Platforms: Xbox One/S/X, PC
The_Gears_series has always been bombastic, full of unfeasibly large soldiers wielding ridiculous weaponry to fight back against gribbly insectoid aliens. It's_Starship Trooperswithout the satire,Alienswith more firepower, where subtlety and tactics play a distant second fiddle to fast-paced cover-based shooting. Trying to merge that with the considered pace of a turn-based strategy title has been a fraught process for publisher Microsoft, already leaving one aborted project in its wake – a_Gears of War: Tactics_was abandoned around 2014 – but inGears Tactics{
Set 12 years before the original Gears of War, this long-in-development spin off follows Gabe Diaz – father of Kait, the hero of Gears 5 – on a mission to hunt down a Locust scientist breeding even more powerful monsters. The narrative is pivotal to the game's progression, filled with named and Very Important™ characters, fitting with Microsoft's overall plan for the Gears franchise to be a sci-fi epic. Events matter, even in ostensible spin-offs like this. However, while long-time players of the series will get some kicks out of the set-up, and occasional ominous nods to later developments in the timeline, Tactics' tale never really evolves beyond serviceable framework to hang its series of combat encounters on.
While it borrows mechanics from the likes of the XCOM series, Gears Tactics operates at a much faster pace. Each squad member has three action points per turn – rather than two, as in many turn-based strategy games – allowing players to cover more distance or dispatch more enemies in a single round. It's a nice way of recapturing the sense of sheer power from the core Gears games, as you plough through opponents.
Epic boss fights against gargantuan monsters keep your team on their toes.
Tactics also successfully adapts stalwarts of the main franchise to the strategy genre. Appropriately, the familiar use of cover fits well, even without the real time shooting, allowing characters to take shelter while engaging enemies, or hunker down for overwatch duty, taking shots at enemies as they move. Grenades work even better, the brief pause between actions allowing you to take out clusters of enemies in one go. Best of all though is how it utilises executions.
In the regular Gears games, executions are gory spectacles – commonly, micro-cinematics of you dismembering enemies with chainsaws. Here they're no less graphic, the camera switching from a top-down aerial view to a third-person close-ups, but they now serve a tactical purpose. Get an enemy to low enough health, and you can now spend an action point to execute them, which buys every other member of the party an additional action. Given Tactics frequently threatens to totally overwhelm your paltry squad with hordes of Locust warriors spewing forth from the subterranean depths, chaining together a few executions can buy you more time, allowing you to cleverly change the tide of battle.
Tactics isn't a straight re-skinning of other turn-based strategies though. Epic boss fights against gargantuan monsters are a departure from the norm, keeping your team on their toes as you scramble for destructible cover while adapting to evolving attack patterns. They're some of the game's strongest moments, and manage to feel appropriately Gears in execution.
Tactics also doesn't bother with genre staples such as research tasks between missions – after all who has time for R&D when there are bugs to splatter? Instead, you improve your arsenal by picking up supply crates in battle. In theory, it's a risk-reward calculation, asking you to endanger characters in order to collect crates while still tackling enemies. In practice, it feels more like an uninformed gamble, the randomness of the crates' contents unfortunately feeling a bit too close to lootboxes. Thankfully there are no actual microtransactions, though.
It's clear to see where Gears Tactics has been inspired by other staples of the turn-based genre, and equally clear where it's tried to evolve beyond them, all while putting a distinct Gears-shaped stamp on everything. Not all of its ideas pan out, but the ones that do help this stand as a strong addition to the wider franchise for existing fans, and a solid entry point to turn-based strategies in general.
Buy Gears: Tactics on Xbox now from Amazon.{