“Look ma, no face,” growls Marcus Fenix as I land a headshot on an Elite Sniper from across the map. The foley, wet with viscera and meat, drips and gloops in my ears. A nearby Locust roars its outrage, a chainsaw revs up to my left, and there’s a big meaty slap of muscle on flesh as a Drone ambushes my right flank and tackles me to the floor. Gears of War is back, alright, and it’s like it never left.

I think I’d forgotten how incredible this series was at setpieces. There’s a sort-of tidal push and pull to the original trilogy, baiting you forward with well-executed maps with waist-high cover and different configurations of enemies and weapons. They lull you into a false sense of security, before something big happens and you’re forced out of your comfort zone – the train battle at the end of the first game, the sinking of Jacinto in Gears 2, the ‘Mad World’ moment in Gears 3, and even the Hamilton-inspired theatre section in Gears 5 all spring to mind. Gears of War: E-Day, I’m pleased to say, continues this legacy with aplomb – and it gets going pretty much straight away.

I’ll take a second here to do some housekeeping: this is not a scored review because the access I’ve been given so far only allowed me to play the campaign locally. A large – if not majority – part of the Gears experience is in online co-op, PvP, and Horde (in fact, I know a lot of people pick these games up for Horde alone). I will continue to play the game in the coming week, and publish another, scored piece later that reflects the whole package. From here on out, it’s all campaign.

Given the uber-macho ‘ooh-rah’ testosterone on display in the series, a casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that’s all there is to it: big men with big guns splitting things in half like they’re compensating for something. And maybe that was true 20 years ago, but I think Gears has grown into itself with self-awareness, and now feels more akin to something like Starship Troopers or even Robocop; a sly little pastiche of the very things they’re celebrating. You can pick that up from the early hours of E-Day, where a sad Marcus Fenix reunites with long-time compatriot Dom Santiago on the anniversary of a former comrade’s passing. It’s a surprising moment of vulnerability to kick things off – but I guess we need to see the gooey centre of our meathead heroes if we want to feel like there’s something worth protecting.

Almost immediately, the situation is FUBAR. Tunnels start popping up all over the city, and a strange subterranean threat begins emerging – ripping civilians to shreds, taking the military by surprise, and threatening the delicate ‘peace’ the uber-fascist Coalition of Ordered Governments has just about managed to establish in recent months. Marcus, Dom, a greenhorn private called Reyes, and a combat-weary veteran called Mags form a unit – Delta – and make for a rallying point. Your primary objective is survival, and I must give credit to the scenario planners and writers because from this point on-wards the game never lets up.

I do not understand how you can make a campaign of this length and density so fraught. I am pretty sure my cortisol levels are higher this week than they have been all year, simply because I’ve been saying ‘oh God, oh no’ to myself every 10 minutes as I’ve been working through the campaign. My final time clocked somewhere between 20 and 25 hours, playing on Hardcore (the “intended” difficulty, and appropriately brutal), and giving up on collectibles and side missions about halfway through.

When The Coalition is guiding you through its well-manicured setpieces and bombastic cinematic events, Gears of War E-Day is up there with the series’ best – I felt transported back to the original trilogy, but with even better combat mechanics underpinning the whole experience. But, sadly, this breakneck pace and tight design work is undercut with open-ended sections that completely hobble to momentum, intentionality, and tension the rest of the game is so good at building up. What’s worse is that some of these sections just have you exploring the same section of the city, just in various states of disrepair. If the more streamlined sections are a totem of Gears’ best, these languid, free-form bits are emblematic of its worst; evoking some of the weaker pacing in Gears 4 and the more barren reaches of Gears 5. I appreciate the need for a bit of contrast – some downtime to make sure it hurts even more when your face is pushed back against the grindstone – but I think the earlier open bits of E-Day over-correct somewhat, to the detriment of the overall game.

It’s hard to stay mad when there are such incredible, fun gauntlets of misery waiting for you around every bend, though. E-Day is canny with how it feeds you toys: you don’t get the best weapon in the series – the Torque Bow – until the latter half of the campaign. It’s still one of the best weapons to use, maybe in all of gaming. Watching the slowly erecting guideline of tension rise as the explosive bolt you’re harbouring gets ready to shunt off with a satisfying ker-chunk… it’s bliss. All your favourites are back: the shotgun Gnasher, the sniper Longshot, the heavy Boomshot, and of course the chainsaw-equipped Lancer. At first, I thought the shooting was a bit pants – a little messy, too much recoil, not enough focus or impact.

