Gears of War: E-Day holds 78% positive on Steam
A wave of negative reviews from players calling the game "woke" did not sink its Steam rating a day before general release.
Steam rates Gears of War: E-Day "Mostly Positive," with 78% of reviews favorable. The Steam reviews API showed 3,176 reviews in total at 9:31 a.m. Mexico City time on Oct. 5, with 2,481 positive and 695 negative. The percentage is our own calculation, across all languages.
The figure moves by the hour. TheGamer cited 75% positive in its piece today, and this morning's count came in three points higher.
Some players are upset about three things, according to that same outlet:
- A new protagonist, whose story they describe as an "agenda."
- Profile emblems tied to sexual orientation.
- Hit Detection in the credits, a consultancy that offers "cultural and sensitivity evaluations."
Tech4Gamers reports the same finding in the credits. In what the two outlets cite, neither The Coalition nor Hit Detection responded.
The reviews arrived while only the Premium edition's early access was open, since Oct. 1. General release is Oct. 6 at 9 a.m. Mexico City time (8 a.m. Pacific), on Xbox Series X|S, Windows and Steam, according to Xbox Wire. Professional critics had already received the game well: Metacritic gave it 88 on Xbox Series X from review-embargo day. TheGamer adds that the most repeated technical complaint is performance on Unreal Engine 5, not the story.
A Steam user review measures the opinion of someone who bought the game and can be inflated or sunk by a campaign; "review bombing" is the name for that practice, and TheGamer uses it in its headline. Steam does not show how many of these reviews are part of an organized campaign, so the figure is reported without attributing intent to any group.
Tomorrow a much larger base of buyers joins the early-access players. It will be the first read on how the public, and not just the press, rates the series' return.
