The final firefight is done, the chainsaw has stopped revving, and the credits on Gears of War: E-Day are rolling over a city that looks like it lost an argument with the planet. If you bought the Premium Edition, that happened sometime this week. If you're on Game Pass, it's about to happen tonight. Either way, you're about to be left holding a very quiet controller.
Most "games like Gears" lists will tell you to play Gears 5. You have. This list assumes you've played the rest of the series, so the only Gears game here is the one E-Day leads straight into. Everything else is ordered for momentum: the closest matches first, then out toward stranger picks that share E-Day's DNA in one specific way. If you're building out your Game Pass queue, our Xbox picks are a good next stop. Eight entries, each one earned.
01
Third-person shooter / The Coalition
Gears of War: Reloaded
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
Play This First
E-Day ends on the day the war starts. Reloaded, the 2025 remaster of the 2006 original, picks up fourteen years later, with Marcus Fenix getting broken out of prison into the world E-Day just tore open. That gap is the point. Having seen how Emergence Day began, the original's grey, exhausted cities land harder. It's also the purest version of the stop-and-pop rhythm E-Day was built to loosen: no climbing, no weapon mods, just the Lancer, the active reload and a lot of waist-high concrete. The weakness is that it plays like 2006 underneath, because it is. After E-Day's freer cover controls, movement feels stiff, and the Berserker set piece is more endurance test than fun. It also runs on PS5, so it's the easy pick for the friend who couldn't play E-Day.
The Hook: For players who want the story E-Day sets up, told by the game that started it all.
02
Action / Saber Interactive
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
Closest in Spirit
Space Marine 2 throws cover away and replaces it with a simpler idea: you are the cover. Where E-Day has you vaulting rubble to flank a Locust nest, Titus wades into Tyranid swarms that pour over walls by the hundred, parrying a Warrior's blade, gun-striking it off balance and executing it to claw back armour. The weight is identical, though. Both games make your soldier feel like a refrigerator carrying a grudge, and the chainsword does to your restraint exactly what the Lancer's chainsaw does. Three-player co-op covers the campaign, and the Operations missions run alongside it as side stories. The honest weakness: the campaign wraps up quickly and Operations recycle its environments, so the late game leans on difficulty tiers rather than new places. Solo AI squadmates are also fairly dim.
The Hook: For players who loved E-Day's executions more than its cover.
03
Co-op shooter / Arrowhead Game Studios
Helldivers 2
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
Best for Your Horde Siege Squad
If E-Day's 12-player Horde Siege is where your nights went, Helldivers 2 is the natural next drop. Four players, one hostile planet, a mission timer and a stratagem system where you punch in D-pad codes mid-firefight to call in turrets, airstrikes and a 500kg bomb that will absolutely land on your friend. Gears teaches you to hold a position; Helldivers teaches you to abandon one before the bug breach finishes spawning. Friendly fire is always on, and that's both the joke and the strategy. The weakness is structure: there's no campaign, the story lives in a shared galactic war, and progression runs through Warbond unlocks that can feel like a grind if you're not playing every week. It's been on Xbox Series X|S since August 2025 with full crossplay, so your E-Day squad can come along whatever they play on.
The Hook: For players who'd rather fight beside three friends than for a story.
04
Third-person shooter / PlatinumGames
Vanquish
PC · PS4 · Xbox One
Odd One Out, Worth It
E-Day loosened the Gears formula with climbing and freer cover. Vanquish took the same instinct back in 2010 and strapped a rocket to it. Sam Gideon's suit lets him boost-slide across the battlefield on his knees, and dodging or vaulting mid-boost kicks in a slow-motion reaction mode for lining up headshots. Cover exists, but it's a pit stop: the game rewards you for leaving it, the same move-or-die philosophy behind the best FPS campaigns we've played this year. It plays like a Platinum game through and through, with robot bosses the size of buildings and a suit that overheats if you get greedy. The weakness is everything outside combat. The story is noise, the dialogue is a cheese board of action-movie clichés, and it's short. You won't care. The 2020 remaster plays on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S through backward compatibility.
The Hook: For players who think E-Day's new movement didn't go far enough.
That's the first half: four games that share E-Day's weight, its squad chaos or its urge to move. The back half drifts further from the Locust. Each of these takes one piece of E-Day, whether that's the weapon tinkering, the cover system, the brotherhood or the grim mid-2000s attitude, and builds a whole game around it.
05
Soulslike shooter / Gunfire Games
Remnant II
PC · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
Hardest on This List
E-Day's build-your-own weapons are a starter; Remnant II serves the main course. Every gun takes a mod with its own charged power, mutators change how it behaves, and archetypes like the Handler (whose dog can revive you) or the Engineer (with a deployable heavy turret) stack once you unlock a second class. The gunplay borrows Gears' over-the-shoulder feel but swaps cover for a dodge roll, and the bosses are the main event. Up to three players can co-op the whole thing. The honest weakness: worlds are procedurally assembled, so you can finish a run and miss bosses, dungeons and story beats your friend saw. That's great for replays and frustrating if you want one authored campaign like E-Day's. If you've worked through our Nioh 3 Soulslike list, the boss arenas will feel like home.