But then I started getting the upgrades. Each weapon has four slots and you’ll need to sniff out lockboxes or do side missions to get more augmentations or unlock more slots. These can focus fire, improve range, enhance lethality, or change the behaviour of your perfect reloads. This is where E-Day stands head and shoulders above past Gears games: each weapon gets a gimmick, and various actions can also grant you a perfect reload in the right circumstances (getting a chainsaw Lancer kill can give you a full clip of powerful ammo, for example). This helps you get into a lethal rhythm: the power fantasy of exploding head after head, nailing a perfect reload every time, and seeing the parabolic increase in your own stopping power. It’s enough to make you want a cigarette and a lie down.

I played through most of the game with a Longshot with a scope (perfect for popping heads at range) and a Locust-made Incinerator – which is basically a shotgun filled with acid. The long-range/short-range interplay is good enough to carry all 20+ hours, complemented by some nice mid-range gunplay when you run out of ammo and need to start scavenging dropped guns from the battlefield floor. As a teenager, I never thought of Halo when I was playing Gears, but I couldn’t get it out of my head during E-Day. Maybe that’s because I only recently wrapped up a LASO run on Halo: Combat Evolved, or maybe it’s because the encounter design in this game is top-notch, and demonstrates an intimate understanding of the tools at your disposal, the strengths and weaknesses of each enemy, and the pros and cons of Gears’ innate identity as a cover shooter. If you boil it down, every fight is simply ‘stay in cover and kill stuff’. But there’s a gleeful abandon to it all in E-Day, a willingness to experiment and remix and not patronise you as a player. It instills in you a kind of mania, I think: there are multiple occasions I felt like a berserker during the campaign – intoxicated by a bloodlust and aggression I didn’t know I was capable of. Gears!

This forward momentum was only undercut by a few occasional gripes – the aforementioned arrhythmia from the curated and open world sections, and some of the encounters that seemed tuned a little too frustratingly for me (and I like my games hard). There’s one fight with two Flayers in a cathedral that had me pulling my hair out – one-shot kills, mixed with some funky camera-work and ungenerous checkpointing, ended up ruining an otherwise excellent little skirmish. This wasn’t the only time I butted heads with controls, either. They’re mostly fine, but when things get very hectic in the middle of a huge melee, it’s easy to glue yourself to the wrong wall, melee at the wrong enemy, die for all the wrong reasons. Between that and getting one-shotted by off-screen enemies, you get a bit of a bad taste in your mouth.

Speaking of which, there is a downside to my praise of the game that’s equally worth addressing. I spend a lot of time praising the pacing and narrative above, yet following the latest wave of Microsoft cuts, E-Day’s story director Juan Vaca was laid off – this happened just before the launch of the game. Other developers fear they’ll be laid off straight after launch – and right before they’d be due their bonuses, too. This does not affect my appraisal of the game and what I’ve played (actually, it makes me admire the effort that went into it all the more), but I’d be remiss to not add a note here acknowledging the culture, crunch, and context behind the no doubt turbulent journey E-Day has had to this juncture. I wish the developers affected well, and hope they can take some comfort in knowing they made a game that pays homage to – and, in many cases, improves upon – Gears games that have come before.

And ultimately, I think The Coalition has managed to capture some lighting in a bottle with E-Day. It somehow manages to evolve all the best bits of the original 2006-2011 trilogy whilst dropping the cringiest parts of the series. It reevaluates what makes Gears timeless and retrofits the rest, and what emerges is this blood-spattered, muscle-bound colossus that is keenly aware of its strengths and weaknesses. For every gripe, I’ve got two bits of praise. For every two seconds of frustration I felt, I enjoyed ten seconds of euphoria. Gears has always been a game of contrasts, a winding tension relieved in an explosion of blood and gore – and somehow The Coalition has taken that tempo in micro and expanded it to macro. It’s good to have you back, Marcus.

A copy of Gears of War E-Day was provided for this review by Xbox.