Gears of War: E-Day takes players back to Emergence Day, the beginning of the long-running saga, following protagonists Marcus and Dom through the first hours of the Locust invasion. The Coalition rebuilt the game entirely from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5, and it is the first shipping title to use the engine's MegaLights technology, which allows artists to light a scene with hundreds of dynamic ray-traced light sources in real time.
The reviewer said the effect is immediately striking, describing a "haunting use of light and shadow" in the opening moments, driven by sources such as flashing police and ambulance lights and, in a ravaged supermarket, everything from flickering TVs to fluorescent tubes in the frozen foods aisle.
To measure what that presentation costs, the outlet benchmarked 43 graphics cards targeting a 60 FPS average. A companion test of 25 CPUs found the game is "uncharacteristically CPU-heavy" for an Unreal Engine 5 title and investigated its low core mode.
The game offers five quality presets: Low, Medium, High, Ultra and Ludicrous, the last seemingly equivalent to Cinematic in other Unreal Engine 5 titles. Side-by-side screenshots show Low "brutally crushes" shadows and sheds much of its ambient occlusion, giving surfaces a "cardboard cut-out" look, which the reviewer says may or may not be a bug. From Medium upward the differences are more subtle, with foliage shadows becoming softer and more detailed at higher settings. The reviewer advises against going below Medium.