Gears of War: E-Day Is Getting a Free Full-Campaign VR Mod, and You Start the Chainsaw by Hand

On October 18 he posted a trailer for a free PC VR mod covering the whole single-player campaign of Gears of War: E-Day, the Emergence Day prequel The Coalition made with People Can Fly and Xbox Game Studios released on October 6. Road to VR picked it up this morning. The footage runs just under three minutes and shows stereo rendering, full-body IK, manual reloads, two-handed aiming, fighting from cover and a turn on the gunner seat of a King Raven. His announcement post on X ends on the two lines that matter most: “Early WIP build. Free at release.”

The trailer is already behind the build. About a day after it went up, he pinned a changelog under the video, and it reads like the work of somebody who has spent real time with a Gnasher in his hands. The chainsaw now starts on the lever and cuts into any enemy it touches, with no animation taking over. Melee is physical. Hands and weapons collide with enemies, walls and objects. The Longshot has, in his words, “a real working scope.” Reloads are manual and different for every gun: a bolt action on the Longshot, shell by shell on the Gnasher, a slide rack on the pistol. Every weapon carries its own magazines, in your hand and on your chest.

Shell by shell on the Gnasher. That one got me.

Gears has always been a game about the half second behind a waist-high wall when you realize you are empty and a Wretch is already over the top of it. On a gamepad that panic is a button press and a reload bar. Make you thumb shells into a shotgun with a real hand while something is screaming at you from two meters away and the oldest feeling in the series gets a lot louder.

A three-day-old account and one video

Nobody outside his circle knew the name rockonthehill a week ago. His YouTube channel lists one video, the trailer. The X account was created on October 18, the same day, and has one post. There is a Ko-fi tip page with the same pitch, and I could not find an earlier VR mod under the name anywhere. In the comments he says he is building it on a Pimax Dream Air SE with an RTX 5080.