The Entire Gears Of War Story Explained

For a series that, on its face, is mostly about hulking meatslab dudes chopping down 8-foot tall snarly gray mutants with chainsaws, there's a lot more plot going on in Gears of War than some folks give it credit for. There's civil war, class inequality, green energy arguments, climate change, and eugenics all lurking just under the surface. That doesn't make that "Mad World" commercial any less embarrassing as time goes on.

With Gears 5 not far away, plus a potential movie still floating out there, it might sound like a grand idea to go revisit the first five games in the series for a refresher course, which, while fun, is definitely a time-consuming process. Alternately, though, you can sit back, relax, and enjoy this handy guide we've put together on all things Gears of War to help get you all caught up before the game drops.

Humanity gets a nice 79-year break after the Pendulum War. But break time is over on Emergence Day, when a race of massive, snarling, vicious creatures called the Locust rises up out of their subterranean Hollows and proceed to run completely roughshod over humanity. It's ... bad. How bad? A quarter of all human life is dead on day one. That bad.

After a year of sustained, brutal fighting, the COG gets desperate and decides to go full scorched Earth (or scorched Sera, as it were) on the Locust. Evacuating as much of humanity as possible to the Jacinto Plateau and the city of Ephyra, the COG razes the planet using orbital strikes from the satellite weapon Hammer of Dawn. A great deal of the Locust are killed, right alongside millions of civilians who couldn't evacuate before the strike. There are some survivors, thereafter known as the Stranded. As you might imagine, they're less than thrilled with the COG after that.

Thankfully, Marcus doesn't even end up doing a full sentence, because four years later the Locust end up attacking the prison. The order is given to pardon all prisoners, but one of Marcus' old Gear squadmates, Dom Santiago, comes for him personally, bearing armor and a Lancer. Once they kill their way out of the prison, he's promptly drafted back into COG via Delta Squad, consisting of Dom, Anthony Carmine, and Minh Young Kim, and a wee bit later, Damon Baird and the infamous Augustus Cole as well.

Delta Squad, as it turns out, has a pretty huge mission on their plate: they're ordered to obtain an item called a Sonic Resonator, which will allow COG to map the Locust Hollows beneath what's left of Ephyra, thus finding the optimal place to drop a weapon called a Lightmass bomb and wipe the Locust out for good. 

Six months goes by, and humanity is enjoying some well-earned peace. Well, most of it is, anyway, a lot of them are suffering from an awful respiratory virus called Rustlung because somebody, not naming names, dropped a devastating explosive weapon into the Imulsion underground. Other than that, everything's cool. 

The COG starts to get the wild idea that the Locust may not be all the way dead yet when cities start suddenly sinking underground and disappearing, which is generally not something you expect to see from a major city. Not taking things lying down, Delta Squad is pulled out of retirement along with several other squads to execute Operation Hollow Storm, a plan which basically amounts to not waiting to see what the Locust has in store next. Instead, the COG will send Gears directly into the Locust Horde's Hollows to find and annihilate every enemy they see with extreme prejudice.

The Gears manage to sneak their way into Nexus, the Locust capital. The reward for their courage and perseverance is one of the saddest things to ever happen in a video game: after they find Dom's wife Maria tortured and lobotomized in a Locust prison, Dom forces himself to kill her out of mercy.

After everyone is done staring into the middle distance for a couple of hours, the Gears make another less sad but equally horrifying discovery. See, while some things exposed to Imulsion just get sick and die, an equal number actually mutate into some brand new terrifying creatures called Lambent. The new ugly Lambent are currently at war with old ugly Locust, and the Gears discover that Myrrah's plan to sink Jacinto is less about giving humanity the middle finger than creating a massive flood throughout Nexus to wipe out the Lambent after the Locust have evacuated. It's not a bad idea, aside from the fact that the Gears aren't a fan of the "after the Locust have evacuated" part. The Gears manage to escape Nexus after killing Myrrah's right hand man, but not before making the eyebrow raising insinuation that she knows Marcus' father.

The decision is made by COG brass to go ahead with the Queen's plan and let Jacinto sink, which they accomplish using a Locust Brumak that gets a little too swole with Imulsion for its own good. After they blow it up with the Hammer of Dawn, Jacinto sinks, and humanity retreats to the island of Vectes to start over. Again. 

