Gears has always exhibited shades of American football, from the hypermasculine tone to its disconcertingly swole characters. Nonetheless, Gears Tactics is a triumphant twist on an old favourite, capturing the fury and spectacle of its shooter-based brethren while also offering a more cerebral experience.
The latter half of the third act is a slog when it should be a sprint. There also aren’t enough mission types to prevent a sense of repetition creeping into those final hours. But it has the effect of slowing progress to a crawl when the story should be ramping up to the conclusion. There is a logic to the idea – soldiers sent on one side-mission cannot be deployed in another, so you need to manage your squads carefully to ensure success. In the latter acts, however, Gears Tactics forces you to complete two or even three side missions before moving on to the next story beat. Initially, they’re a welcome opportunity to flex your tactical muscles, whether you need to hold two separate control points against assault, or retreat from an encroaching artillery barrage as the Locust try to slow you down. This is the right call, but problems arise with the side missions embedded into this structure. Gears Tactics lacks the broader strategic layer of games such as XCOM, featuring instead a linear story campaign. The way the game injects pace and momentum into a traditionally slow-burn genre is its greatest success, so it isn’t surprising that it is weakest when the pace falters. Even the lowliest Locust grunt can blast half a health bar off one of your soldiers, while together they create overlapping overwatch traps that need to be surgically dismantled to prevent your squad from being wiped out. Yet, while boldness is often rewarded, recklessness will be punished severely. Gears Tactics constantly encourages players to push forward into battle, to be aggressive and daring and think on their feet. In the late game, one of my snipers could pop the heads of a half-dozen Locust in a single turn. Some of the combinations you can pull off are truly exhilarating.
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Many abilities can be upgraded to provide free actions or even add actions to your pool. Moreover, certain soldier-types sport powers such as “bayonet charge”, letting them rush across the battlefield to quickly take an enemy out of commission. This foundation is familiar among tactics games, but Gears adds to it abilities such as “executions”, where theatrically killing an incapacitated enemy gives teammates an additional action point. These can be used to move, shoot at an enemy or deploy special abilities such as “overwatch”, which lets you set up ambushes, firing at any enemy who wanders into its cone-shaped kill-zone.
Your soldiers have a limited number of “action points” per turn. Any given mission sees your squad pitted against a much larger number of Locust, with each side taking turns to move their units between cover and eliminate as many of the opposing force as possible. Gears Tactics is a strategy game designed to feel like an action game, and this philosophy goes beyond the sharp visuals and the viscera dispersion rate. Also like earlier games, it is ferociously violent, with your soldiers frequently bursting and dismembering the Locust with bombs, bayonets and chainsaws. Indeed, Gears Tactics has lost little of the series’s perennially high production values in the switch from shooter to strategy, boasting stunning visuals and slick animations alongside an incredibly intuitive interface. Also, Cole Train, as always, is a goddamn delight.Strategy that feels like action.
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Gears Tactics is a fantastic strategy game and an excellent addition to the Gears of War series, and I’d recommend it to anyone who is either a fan of Gears of War, or to the XCOM series style of game. Who knows? Either way, Splash Damage has created a fine tactical game that fans will enjoy and have a great time with, while not sacrificing the skill wall and difficulty. The XCOM fans will have a ball with it and maybe even some Gears fans will get into the strategy genre.
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