GEARS TACTICS BASE GAME SERIES

At this point, one of your soldiers can run up to them and perform a gruesome execution, shoving their chainsaw bayonet into the Locusts’ gut, or just pummelling their head into savoury jam. When you eliminate an enemy, often they aren’t killed outright, but instead become incapacitated. Gears Tactics sets ups these distinctly unbalanced scales, and then dangles this enticing, blood-soaked carrot at the far end of the battlefield in the form of executions.

But the reason Gears is so seemingly generous is you’re constantly outnumbered, often fighting three-to-one odds, and sometimes as high as five-to-one. In any given turn your Gears can move, shoot and establish Overwatch. To start with, each Gear receives three action points rather than two, meaning you have more tactical flexibility than say, XCOM. The key element here is the game’s approach to action points. But this element is tied closely to what makes Gears Tactics mechanically unique too, as it’s a tactics game designed to capture the aggression and powerful forward momentum of an action FPS. And if that’s all Gears Tactics was, I might not be quite so enthusiastic about it. In short, it’s a tactics game delivered with the production values of a triple-A shooter. Moving units around, dragging out Overwatch cones, selecting abilities, it’s all wonderfully intuitive. The UI and screen interactions are smoother than a Teflon snake, even compared to X-COM.

But the same slick design has been applied to the tactical elements too. Slicing up a grub with a chainsaw bayonet is just as messy as it was in the shooters, and just as satisfying. Indeed, as you’d expect from a Gears game, Tactics is phenomenally grisly. You can feel the thud of their boots as they dash for cover, sense the rattle of the lancer up your arms as they blast an encroaching Wretch into mulch. Gears Tactics makes brilliant use of the foundation previous Gears games have laid, such that even though you aren’t directly in control of your Gears, you get a palpable sense of the actions they perform. It boasts all the same animations for movement and gunplay, whether it’s the way Gears slide neatly into cover, or that little crouch-bend they do to pick up equipment from the ground. Visually it’s on par with the astounding looking Gears 5. But the first thing you’ll notice about Gears Tactics is that, despite the wildly different mechanics, control system, and perspective, it both looks and feels exactly like a Gears of War game. Each Gear has a limited number of action points used to move, shoot and set up ambushes with Overwatch. You control a team of up to 4 Gears, who take turns against an eternally superior force of Locust. Together, the aim to take down a Locust general named Ukkon, who’s been creating ever-more terrifying monsters for the COG to fight and has the slight advantage of being basically invincible.Īs you’ve probably already guessed, Gears Tactics switches out the familiar third-person gunplay for X-COM style mechanics. The story revolves around Gabe Diaz, a gearhead trying to weather the storm of war in a COG garage when he’s forced into the fight by one-eyed, moustachioed veteran Sam Redburn. Gears Tactics is a prequel to the original Gears of War, set in the early days of the conflict between the COG and the Locust. The result is the best tactics game I’ve played in ages, one that offers both the cerebral satisfaction of tactical puzzle-solving, and the more straightforward satisfaction of impaling a steroid-addled lizardman on a bayonet the size of a baguette. Maybe we should hide behind that wall?” Just because it has chainsaws on the guns and characters who look like they’ve climbed out of a vat of horse testosterone doesn’t mean it’s stupid.Īll Gears Tactics does is embrace Gears of War’s smart secret identity, digging beneath the performative jock-ness on the surface and revealing the shy tabletop nerd underneath.

GEARS TACTICS BASE GAME SERIES

It was, after all, the first shooter series to realise “Hey, those guys are shooting bullets at us. While turning Gears of War into a Tactics game might sound like the worst idea since mayonnaise in a squeezy bottle, the truth is that Gears of War has always been a tactics game. I probably shouldn’t be as surprised as I am.

Well carve me up with a chainsaw and call me a grub, Gears Tactics is fluppin’ brilliant.

Gears tactics base game