More often than not you’ll be using Gabe, Sid or Mikayla in most missions, but the empty spots are filled up with fully customisable Gears who you recruit or rescue along the way. I’m not sure yet whether theory-crafting is possible or useful here, but there are so many skills that not only stack with each other but work together across classes that there’s genuine potential for build diversity, especially once you have an established go-to squad. Each class has four fairly compact skill trees branching out from a central hub skill, and specialising in any tree creates a lethally efficient presence on the battlefield, whilst cherry-picking abilities and upgrades offers a great deal of flexibility. Your squad will be comprised of a combination of five distinct classes: Support, Vanguard, Heavy, Sniper and Scout, who bring a variety of skills and abilities to the battlefield.įor example, the Sniper is pretty self-explanatory, but the Vanguard is a full-frontal assault trooper able to buff itself and allies, while Support can use Stims and Stim Grenades as well as healing abilities, and the Scouts carry Gnasher shotguns and can enter into a cloaked state to move undetected. The addition of the third action point makes a powerful difference, as you’ll often be outnumbered three or four to one by the Locust forces. Each round your units have three action points to spend on moving, shooting, using an ability and reloading. Sometimes you’ll deploy a single Gear into a map, and will need to find and rescue allies as you go.
You’ll usually field a squad of four, but that changes dependant on the mission. But it’s not just about authenticity and familiarity it’s also about confidence, and this may be the first game in this genre that can genuinely teach XCOM a thing or two. Your Gears roadie-run from point to point and slam into cover, and when the camera shifts to an over-the-shoulder perspective for a critical hit you’ll swear you’re seeing the old Gears you know and love. That may sound like hyperbole, but Tactics is so authentically, dyed-in-the-wool Gears of War that the genre almost doesn’t matter. What’s both truly bizarre and hugely relieving is that, at times, you’ll forget you’re playing a turn-based strategy game at all. For a tactics game it also packs in a surprising amount of cinematic cutscenes to keep you invested in the plot. In true Gears fashion the plot clicks along at a steady pace, and developers Splash Damage and The Coalition have fostered a handful of narrative twists and emotional story beats among the grunts and ooh-rah’s to catch you off-balance. Before long, the trio find themselves on the hunt for Ukkon, the enigmatic Locust leader responsible for creating Corpsers and Brumaks, amongst other toothy horrors. Away from the front lines of the Locust War and disenchanted by the Coalition’s frequent disregard for the sanctity of life, Gabe wants nothing to do with their warmongering ways – until he crosses paths with grizzled veteran Sid Redburn and Stranded leader Mikayla Dorn.
#GEARS TACTICS STEAM SERIES#
From the onset and throughout, Gears Tactics pushes the envelope, taking the turn-based, thinking person’s gameplay of Firaxis’ franchise and injecting it with a swaggering confidence that is purely, quintessentially, Gears.Ī prequel set 12 years before Dom Santiago breaks Marcus Fenix out of prison in the first Gears of War, Tactics begins with Gabe Diaz (father of current series protagonist Kait Diaz ), wallowing in self-imposed exile as a lowly transport mechanic. What’s even more surprising than the fact that they made this game at all is that it’s such an exceptional pairing of genres.
Still, it’s easy to overlook Gears’ storytelling and emotional depth when it does its best to hide it all under curb-stomp executions and meat-coated chainsaws.Īnd yet, here we are, faced with Gears Tactics, the result of pouring all that big, dumb Gears of War batter into an XCOM-shaped mould and nuking it in an oven made from recycled Lancers. Often dismissed as big and dumb, it’s a franchise of over-the-top explosions, sweaty biceps and growled one-liners that has nevertheless stood for almost 14 years as one of the Xbox’s flagship properties. Of all the loud, shouty shooters you could choose to distill into a strategy-heavy action game, you’d be forgiven for putting Gears of War (or lately, simply “Gears”) at the bottom of the list.
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