Eventually, Delta Squad find Marcus's father alive and well, who does everybody the favor of dropping some much-needed exposition. Apparently, the big problem is Imulsion. For all its clean energy properties, it is actually a living organism. A parasite, to be exact. Prescott figured this out, and had Adam working on a cure. Unfortunately, the Locust conquered Azura, and Myrrah made Adam develop a process that would kill the Lambent, but leave the Locust alive. Marcus doesn't like that part. 

While Adam finishes the energy device that would administer the cure, Marcus and his crew go toe-to-toe with both the Lambent and the Locust, eventually having a showdown with the Queen herself. Marcus gets some sweet revenge, killing Myrrah by stabbing her with Dom's knife, but not before the device has been triggered. This, unfortunately, spells the end for poor Adam, who'd been injecting himself with Imulsion, trying to test out his cure. His last words: "Go, and live. For me." With the Locust and Lambent all annihilated, that looks like it's very, very possible.

After a terse reunion with dear old dad, Marcus suggests that the best way to test and compare the sample is against the Locust corpses the COG buried in a mine beneath nearby fort. Along the way, Marcus figures out that the people the Swarm kidnap aren't just being taken somewhere and killed, but being cocooned in pods. He gets to experience everything first-hand when Marcus himself is kidnapped by a Snatcher, cocooned, and connected to the Swarm's hivemind. J.D. and company manage to hunt Marcus down, thankfully reaching him alive and getting the lowdown.

As it turns out, the Swarm are actually — are you sitting down — the Locust. After Adam Fenix's device went off, many Locust didn't die, but instead went into a state of extended hibernation, whereupon they evolved into their new Swarm forms. The people being kidnapped are placed into cocoons in order to be converted, bolstering their numbers after near-extinction put a dent in them. Except for Kait's mom, though, who's being held in another Locust burial site, treated oddly differently than the others.

Some time after the whole nasty business with Reyna, J.D., Kait, and Del are full time COG soldiers helping to fight the good fight. This would turn out to be the biggest mistake any of them could make. 

Even before the game begins, J.D.'s already got a big red mark in his ledger after a protest goes wrong, and under pressure, he orders his squad to fire on civilians. Things get a hell of a lot worse, however, when Delta Squad is called out to a settlement after it's attacked by the Swarm. When things get too hairy, J.D. calls for Baird to fire the Hammer of Dawn, despite Baird's warning that it's still under maintenance. The strike is successful, until the satellite malfunctions and can't stop firing, resulting in a catastrophic loss of life.

Kait's issues almost pale by comparison. Post-Reyna, Kait exhibits all the signs of PTSD, including a series of blinding headaches that become progressively worse over time. After J.D.'s little incident, Kait goes out to the exile camps to try and convince her uncle Oscar to get in league with the COG. When the Swarm attack there, Kait is abducted by a Snatcher, discovering that while connected to the hivemind, she has control over low-level enemies. That doesn't, however, apply to a new type of Swarm, the Warden, who manages to reach Oscar and splatter his head while Kait watches helplessly.

Kait, now armed with the truth, escapes the lab and kills the Matriarch on the way out, which unfortunately (and inexplicably!) wakes up Reyna in the process. Kait and Del eventually hook back up with J.D. and their brash colleague Fahz in the desert with old-school UIR soldier Paduk, looking to repair the Hammer of Dawn using one of the UIR's old rockets. While that happens, though, Reyna sends her army straight to the COG's capital city to pick a fight.

Once the Hammer is up and running, Kait and her company, after narrowly escaping arrest for her little excursion, helps the COG fight off Reyna's forces, which also includes a brand new massive beastie called the Kraken. The battle is hard won, but not before Reyna herself shows up to take one of Kait's friends out of the picture. Depending on your choice, either Del dies, after which J.D. truly reconnects with Marcus and realizes the value of his own life; or J.D. dies, leaving Marcus alone, having lost even more of his family to the Swarm.  Either way, Kait, having gotten all the closure she needs, sets out without her personal baggage to go slay the new Queen.