Gears of War: Games, Lore, and the Complete Playing + Reading Order
Chainsaw bayonets, crumbling cities, and a planet that never really recovers. Gears of War is a war story first, a monster story second, and a long, slow elegy for a world called Sera that keeps finding new ways to break its heroes.
The franchise began in 2006 with Gears of War, a brutal third-person shooter from Epic Games and Microsoft that dropped players into the ruined streets of Sera, locked in a losing war against the subterranean Locust Horde.
The original trilogy follows Marcus, Dom, Cole, Baird, and the Gears as they fight to survive Emergence Day and the long Locust War. Later entries, led by Gears of War 4 and Gears 5, push the story forward with JD Fenix, Kait Diaz, and Del Walker facing a new enemy, the Swarm, that crawls out of the old Locust nightmare and rewrites what anyone thought the war was really about.
Throughout, Gears leans into brotherhood, trauma, state power, and the sick logic of superweapons like the Hammer of Dawn, always asking who gets sacrificed to save a world this damaged.
Today the Gears universe stretches far beyond those first Xbox firefights. The Coalition has taken over as steward of the series, continuing the mainline saga and announcing Gears of War: E-Day, a full prequel that finally places players inside the hell of the twenty-six hours when the Locust first opened the ground.
A remaster, Gears of War: Reloaded, is bringing the original campaign back with modern tech, and Netflix is developing both a live-action film and an adult animated series that aim to translate Sera’s smoke and blood to the screen.
This page gathers the whole thing into one place.
The games. The novels. The history of Sera from the Pendulum Wars to the Swarm.
A reading and playing roadmap for anyone who wants to follow Marcus Fenix and his allies across every front.
Gears of War Games in Order
Gears can be experienced in release order or in story order. Release order tracks how the series evolved as a piece of game design. Chronological order tracks life on Sera as the planet slides from cold war to total collapse.
What follows is a high-level story order, covering mainline titles and key spin-offs, with remasters grouped alongside the game they retell.
| Game | Release | Chronological Placement | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gears of War: E-Day | 2026 | Prequel (E-Day) | Origin story for the Locust War, following a young Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago through the first 26 hours of the assault. |
| Gears of War: Judgment | 2013 | Post E-Day | Prequel focused on Kilo Squad (Baird and Cole) on trial for desperate choices made in the early days of the war. |
| Gears Tactics | 2020 | Early Locust War | Turn-based tactics prequel starring Gabe Diaz hunting the Locust scientist Ukkon. Digs into the covert side of the COG. |
| Gears of War | 2006 | Original Trilogy Start | Marcus Fenix is pulled out of prison to lead Delta Squad in a last-ditch attempt to deploy the Lightmass Bomb. |
| Gears of War: Ultimate Edition | 2015 | Original Trilogy Start | Remastered version of the first game. Treat it as the definitive way to play the original campaign. |
| Gears of War: Reloaded | 2025 | Original Trilogy Start | Modern port based on Ultimate Edition, adding 4K support and cross-play. |
| Gears of War 2 | 2008 | War Escalates | Delta Squad takes the fight into the Hollow while Jacinto, the last safe city, teeters on the brink. |
| Gears of War 3 | 2011 | End of War | Closes the trilogy. Humanity is cornered, the Lambent are spreading, and Marcus must make the final choice to save Sera. |
| Gears of War 4 | 2016 | New Generation | Set 25 years later. JD Fenix, Kait Diaz, and Del Walker stumble onto the first stirrings of the Swarm. |
| Gears 5 | 2019 | Swarm Emergence | Shifts focus to Kait Diaz as she chases the truth about her connection to the Locust, tearing into COG secrets. |
| Gears Pop! | 2019 | Spin-off | Mobile tactics spin-off. A tonal palette cleanser beside the mainline tragedies. |
Pro Tip: For a pure release order run, play: Gears of War, Gears 2, Gears 3, Judgment, Gears 4, Gears 5, Tactics, then fold in Reloaded and E-Day when they land.
History of Sera
Every Gears story is really a history lesson about Sera told through the sights on a Lancer. Before there were monsters coming up from the dark, there were humans fighting over a glowing resource called Imulsion. That seventy-nine-year conflict, the Pendulum Wars, pitted the Coalition of Ordered Governments against the Union of Independent Republics in a planet-wide grind for energy dominance.
Six weeks after the Pendulum Wars ended, the real enemy surfaced. The Locust Horde erupted from beneath the planet, launching a perfectly coordinated assault on nearly every major human city. A quarter of humanity died in the first twenty-six hours of this new war, a day burned into history as Emergence Day.
Faced with extinction, the COG turned to the Hammer of Dawn. The Fortification Act funneled survivors to the fortress plateau of Jacinto while orbital strikes burned huge portions of Sera into ash to deny the Locust territory. In Gears, victory is never clean. It is always bought with someone else’s home, someone else’s sky.
Novels and the Expanded Universe
The games give you the firefights; the novels give you the quiet in between. Written by Karen Traviss, Jason M. Hough, and Michael A. Stackpole, the books deepen everything the games hint at: political factions, the grind of siege warfare, and the way a long war rewires a soldier’s sense of home.
Traviss’s run, from Aspho Fields through The Slab, bridges the original trilogy. These books flesh out Marcus, Dom, and Hoffman, while sharpening the moral edges of the COG. The games show you the armor; the novels show you the bureaucracy inside it.
| Book Title | Author | Key Plot Focus | Related Game |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Slab | Traviss | Marcus Fenix’s time in Jacinto Maximum Security Prison before the first game. | Gears 1 (Prequel) |
| Aspho Fields | Traviss | Bridges Game 1 & 2. Flashbacks to the Pendulum Wars and Dominic's brother, Carlos. | Gears 1 |
| Jacinto’s Remnant | Traviss | Follows the survivors after the flooding of Jacinto. Politics and pirates on Vectes. | Gears 2 |
| Anvil Gate | Traviss | Siege warfare at Anvil Gate, featuring Colonel Hoffman’s past battles. | Gears 2 / 3 |
| Coalition’s End | Traviss | The final dismantling of the COG government leading into the third game. | Gears 3 |
| Ephyra Rising | Stackpole | The fragile peace between Gears 3 and 4 as Marcus and Anya try to rebuild. | Gears 3 / 4 |
| Ascendance | Hough | Kait Diaz’s grief immediately after Gears 4, fighting to be taken seriously. | Gears 5 (Prologue) |
| Bloodlines | Hough | Connects Kait to her father Gabe Diaz (from Gears Tactics). | Tactics / Gears 5 |
Recommended Reading Path: The Slab → Gears of War → Aspho Fields → Gears 2 → Jacinto’s Remnant → Anvil Gate → Coalition’s End → Gears 3 → Ephyra Rising → Gears 4 → Ascendance → Gears 5 → Bloodlines.
Platforms - how to play GOW
TV, Film, and the Future
Gears of War has always felt like it belonged on a big screen. Netflix is currently developing a live-action film and an adult animated series. The plan is not a simple retread, but an alternate reality story that hits the same veins of war, horror, and bitter heroism.
That is why Gears endures. Not just for the Lancer roar or the cover shooting, but for the way it keeps circling the same hard questions. What do you sacrifice to save a world like Sera? Who gets to call themselves a hero when the ground itself is complicit?
And how many times can you light the sky on fire before there is nothing left to rebuild?