The Hook: For players who spent more time in E-Day's weapon menu than its cutscenes.
06
Cover shooter RPG / Massive Entertainment
Tom Clancy's The Division 2
PC · PS4 · Xbox One
Best Cover System Outside Gears
If the thing you love about Gears is the snap of a good cover system, The Division 2 has one of the best outside The Coalition's games. A single held button sends your agent sprinting cover-to-cover across a ruined Washington D.C., and flanking a squad of Hyenas from a burnt-out car to a collapsed bus shelter scratches the same tactical itch as clearing a Locust ambush. The difference is loot: every gun and armour piece rolls stats, and gear sets let you build anything from a turret engineer to a shotgun tank. The weakness sits close to E-Day's own reviews. Enemies at higher tiers soak bullets like sponges, the endgame turns into a long chase for better rolls, and the story barely registers. In four-player co-op, though, it's one of the most satisfying ways to clear a city block. It plays on current consoles through backward compatibility.
The Hook: For players who want E-Day's cover fights with a loot grind attached.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition
PC · PS4 · Xbox One
Biggest Time Commitment
Gears has always sold brotherhood alongside the gore, and E-Day builds its whole story around Marcus and Dom. Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the 2021 remaster of BioWare's trilogy, is that squad-loyalty idea at full scale: three games, one Commander Shepard and a crew whose survival depends on choices you made dozens of hours earlier. Mass Effect 2 and 3 play as third-person cover shooters, with combat pausing so you can aim biotic and tech powers through two squadmates, so your Gears muscle memory carries over. The weakness is the first game. Mass Effect 1's combat stays clunky even after the remaster's fixes, and driving the Mako across empty planets tests anyone's patience. Push through it. If you liked our sci-fi picks that deliver what Starfield promised, this is the crew story at the heart of that whole genre.
The Hook: For players who stayed for Marcus and Dom, not just the chainsaws.
08
Squad shooter / Sega (Toshihiro Nagoshi's Yakuza team)
Binary Domain
PC · PS3 · Xbox 360
Most Underrated on This List
Binary Domain looks like a Gears clone for its first ten minutes, then shows its hand. Directed in 2012 by Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, it's a squad cover shooter set in a future Tokyo where every enemy is a robot, and robots don't die politely. Shoot the legs off and they crawl after you. Shoot the head off and they start firing at their own side. On top of that sits a trust system: squadmates remember whether you shot them by accident and how you answered their questions, and that loyalty shapes how they follow orders. The weakness is age. Voice commands through a headset were always unreliable, some boss fights drag on well past their welcome, and it's stuck on last-generation hardware. The PC version on Steam is the easiest way in today, and it's rated Playable on Steam Deck. It's the closest anyone came to building a Gears rival with ideas of its own.
The Hook: For players who want a cult classic that treats your squad as more than backup.
Closing thought
Cover shooters spent the last decade being called a dead genre, a relic of the Xbox 360 era that got buried under battle royales and open worlds. The games that lasted didn't stay behind the wall. Space Marine 2 replaced cover with aggression, Helldivers 2 turned it into chaos, Remnant II swapped it for a dodge roll, and Vanquish was laughing at the whole idea back in 2010. E-Day is what happens when the series that invented the wall finally learns to climb over it. The genre was never dead. It just needed to stand up.
FAQ
Is Gears of War: E-Day on PS5?
No. Gears of War: E-Day launched on October 6, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, through both the Xbox app and Steam, and it's included with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. If you're on PS5, Gears of War: Reloaded, Space Marine 2, Helldivers 2 and Remnant II from this list all run there.
Should I play Gears of War: Reloaded after E-Day?
Yes, especially if E-Day was your first Gears campaign. E-Day is set 14 years before the original game, and Reloaded is the remastered version of that original. Expect older, stiffer movement, but the story payoff is worth it.
What's the best co-op game like Gears of War: E-Day?
Helldivers 2 is the best fit for a four-player squad, especially if you loved Horde Siege. For a co-op campaign with a story, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 supports three players and has the same heavy, brutal combat.
Which game on this list is the hardest?
Remnant II asks the most of you. Its bosses are built like Soulslike encounters, with attack patterns to learn and a dodge roll instead of cover. Co-op helps, though enemies scale up to match a bigger squad.
Can I still play Binary Domain in 2026?
Yes. The easiest way is the PC version on Steam, which is also rated Playable on Steam Deck. The original console versions were released on PS3 and Xbox 360.
Which of these chewed through your weekend like a Lancer through a Drone, and what did we leave off?
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