Here is every Gears of War game in order: eleven games over twenty years, from the first Gears of War on Xbox 360 in November 2006 to Gears of War: E-Day, which launched on October 6, 2026. For each one you get the date, the scores, the sales where they were published, what it added to the series and what people complained about. At the end there is a table of every game, the story order, and where you can actually play each of them today on PC, Xbox and PS5.
- 2001-2005: how a Battlefield clone became a cover shooter
- Gears of War, November 2006: a 94 and 3 million copies in 10 weeks
- Gears of War 2, November 2008: Horde and 2 million copies in one weekend
- Gears of War 3, September 2011: 3 million in a week and the end of a trilogy
- Gears of War: Judgment, March 2013: a 79 and the creators walk out
- 2014-2015: Microsoft buys the series, and Ultimate Edition scores an 82
- Gears of War 4, October 2016: Marcus's son, Kait and Unreal Engine 4
- 2019-2020: Gears 5, Gears Tactics and the mobile Gears POP!
- 2020-2025: six years without a new game, and the first Gears on PlayStation
- Gears of War: E-Day, October 2026: an 88 and a Steam record for the series
- The Netflix film: the Dune screenwriter and the Deadpool 2 director
- The series in numbers: scores, gaps and Steam players
- What order to play Gears of War in: release or story
- Where to play Gears of War today: PC, Xbox and PS5
- Every Gears of War game: the full table
- What changed in twenty years
The timing is not an accident. E-Day scored 88 on Metacritic, the series' best result in fifteen years, and hit 31,517 concurrent players on Steam, more than any Gears before it. And it all began with a project Epic Games pitched as a Battlefield-style shooter with tanks and mechs. There was no cover in it at all.
2001-2005: how a Battlefield clone became a cover shooter
Around 2001 Epic was working on something called Unreal Warfare. According to Epic programmer James Golding, it was a class-based team shooter with vehicles and mechs, "like Battlefield". Cliff Bleszinski, later lead designer of Gears, told the same story at GDC 2007: it started as a Tribes or Team Fortress style multiplayer game about holding territory. The enemies were originally called the Geist, a name that had to go once Nintendo shipped a game called Geist.
The project was then cut down and rebuilt. Bleszinski named three games it grew out of. Resident Evil 4 gave it the over-the-shoulder camera and the pacing, Namco's Kill Switch had what he called the best cover system of its time, and the old Bionic Commando inspired the idea of dashing from cover to cover. Combat cash, a morale meter and a complex squad orders system were dropped along the way. What stayed is the thing that now feels obvious: you snap to a wall, pop out, shoot, and run to the next one.
The game was first shown behind closed doors at GDC 2005 as an Unreal Engine 3 demo, then publicly at Microsoft's E3 2005 briefing. A Microsoft fact sheet dated May 17, 2005 called it Epic's first game made exclusively for Xbox 360, with a release window of "Emergence Day 2006". Epic's Mark Rein put the budget at roughly 10 million dollars, not counting the engine: a team of twenty to thirty people for two years. Modest for 2006, almost quaint today.
Gears of War, November 2006: a 94 and 3 million copies in 10 weeks
Gears of War launched on Xbox 360 on November 7, 2006. Microsoft sold three million copies in ten weeks, making it the fastest-selling game of the year. It holds a 94 on Metacritic from 88 reviews, and at the D.I.C.E. Awards in February 2007 it won eight of its ten nominations, including Overall Game of the Year.
The ad did half the work. The Mad World spot, with Marcus running through ruins to the Gary Jules cover, was directed by Joseph Kosinski, the same Kosinski who would later make Top Gun: Maverick. It was rendered in Unreal Engine 3, and the song sat in download charts for weeks afterwards. The original 2006 ad is not on any official Xbox channel, so the video above is the shot-for-shot 2015 remake built with Ultimate Edition footage.
- Story. The planet Sera, fourteen years after Emergence Day, when the Locust burst out of the ground. Dom Santiago breaks Marcus Fenix out of prison, and Delta Squad carries the Lightmass Bomb into the enemy's tunnels.
- Cover. Not the first game to have it, but the first built entirely around it. The snap-to-wall button became the genre standard for a decade.
