How the campaign is built
Linear, with semi-open stretches
Mostly set-piece corridors and streets, broken up by a few larger stretches of Kalona — the first is Act 2, Chapter 2, Hold the Line — where you choose your route and find the side objectives and most collectibles. Those chapters have a map.
Secondary objectives
Optional jobs for the soldiers and civilians you meet: holding a position, freeing a trapped family, answering a call for help. You accept each one when it is offered, and they pay in weapon mods.
Supply caches
Fixed points where you top up ammunition, change your loadout and fit weapon mods. They are how the previews describe carrying a chosen weapon setup between fights.
Tactical Gear
Xbox Wire describes rechargeable items deployed in battle, giving health injectors and throwables as its examples. The guides list four, the same as the Horde Siege classes' equipment: Sonic Disruptor, Adrenaline Injector, Pulse Drone and Stim Vaporizer, each unlocked at a campaign Supply Cache.
Hard Cases and collectibles
Hard Cases are yellow cases that unlock weapon mods and mod slots. Collectibles are lore items logged in the War Journal. Both have their own trackers in this guide.
Pick your Gear
All four Bravo Squad members are playable from the start, and Pure Xbox's writer chose Mags for a first run. In solo play the rest of the squad is AI-controlled (xbox.com, Xbox Wire).
Movement, and the argument about it
What changed
Sprint, sprint-sliding, jumping, mantling, climbing, prone and reworked cover transitions. It amounts to redesigned movement with enhanced traversal; Pure Xbox describes mantling over buses, cars and railings, and knee slides chained into a Gnasher blast.
The buttons moved
Cover is on A, sprint on a left stick click, and vault and jump on Y. The sprint opens with a hunched nod to the old roadie run, then becomes an ordinary run.
Verticality is the stated point
Figueroa's line on the Official Xbox Podcast is that climbing and jumping widened what the player can do, so the Locust were given matching abilities — making encounters closer to puzzles than to raw difficulty.
Divisive in the beta
Beta players split hard. Some found it more fluid and a necessary modernisation; others said the characters had lost their weight, calling the animation weightless. Pure Xbox's own poll of 664 readers came out 43% loving it, 26% pretty good, 10% OK, 14% a bit disappointed and 7% actively disliking it.
Weapons
| Weapon | What it does | Who says so |
|---|---|---|
| Prototype Lancer | Higher rate of fire and a deeper magazine than recent Lancers; the all-round rifle. | The Coalition |
| Chainsaw Lancer | A prototype at this point in the timeline, crudely but deliberately bolted together. | Xbox Wire |
| Lancer MK1 (Retro) | Deadly up close, usable at range if you tame its strong recoil. | The Coalition |
| Gnasher | The shotgun, now reloaded a round at a time; a bayonet is one of its mods. | The Coalition |
| Hammerburst | A six-round burst; a perfect Active Reload raises its rate of fire. | The Coalition |
| Breechshot | A scopeless rifle that kills with one headshot in PvP, reloads a round at a time and doubles as an axe. | The Coalition |
| Gut-Puncher | A grenade launcher whose rounds burst on their own, or when you release the trigger. | A walkthrough |
| Snub Pistol | Fires as fast as you pull the trigger and is quick to draw: a clean-up weapon. | The Coalition |
| Incinerator | A new shotgun. | Launch coverage |
Weapon mods
Weapon mods are customisable for the first time in a mainline Gears game. In the campaign they come from Hard Cases, which can also add mod slots, and from secondary objectives, and you fit them at Supply Caches. Horde Siege has its own mods, all of which This Is My Rifle asks you to unlock. No source we read says whether the two sets are the same system.
Enemies
- Drones come in several kinds, with elite units carrying tougher loadouts and working as squads.
- Armored Wretches can scream at you, which stuns you and blurs the screen.
- Boomers soak damage and hold a space; at low health they can be chainsawed.
- Seeders are mini-bosses: get close, taunt them out of their holes, and they flip over to show a weak head.
- Reavers carry Drones into the fight and can cling to high walls and fire from there.
- Bilefrogs spit acid; when one opens its mouth wide it shows a green glow you can shoot into.
- Grubs, Tickers and Emergence Holes keep the Locust coming. Explosives close an E-Hole.
- A Corpser, which reshapes the ground around it, and new creatures from the Hollow.
Cross-checked
Cross-checked on 22 September 2026 against Xbox Wire, the Official Xbox Podcast, The Coalition's multiplayer deep dive, the ESRB listing, Wikipedia and the previews of Pure Xbox, TheSixthAxis and Press Start; re-checked on 1 October 2026 against Eurogamer.es, Vandal and EliteGuias; and re-checked on 5 October 2026 against The Coalition's gameplay post on gearsofwar.com, Wikipedia's article and the walkthroughs and guides of Game8, NoobFeed, games.gg, Gamer Social Club, Patchcrazy and TechWiser, and on 6 October 2026 against Game8's tactical gear list and Gamers Beacon's weapon and class guides. Not from a playthrough: checked against the sources above. Still to confirm in-game.