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. The team states the rule plainly: every time an enemy shows up it is the first time, the first time Marcus and Dom have seen it and the first time anyone in the city has.
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.
Armoured Brumaks sit at the top of the escalation. By the time they arrive the fight has gone from a block-by-block monster attack to an army coming up from underground.
Nobody in the city has a name for any of this while it is happening, so the Gears name things by what they do, and those field nicknames stick as the names. The first case of it in play involves the Wretches. Bravo Squad meets them rushing across the underside of a bridge, and an adjacent squad dubs them Crawlers on the spot, purely from how they move.
One piece of squad slang has since been confirmed in writing. Achievement text uses Grub as the Gears’ own word for a Locust, and also renders the Hollow creature as a single word, Bilefrog, where spoken developer material says Bile Frog. Both spellings are first-party; neither has been presented as the corrected one.
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. |
Grenadier | The shotgunner of the Locust line. Grenadiers climb onto vehicles to get around a flank and drop in behind the player, and they will put a smoke grenade down between themselves and their target and walk through it to close to Gnasher 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 | Confirmed in the campaign's enemy escalation, which climbs until Brumaks in armour are on the field. Also appears as an Invasion Event boss in Horde Siege, crushing its way onto the battlefield with supporting units alongside it. |
Ticker | Confirmed by name in the achievement list, which asks the player to convert one to express air mail and return it to sender. The pre-launch patch notes add that Tickers appear in Horde Siege and can be kicked away. No size or full behaviour description has been published. |
Bile Frog | A new creature from the Hollow that spits acid. This is the one named example of the enslaved Hollow creatures. |
Flayer | Named in the September 30, 2026 patch notes as one of three Horde Siege enemies, with the Boomer and the Grinder, that can be executed with a Prototype Lancer once its health is low enough. No description has been published. |
Grinder | Named in the same patch note line as the Flayer. No description has been published. |
The Act 2 stretch shown publicly fields three of these units together: Wretches, Drones and a Boomer, the last of them a hulking artillery platform that can take a Gear out with a single shot. That part of the campaign is broken down on Campaign Acts and Chapters.
How Drones Fight
Armed Drones carry the tactical load of the roster, and their behaviour is the most fully described part of it. A Drone holds a position and puts rounds down it rather than running at you. Return fire changes its mind: it dives into cover, and from there it either pulls back or works around the side.
Behaviour | What it looks like in a fight |
|---|---|
Hold and fire | Drones take a position and shoot from it instead of charging into the open. |
Dive to cover | Sustained return fire sends them into cover rather than trading in the open. |
Retreat or flank | A losing position gets abandoned. The Drone either falls back or comes round the side. |
Smoke and rush | Used by Grenadiers rather than by standard armed Drones. They drop a smoke grenade between themselves and the player and walk through the cloud, so they are not visible until they are already at close range. |
Sniper Drones | Some Drones carry sniper rifles, which makes the long sightlines as unsafe as the short ones. |
Sound as a warning | Flankers are hard to see and easy to hear, so audio cues are the reliable way to catch one coming. |
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. The campaign's named antagonist is Vraahk, a Locust blight commander who leads an elite formation called the Scorched Legion. Armoured Brumaks are confirmed in the campaign's escalation and a Corpser appears there as a set piece, and both units also turn up through the Horde Siege Invasion Event system. What has not been described is how any of them is fought. See Campaign Bosses for what is confirmed.
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.
One name has come off that list. Ticker circulated for months without first-party support and is now confirmed by the achievement list, so it sits in the roster table above. Flayer and Grinder have since been named too, in the September 30, 2026 patch notes, and sit in the table with name-level detail only. The rest of the circulating names remain unsupported.