- Active reload. Hit the timing and you get bonus damage, miss it and the gun jams. A small thing that turned reloading into a minigame.
- The chainsaw Lancer. An assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet became the symbol of the series, and sawing a Locust in half was the first Gears meme.
- Two-player co-op. The whole campaign could be played with a friend, split-screen or online.
"I'm smitten with Gears of War."
GameSpy, 100 out of 100A year later, on November 6, 2007, the Windows version arrived. It was co-developed with Poland's People Can Fly (remember that name, it comes back), and it had things the console never got: five new campaign chapters including a Brumak fight, three multiplayer maps, King of the Hill and a level editor. That version is no longer sold, and on PC the first game now lives on as a remaster, more on that below.
Gears of War 2, November 2008: Horde and 2 million copies in one weekend
The sequel arrived exactly two years later, on November 7, 2008. Microsoft sold over two million copies in the opening weekend, and 1.5 million players logged into Xbox Live that same weekend. It scored a 93, nearly level with the first game. Joshua Ortega wrote the story, Bleszinski stayed on as lead designer and Rod Fergusson as producer.
The story got bigger and nastier. Six months after the bomb, cities are sinking into the ground, the last human stronghold of Jacinto is next, and the army takes the war underground. This is where Dom finally finds his wife Maria, and players remember that scene better than any firefight.
- Horde. Five players against waves of Locust. The mode debuted here, and similar modes later showed up everywhere from Halo 3: ODST to Mass Effect 3. GameSpot called it the most addictive and challenging take on Gears yet.
- Chainsaw duels. When two Lancers lock, whoever mashes faster wins.
- Meatshields. You can pick up a downed enemy and hide behind him.
- New weapons. The Mortar, the Mulcher chain gun, a flamethrower and the Gorgon pistol.
What changed from the first game: scale. In the original the squad crept through ruins. In the sequel it rides a Brumak and carves its way out of a worm the size of a city. The cover mechanics barely changed, and that was the right call.
Gears of War 3, September 2011: 3 million in a week and the end of a trilogy
Gears 3 was first dated for April 8, 2011 and actually shipped on September 20. Pre-orders had passed a million by May, the first week brought more than three million sales, and Microsoft said no game of 2011 had grossed more in a single week. At the same time Microsoft and Epic said the series had passed a billion dollars in lifetime sales. It scored a 91.
Karen Traviss, who wrote the Gears novels, wrote the story. Two years after Jacinto fell, what is left of the army fights on two fronts: the Locust and the Lambent, creatures mutated by the contaminated fuel called Imulsion. The ending ties everything off, and in my view it is one of the cleanest endings to a trilogy in games. No spoilers, but Dom gets the strongest scene of the whole series here.
- Four-player co-op. The campaign now supports four players online and two on one screen.
- Beast mode. Horde in reverse: you play as the Locust and storm a human defense.
- Women in the squad. Anya Stroud and Sam Byrne became real fighters instead of voices on the radio.
The A.V. Club wrote that the story in Gears 3 is nearly as potent as the gameplay. For a series that in 2006 was praised for everything except its plot, that was a real shift.
Gears of War: Judgment, March 2013: a 79 and the creators walk out
Judgment came out on March 19, 2013, and it was the first Gears whose campaign Epic did not build itself. That went to People Can Fly, the studio from the PC version of the first game, which Epic owned by then, while Epic kept the multiplayer. The story jumps back to the first weeks after Emergence Day: Lieutenant Damon Baird, Augustus Cole and Kilo Squad stand before a military tribunal and tell what happened in flashbacks.
Some ideas were good. Declassified let you reveal a harder version of a mission for more stars, and multiplayer got a class-based mode called OverRun. But familiar things were trimmed: you could only carry two guns, and the controls were remapped in a way that confused veterans. It also came with a separate campaign, Aftermath, set during Gears 3. The result was a 79, the lowest score of the main series. GameSpot still noted that the gunplay was as brutal and weighty as ever.
The bigger story was behind the scenes. In April 2012 Epic confirmed it had canceled Gears of War: Exile, an unannounced spin-off rumored to be a Kinect game. In August 2012 producer Rod Fergusson left Epic, and in October so did lead designer Cliff Bleszinski. Judgment shipped without them, and it was Epic's last Gears. Bleszinski went on to make LawBreakers, whose servers were shut down a little over a year after launch. Fergusson, as you will see, came back to Gears quite soon.
