Enemies are one of the four pillars the team built Gears of War: E-Day around. Every returning Locust unit was rebuilt rather than ported, and the design brief was to keep each unit's core identity while giving it new behaviour so fighting it feels unfamiliar again.
The roster also has a narrative job. Because the campaign covers first contact, enemies are introduced in an order that mirrors how the characters work out what they are up against.
Escalation Order
Feral Wretches arrive first, mindless and animal, terrifying mainly through numbers.
Drones appear next, initially without weapons.
Armed Drones follow, and with them the realisation that the Locust take cover, use tactics and speak.
Elite Drones and larger units combine into structured enemy squads, which is the point where the invasion reads as an organised army rather than a monster attack.
Confirmed Units
Unit | Behaviour |
|---|---|
Feral Wretch | The first Locust the player meets. Fast, unarmoured and dangerous in numbers. If you go down but not out and a Wretch reaches you, it will tear your head off. |
Starved Wretch | The first-wave Wretches are drawn skinny and malnourished on purpose. The design fiction is that they were caged, starved into rabid attack dogs and released into the streets ahead of everything else. |
Bulked Wretch | The mid-roster Wretch, physically larger than the first wave. |
Armored Wretch | The armoured end of the Wretch progression. Can catch the player in a scream that disorients and limits available actions. |
Unarmed Drone | Introduced before any Drone picks up a gun. No weapon, no cover: it screams and charges straight at the player. If a squad is not watching its flanks, one of these can take a Gear to the ground on its own. |
Drone | Comes in many varieties. Elite units field tougher tactics and loadouts and combine into formidable enemy squads. Drones speak, and the line the team quotes is "Die, ground walkers". |
Raging Drone | Any Drone will jump on a downed player and try to tear them apart. Some Drones that go down but not out, or that lose their weapon, enter a rage state and charge. A squadmate can pull one off, or it can be shot from range. |
Boomer | Over 9 feet tall, too big to fit through a doorway so it bursts through instead. Soaks damage, dominates a space, yells "boom" and fires the Heavy Boomshot. Getting too close means being knocked and thrown across the space. At low health it can be brought down to a knee and decapitated with a Lancer chainsaw. |
Seeder | Returns both as an anti-air Nemacyst launcher and as a mini-boss. Beating one is a tactical problem: you have to get close and taunt it out of its hole so it flips over and exposes a weak fleshy head. |
Reaver | Acts as troop transport, deploying a squad of Drones. If it stays it becomes a walking tank, and it can leap and cling to a high wall to rain munitions down from above. |
Corpser | Appears in the campaign as a spectacle moment, ripping through the ground as a sky train collapses. Also appears as an Invasion Event boss in Horde Siege |
Brumak | Appears as an Invasion Event boss in Horde Siege, crushing its way onto the battlefield with supporting units alongside it. |
Bile Frog | A new creature from the Hollow that spits acid. This is the one named example of the enslaved Hollow creatures. |
Creatures from the Hollow
Beyond the familiar Locust units, the game adds new creatures from the Hollow that the Locust Horde has enslaved and unleashed on the surface of Sera. Only the Bile Frog has been named. The team treats the Hollow as an open licence to invent, so more of these exist in the game than have been shown, and the rest are deliberately not listed here because inventing names would be guesswork.
Bosses
A boss enemy class exists as a distinct category: the enemy health bar settings in both the campaign and Horde Siege offer a Bosses option separate from the Large Enemies option, which covers Boomers and larger units. Towering bosses are confirmed for the campaign, but none of them has been named. Corpser and Brumak are the only named bosses, and both of those names come from the Horde Siege Invasion Event system. See Campaign Bosses for that gap.
Fighting Them
Encounter variety in this series comes from the enemy mix rather than from arena layout alone. Each unit challenges the player differently: pinning you in cover, flushing you out of a position, or mirroring the tactics a squad of Gears would use. In co-op that multiplies, because a squad can split the combat problem several ways at once. Weapon choices against specific units are covered on Weapons, and executions and downed states on Combat and Gunplay.
Unconfirmed Names
Several Locust unit names circulate for this game with no first-party support. The unarmed Drone in particular is often given a name that has never appeared in official material; the behaviour is confirmed, the name is not, so this page describes the behaviour and leaves the name out.