part of the negativity is a review bomb over the game being "woke", which has nothing to do with how it plays.

Two scores, two audiences

A 78% Steam score isn't bad. It's just a long way from the critic consensus we covered in our E-Day reviews roundup.

There's a quirk worth knowing too. Gagadget noted that Steam's "most helpful" reviews lean negative, so the store page can look grimmer than the overall number. If you only read the top few, you'll get a skewed picture.

It's not a sign nobody's playing, either. During the early-access window before launch, E-Day reportedly hit 20,374 concurrent players on Steam, a series record on PC.

What players are unhappy about

Set aside the culture-war posts and a few themes keep coming up in Steam reviews:

• Missing staples. Players say chainsaw duels and the "meat shield" grab didn't make it in.
• The story. Some call it dull next to the critics' praise.
• Marcus and Dom. A common complaint is that both feel toned down.
• Mags Carter. The new character's bigger role reads to some players as a bait and switch for a game sold on Marcus and Dom.

These are fair arguments to have about a Gears game, and they don't cancel out the critics. Reviewers mostly judged the campaign and the gunplay, and both came out well. Steam players are weighing what feels like Gears to them.

The review bomb part

TheGamer and Game Rant both reported a wave of negative reviews calling the game "woke". Reviews like that usually target the cast and writing rather than anything you'd notice with a controller in hand. Steam has a system for this: when Valve flags a burst as "off-topic review activity", those reviews are left out of the score by default.

What to watch: whether the score moves once the launch week crowd has finished the campaign. On Steam, the most recent reviews often tell you more than the all-time number.