2014-2015: Microsoft buys the series, and Ultimate Edition scores an 82
On January 27, 2014, Microsoft bought the entire Gears of War property from Epic: every existing and future game, film and piece of merchandise. Phil Spencer shared numbers that no one has officially updated since: over 22 million units sold and over a billion dollars grossed. The series went to Black Tusk Studios in Vancouver, and Rod Fergusson joined it, this time to lead. On June 3, 2015, Black Tusk was renamed The Coalition, the name the studio still makes Gears under.
Its first job was a remaster. Gears of War: Ultimate Edition came out on Xbox One on August 25, 2015, with Splash Damage helping. It was the first game rebuilt with new models, lighting and cutscenes, plus the five chapters from the old PC version. Anyone who bought it before the end of 2015 got Gears 1, 2, 3 and Judgment free through backward compatibility. It scored an 82 on Xbox One and a 73 for the Windows 10 version, which reached the Microsoft Store on March 1, 2016.
Gears of War 4, October 2016: Marcus's son, Kait and Unreal Engine 4
Gears of War 4 launched on October 11, 2016 on Xbox One and Windows 10, the first game in the series on Unreal Engine 4. At E3 2016 Microsoft announced Xbox Play Anywhere, buy once and play on both console and PC, and Gears 4 was one of the first games sold that way. Over 1.6 million people played its beta. It scored an 84 on Xbox One and an 86 on PC, where it is still sold only through the Microsoft Store and the Xbox app. It never came to Steam.
Twenty-five years pass between Gears 3 and Gears 4. The lead is now JD Fenix, Marcus's son, with Kait Diaz and Del Walker beside him, while Marcus himself has grown a grey beard and grumbles about being dragged away from his tomatoes. The Locust are gone, replaced by the Swarm, a new threat nobody understands yet. The ending sets up the sequel: Kait's locket ties her to the Locust Queen Myrrah.
- Horde 3.0. Classes (Scout, Sniper, Heavy, Engineer) and the Fabricator, a machine you use between waves to build fortifications.
- New cover moves. You can yank an enemy over cover to your side.
- Arms Race. A mode where the team's weapon changes every three kills.
What changed from the trilogy: the series switched heroes and console generations for the first time but kept the rhythm almost untouched. That was the main criticism of Gears 4: technically strong, but too safe.
2019-2020: Gears 5, Gears Tactics and the mobile Gears POP!
Gears 5 launched on September 10, 2019, with Game Pass Ultimate members playing from the 6th. Dropping "of War" from the title says a lot about the mood: the studio wanted the series to feel broader. Over three million people played in the opening weekend, double Gears 4's first week, making it the biggest Xbox Game Studios launch of that generation. It was also the first numbered Gears on Steam on day one. It scored an 84.
Kait Diaz takes the lead. She learns that Myrrah is her grandmother and spends the game working out what that means. There are open areas crossed on a wind-powered skiff, and the support robot Jack became a real character a second player can control in co-op. The campaign supports three players on one screen. Multiplayer added Escape: three players sneak into a Swarm hive, plant a bomb and run before everything blows. The game ends on a choice we will not spoil, and it still has not had a follow-up.
On December 15, 2020 the Hivebusters expansion followed, a short three-hour campaign about the Escape heroes on a chain of tropical islands. It scored an 82, cost 19.99 dollars, and was free for Game Pass Ultimate members.
Gears Tactics came out on April 28, 2020, on PC first, and on Xbox only in November. It is turn-based tactics in the vein of XCOM, the first Gears that is not an over-the-shoulder shooter. It is set twelve years before the first game: Sergeant Gabe Diaz, Kait's father, and Sid Redburn hunt the Locust scientist Ukkon. Splash Damage made it with The Coalition, and it scored an 80 on PC. God is a Geek called it deep, intelligent and balanced, and I agree: it is the best game in the series that the fewest people know about.
