Gears of War and tactical combat are a match made in heaven. It may not seem like it at a glance, but The Gears series cover-based shooter heritage was begging to be Brought into the top-down perspective. After all, Gears has always been about football linebackers taking position behind sandbags, lobbing grenades and flanking hordes of the Locust swarm.
Gears Tactics (PC [reviewed], Xbox One)
Developer: Splash Damage
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Released: April 28, 2020 (PC), TBA (Xbox One)
MSRP: $59.99; included as part of Xbox Game Pass
At its heart Gears Tactics truly is Gears meets XCOM. The first thing you might notice, even if you can't quite place it as that this feels much faster paced than XCOM. While XCOM only grants each allied unit two actions per turn, Gears Tactics lets each of your four squad members act three times. It doesn't sound like a huge change, but it makes the action start a lot faster and lends itself to the more aggressive playstyle of Gears. While tactics games typically reward players for patiently waiting for enemies to come to you, you’ll find the answer here more often than not is to charge in and take down Locust Grubs before they even have a chance to fire a shot.
It’s not to say that you can brute force your way through combat scenarios. In fact, combat can be quite punishing if you’re reckless. Rushing in without a plan might help you cut the Locust’s numbers in half in one scenario, but it could easily get your whole team pinned down by snipers in another. Strategy hers is as much about seizing all the ground you can as it is about being aware of what sort of weapons your enemy is packing.
What’s done here to set things apart from other tactics titles are basically the things that make it undeniably a Gears of War game. Performing executions can sometimes yield a bonus action, essentially turning it into free movement. Likewise, Gears’ enemy downing system also means there’s almost always a second chance to save a unit of yours that has been taken out. Each team member gets one self-revive per encounter and can subsequently be revived by allied units, albeit their max health will be lower with each revival.
Units also come equipped with the Gears trademark chainsaw bayonet or standard bayonet for the Retro Lancer depending on their class, and you can even pick up classic Locust weapons like the Torque Bow and Boom Shot off of killed enemies.
While you can only bring four of your ever-growing roster of Cog soldiers into battle at a time there are a total of five different classes based around weapon loadout. Vanguard the Retro Lancer, Support the Lancer, Scout the Gnasher, Sniper the Longshot, and Heavy the Mulcher. While there are only truly four named characters in the story mode you’ll scope up plenty of randomly named Cog soldiers that you can customize in name and appearance to add variety to your squad.
While having randomly generated soldiers feels like a necessity in games like XCOM it feels at odds with the story Gears Tactics wants to tell. Your squad size is small and as long as the game allows it you’ll always be more likely to bring the story protagonists like Gabe Diaz who as Gears fans know will one day father Gears 5 protagonist Kate.
In the end game, Vanguard missions are introduced. This never-ending feed of randomly generated missions gives you plenty of reason to engage with your now-massive roster, but it feels too little too late.
If having a huge amount of Cogs to pick from wasn’t enough you can also customize these units with tons of gear you’ll unlock through challenges or in cases on the battlefield. It’s nice to be able to mix and match different buffs and accuracy bonuses for your team but it can feel pretty overwhelming at times. About halfway through the game I felt pretty comfortable with my gear and stopped really messing with my now cluttered loadout menus.
While the story is fun, it feels far from vital. It tells a story set before the first Gears of War that will fill in some gaps for big fans of the series and expands on some interesting lore involving Locust geneticists and the creation of monsters like the Brumak. Though it’s clear if there’s any vital information about Kate’s parentage, it will likely be fleshed out in Gears 6 rather than this tactical offshoot.
All in all, Gears Tactics is a lot of fun. It’s a finely tuned tactics games that even the most experienced of XCOM junkies will find something to love in that also does a phenomenal job of onboarding Gears of War fans that might be new to the genre. It was an exciting experiment, and I hope The Coalition sees fit to return Gears to the tactical board sometime soon.
Verdict: A must buy for fans of the Gears series and a fantastic entry to the world of the COG for fans of XCOM. It turns out these chainsaw charging linebackers translate pretty well to the strategy world.
Buy it
Author: Rich Meister