What the press actually played
Everything on this page about how the campaign feels comes from one preview build, played in August 2026 and embargoed to 25 August. It was the opening of Act 2 — Press Start describes most of the first two chapters of the second act, Pure Xbox puts it at about two hours across two missions, and the demo cut off partway through the second. It was played solo; nobody previewed co-op. Xbox Wire says content was deliberately held back.
The shape of the campaign
🧭 Linear, with room to wander
The accounts differ in emphasis and agree in substance: set-piece stretches such as the bridge crossing, alternating with city blocks you can pick a route through. The previews saw streets and corridors, semi-linear and funnelled; the Official Xbox Podcast describes exactly that alternation; Searcy's summary was linear design with larger areas to explore.
🗺️ A district map, and side missions
Pure Xbox describes primary and side missions laid across a district map of Kalona, with a tourist map used as the in-game guide. Press Start found the side activities fleeting and mechanically simple — helping soldiers hold a makeshift barracks, freeing trapped civilians — and rewarding 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. No full list of tactical gear has been published.
📦 Hard cases and collectibles
Weapon mods turn up inside hard cases in the world. Searcy says the campaign carries more collectibles than any previous Coalition campaign, the classic COG tags among them.
👥 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
Beta coverage reports that A no longer triggers the roadie run — sprint defaults to clicking the left stick, and Y now handles jump and mantle. The sprint itself is described as a plain sprint rather than the old hunched, low-camera 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 named in the previews
| Weapon | What a preview says about it | Who named it |
|---|---|---|
| Lancer | The standard rifle, with the Perfect Reload returning for a damage bonus. TheSixthAxis found it underpowered with heavy recoil. | Xbox Wire, a press preview |
| Chainsaw Lancer | A prototype at this point in the timeline, described by Xbox Wire as crudely but deliberately bolted together. | Xbox Wire, a press preview |
| Retro Lancer | Present in the demo's arsenal. | A press preview |
| Gnasher | The shotgun. Pure Xbox chained knee slides into Gnasher blasts; the multiplayer deep dive uses fitting it with a bayonet as its example of a weapon mod. | A press preview, The Coalition |
| Hammerburst | A Locust weapon you pick up. TheSixthAxis rated it above the Lancer. | Press previews |
| Breechshot | A sniper rifle without a scope; one preview notes it doubles as an axe. | Press previews |
| Gutpuncher | A belt-fed grenade launcher that Press Start says handles its trigger differently from the rest of the arsenal. | A press preview |
| Snub Pistol | Pure Xbox modified theirs to fire a double shot — the clearest published example of what a campaign weapon mod does. | A press preview |
Weapon mods
The Coalition's multiplayer deep dive states that weapon mods are customisable for the first time in a mainline Gears game, and gives a bayonet on the Gnasher as an example. In the campaign the previews found them in hard cases in the world and handed out for side objectives, and fitted them at supply caches. No full list of mods has been published, and no source we read explains whether campaign mods and multiplayer mods are the same system.
Enemies shown in the Act 2 demo
- Locust Drones — Xbox Wire calls them fierce, smart and sneaky, and Press Start reports improved AI that presses and pinches rather than holding ground.
- Grubs and emergence holes, as the Locust keep arriving.
- Wretches, including juveniles; Xbox Wire describes them crawling along the underside of the bridge.
- Boomers — Xbox Wire's description is hulking and not bright, carrying the heavy artillery.
- A Corpser, which Pure Xbox describes reshaping the ground around it.
- Enemies using smoke bombs against the player, which Xbox Wire singles out as a tactic.
- Press Start notes visceral damage and heavy blood effects; the ESRB descriptors are Blood and Gore, Intense Violence and Strong Language.
What the previews did not cover
❓ Campaign difficulty
No preview names the campaign's difficulty levels. The official achievement list names one, Insane, with achievements for finishing the campaign on it; the full set is not published. Horde Siege's three are.
❓ Co-op in practice
The demo was solo. Nobody has published hands-on impressions of split-screen or four-player online campaign co-op.
❓ The horror angle
Press Start notes that the horror tone promised at the original reveal was not what this Act 2 slice delivered. How much of it the finished campaign carries is not something these previews can say.
❓ How far the open areas go
Every preview flags the balance between funnelled missions and explorable blocks as unclear from two hours of Act 2.
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, and re-checked on 1 October 2026 against Eurogamer.es, Vandal, EliteGuias and the official achievement list. Not from a playthrough: nobody here has played it, and what the sources do not describe is not on this page.