Gears POP! launched on August 22, 2019 on iOS, Android and Windows 10. It was a Clash Royale-style strategy game with Gears characters drawn as Funko vinyl figures. It was made by Mediatonic, the studio that released Fall Guys a year later. It scored a 64, and Gamezebo called it a busier, less balanced and uglier Clash Royale. The shutdown was announced on October 28, 2020, and the servers went dark on April 26, 2021. There is no way to play it now.
2020-2025: six years without a new game, and the first Gears on PlayStation
On February 5, 2020 Rod Fergusson announced he was leaving The Coalition for Blizzard to run Diablo. After that, no new big Gears came out for almost seven years. A trilogy collection was rumored the whole time: Windows Central's Jez Corden wrote about it, and leaks promised co-op without competitive multiplayer. It was never announced.
Instead, on May 5, 2025 Microsoft revealed Gears of War: Reloaded, yet another version of the first game, this time in 4K, with 60 fps in the campaign, 120 fps in multiplayer and shared progress across platforms. It launched on August 26, 2025 for 39.99 dollars, and the headline was the platform list rather than the graphics: Xbox Series X|S, PC and PS5. Nineteen years after launch, Gears reached PlayStation for the first time. The Coalition built it with Sumo Digital and Disbelief.
That is the Reloaded trailer on the official PlayStation channel, a sentence that would have sounded like a joke in 2015. Over a million people played in three days, and The Coalition marked it with "Ending the console war, one grub at a time." Scores split: 85 on Xbox Series X, 79 on PS5 and 73 on PC. TechRadar wrote that mowing through grubs is just as fun as it was in 2006, and that sums Reloaded up: an honest remaster of an old game.
Gears of War: E-Day, October 2026: an 88 and a Steam record for the series
E-Day was revealed on June 9, 2024 at the Xbox Games Showcase, with Mad World playing once again. The title stands for Emergence Day: this is a prequel set on the night the Locust broke out of the ground, fourteen years before the first game. A young Marcus and Dom, with Mags and Lucas, try to survive in the city of Kalona. It was built from scratch on Unreal Engine 5, with no old code or assets, the studio's first such project since 2015. People Can Fly came on as co-developer, closing the circle: the Polish studio behind the original PC port and the Judgment campaign is back in the series.
E-Day launched on October 6, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, through the Xbox app and Steam, and in Game Pass from day one. Premium Edition owners started on October 1. There is no PS5 version, so Reloaded remains the only Gears on PlayStation. As of October 8 it holds an 88 on Metacritic for Xbox Series X from 52 reviews and an 82 for PC. Outlets disagree a lot: Game Informer gave it a 9.5 and said it innovates in all the right ways, while GameSpot settled on a 7. Steam peaked at 31,517 concurrent players, a record for any game in the series, and user reviews sit at "Mostly Positive", 75 percent of 5,835.
We covered the tech, the Xbox modes and NVIDIA's numbers in our E-Day launch news, and the PC requirements, where a hardware ray tracing card is mandatory, in a separate breakdown. The Coalition's studio head Mike Crump told the BBC on October 8 that the next game will not take nearly as long. After a seven-year gap, I would like to believe him.
The Netflix film: the Dune screenwriter and the Deadpool 2 director
People have been trying to film Gears for almost as long as the series has existed. New Line bought the rights in March 2007 with Len Wiseman attached to direct, but he left around 2010. In 2016, during the Gears 4 launch stream, Universal picked up the rights, and again nothing came of it. On November 7, 2022, the series' sixteenth anniversary, Netflix and The Coalition announced a live-action film, to be followed by an adult animated series.
In March 2023 Jon Spaihts, co-writer of Dune, was hired for the script. In May 2025 David Leitch, director of Deadpool 2 and The Fall Guy, entered talks to direct. At CinemaCon in April 2026 he said he thinks the film is going to happen and that Netflix is 100 percent behind it. There is no cast, no shooting date and no release date. Dave Bautista has been publicly campaigning to play Marcus for years, but nobody has cast him.
The series in numbers: scores, gaps and Steam players
The original trilogy stayed above 90, and that is still the ceiling. Judgment's drop to 79 came right as the creators left, The Coalition era settled at a steady 84, and E-Day's 88 is the first time in fifteen years the series broke away from that shelf.
