Gears of War: Reloaded arrives on Game Pass Premium a year after launch

Gears of War: Reloaded landed on Game Pass Premium today, July 9. If you have been putting off the remaster, or you never owned an Xbox back in 2006, this is the cheapest it has been to jump in.

Reloaded first shipped in August 2025. For most of the year since, the only subscription routes to it were Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, the pricier end of Microsoft's lineup. Now it drops into Game Pass Premium, the mid tier, as part of the service's first July wave.

What Reloaded actually is

This is the 2006 original, rebuilt. The Coalition led the work with Sumo Digital and Disbelief, starting from the old Ultimate Edition and pushing it well past it. You get 4K assets, remastered textures, lighting and reflections, HDR and Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and variable refresh rate support. The campaign runs at 60fps and multiplayer climbs to 120fps.

It also gathers up everything that trailed the earlier versions: the bonus campaign act, the extra multiplayer maps, and the cosmetics. Cross-play and cross-progression run across every platform, so your campaign save and your multiplayer rank follow you between machines. On PS5 it uses the DualSense, which is worth a mention because Reloaded was the first time Gears turned up on a PlayStation at all.

Reviews landed kindly last year, roughly a 79 on Metacritic. The shooting holds up, the cover system still feels right, and the visual pass is the reason to come back. It is a faithful remaster and it does not pretend to be more than that.

The timing is not an accident

Microsoft is getting people caught up. Gears of War: E-Day, the prequel, arrives October 6, with an open beta from August 6. E-Day winds the clock back fourteen years before the first game, to Emergence Day itself, following a young Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago. Dropping the remaster of the original onto the cheaper tier three months ahead of that is a tidy way to put the starting point in front of newcomers before the new one lands. It is a marketing cycle, and a reasonable one to run.

The rest of the July wave

Reloaded has company. Game Pass's first July batch also brings Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 and The Planet Crafter, with Palworld's 1.0 launch and the open-world RPG Wuthering Waves both arriving July 10, and the sci-fi deckbuilder Fogpiercer on July 17.