The rhythm changed too. Under Epic a big Gears came every two to three years, under The Coalition every three, and then more than seven years passed between Gears 5 and E-Day. Reloaded and Tactics are left out of this chart, since one is a remaster and the other a spin-off.
Steam player counts need care, because every one of these games was in Game Pass from day one and Game Pass has no public counter. Still, the trend is clear. Gears 5 peaked at 10,196 concurrent players in 2019, E-Day at three times that. The series' PC audience has grown, which is a good sign for a game that will not even start on PC without ray tracing.
What order to play Gears of War in: release or story
If you are new to the series, my advice is simple: play in release order, but take the first game as Reloaded. That way you see how the series grew, and the story's surprises land the way they were meant to. The prequels, Judgment, Tactics and E-Day, were written for people who already know Marcus and the Locust.
If you would rather follow the history of Sera from start to finish, here is the order of events inside the universe.
| Order | Game | When it is set |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gears of War: E-Day | Emergence Day, 14 years before the first game |
| 2 | Gears of War: Judgment | the first weeks after Emergence Day |
| 3 | Gears Tactics | 12 years before the first game |
| 4 | Gears of War (or Reloaded) | 14 years after Emergence Day |
| 5 | Gears of War 2 | six months after the first game |
| 6 | Gears of War 3 | two years after the fall of Jacinto |
| 7 | Gears of War: Judgment, Aftermath campaign | during Gears 3 |
| 8 | Gears of War 4 | 25 years after Gears 3 |
| 9 | Gears 5 | right after Gears 4 |
| 10 | Gears 5: Hivebusters | alongside Gears 5 |
Where to play Gears of War today: PC, Xbox and PS5
The series' biggest problem in 2026 is that not every game is officially on PC. Gears 2, 3 and Judgment are still Xbox 360 games, playable only on Xbox One and Xbox Series through backward compatibility. Gears of War 2 does have a fan-made PC port called Hollow, but it is built from a leaked 2008 developer build rather than your own copy of the game. We explain the difference in our piece on native PC ports of Xbox 360 games.
| Game | PC | Xbox | PlayStation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gears of War (2006) | 2007 version delisted | Xbox 360, backward compatible on One and Series | no |
| Gears of War 2 | not officially | Xbox 360, backward compatible | no |
| Gears of War 3 | not officially | Xbox 360, backward compatible | no |
| Gears of War: Judgment | not officially | Xbox 360, backward compatible | no |
| Gears of War: Ultimate Edition | Microsoft Store | Xbox One, Series | no |
| Gears of War 4 | Microsoft Store, Xbox app | Xbox One, Series | no |
| Gears 5 and Hivebusters | Steam, Xbox app | Xbox One, Series | no |
| Gears Tactics | Steam, Xbox app | Xbox One, Series | no |
| Gears POP! | shut down on April 26, 2021 | ||
| Gears of War: Reloaded | Steam, Xbox app | Xbox Series | PS5 |
| Gears of War: E-Day | Steam, Xbox app | Xbox Series | no |
On PC alone you cannot play the full story without gaps: the whole second half of the trilogy is missing between Reloaded and Gears 4. The cheapest legal way to play everything is an Xbox Series S, which runs every game except the shut-down Gears POP! For a PC player, the honest route is to start with Reloaded and catch up on Gears 2 and 3 through story recaps before Gears 4.
Every Gears of War game: the full table
| Year | Game | Studio | Launch platforms | Metacritic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | Gears of War | Epic Games | Xbox 360, PC in 2007 | 94 |
| 2008 | Gears of War 2 | Epic Games | Xbox 360 | 93 |
| 2011 | Gears of War 3 | Epic Games | Xbox 360 | 91 |
| 2013 | Gears of War: Judgment | Epic Games, People Can Fly | Xbox 360 | 79 |
| 2015 | Gears of War: Ultimate Edition | The Coalition, Splash Damage | Xbox One, PC in 2016 | 82 |
| 2016 | Gears of War 4 | The Coalition | Xbox One, PC | 84 |
| 2019 | Gears POP! | Mediatonic | iOS, Android, PC | 64 |
| 2019 | Gears 5 | The Coalition | Xbox One, PC | 84 |
| 2020 | Gears Tactics | Splash Damage, The Coalition | PC, Xbox | 80 |
| 2025 | Gears of War: Reloaded | The Coalition, Sumo Digital, Disbelief | Xbox Series, PC, PS5 | 85 |
| 2026 | Gears of War: E-Day | The Coalition, People Can Fly | Xbox Series, PC | 88 |
What changed in twenty years
- Owner. Epic created the series, Microsoft bought it in 2014, and since 2015 Gears has been made by The Coalition in Vancouver.
- Hero. Marcus went from prisoner to bearded veteran, the series handed the torch to JD and Kait, and E-Day went back to a young Marcus.
- Platforms. The former Xbox 360 exclusive now launches on Steam on day one, and one game even made it to PS5.
- Engine. Unreal Engine 3, then 4, now 5. On PC, E-Day requires hardware ray tracing.
- What did not change. Cover, active reload, the chainsaw Lancer and Horde. Twenty years on, you can tell it is Gears from a single frame.
My personal favorite is still Gears 2, for Horde and the Maria scene, but E-Day is the first Gears in a long time I would hand to someone who has never touched the series. On November 7, 2026 the series turns twenty, and it reaches that birthday in its best shape since the Xbox 360 days.
How many Gears of War games are there?
Eleven as of October 2026: five numbered games (Gears of War, 2, 3, 4 and Gears 5), the prequels Judgment and E-Day, the tactics game Gears Tactics, the mobile Gears POP! and two re-releases of the first game, Ultimate Edition and Reloaded. Hivebusters is an expansion for Gears 5, not a separate game.
What order should I play Gears of War in?
Newcomers are best off in release order: Reloaded, 2, 3, 4, 5, then E-Day, Judgment and Tactics as prequels. In story order it goes E-Day, Judgment, Tactics, the first game, 2, 3, 4, Gears 5.
Is Gears of War on PS5?
One game is: Gears of War: Reloaded, a remaster of the first game, released on PS5 on August 26, 2025. E-Day did not come to PlayStation, it is only on Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Can you play Gears of War 2 and 3 on PC?
Not officially. Both were released only on Xbox 360 and run on Xbox One and Series through backward compatibility. Gears 2 has an unofficial port called Hollow, built from a leaked developer build.
Sources
Origins: GamePro.de on James Golding's interview with GamesTM, Cliff Bleszinski's GDC 2007 talk as reported by GameSpot and Game Developer, Microsoft's May 17, 2005 fact sheet, the budget per Mark Rein as reported by Gear Live and WRAL. The Mad World ad: the SIGGRAPH archive and a Microsoft blog post. First-game sales and awards: Microsoft's January 19, 2007 press release via Engadget, D.I.C.E. 2007 results. The 2007 PC version: TechSpot and Shacknews.
Gears of War 2 and 3 sales: Microsoft press releases via Shacknews, bit-tech, GameSpot and Engadget. Judgment and Exile: Gematsu, Game Informer, GameSpot. The acquisition and Phil Spencer's numbers: Xbox Wire, January 27, 2014. The Coalition: Gematsu, MCV. Fergusson's move to Blizzard: Game Informer. Ultimate Edition: TheSixthAxis, MP1st. Gears 4: Xbox Wire, Gematsu, SegmentNext. Gears 5 and Hivebusters: Xbox Wire. Gears Tactics: Gematsu, Windows Central. Gears POP!: Microsoft Store, Game Informer. Reloaded: Gematsu, Shacknews, Push Square. E-Day: Xbox Wire, Game Developer, GamingBolt, Game Informer, GameSpot, VGC, TechPowerUp. The film: Gematsu, Shacknews, TheWrap, Collider, Variety, Slashfilm.
Scores: Metacritic as of October 8, 2026. Steam players: SteamDB via TechPowerUp, PureXbox and KeenGamer. Review quotes from GameSpy, GameSpot, The A.V. Club, God is a Geek, Gamezebo, TechRadar and Game Informer are taken from their pages and Metacritic.
Images: official screenshots from Steam (Gears 5, Gears Tactics, Reloaded, E-Day) and the Microsoft Store (Gears of War 2006, Gears of War 2, 3, Judgment, Ultimate Edition, Gears 4, Gears POP!). Videos from the official Xbox, XBOX ON, PlayStation and Gears of War channels.
