Gears Tactics Review - An Authentic Gears Experience

It is difficult to overstate how important the Gears of War franchise has been for third person, run and gun shooters. These clunky, goons with chainsaw guns have been instrumental for the genre – you cannot really divide that over the shoulder, run to cover action game-play with the series at large. Gears Tactics tries to do just that. Tactics attempts to translate the Gears tropes, of intense action, luminous set piece battles and thick monster men with chainsaws to the always exciting, turned based strategy game genre.

Surprisingly, Gears Tactics feels like a real red-blooded Gears game, but falls short of that special alchemy of cross platform perfection.

When I say it feels like a Gears game, it really does. There is a weight to your squad mates’ movements that is immediately identifiable to the franchise. The set pieces are breathtakingly detailed and vast, you find yourself exploring locals, moving cover to cover only this time from above. When there is any moment of interaction though – the camera swings right back to over the shoulder and you are back in Gears 3.

For those familiar with turned based strategy games, you will notice immediately – they got rid of the grid. It is a fluid map now that allows for strategic placement pretty much anywhere – it’s seems like a small change, but it creates a landscape that is somewhat unwieldy at times. Not knowing exactly how far an enemy is with certain loadouts causes mishap after mishap. Having an active grid, especially on ironman difficulties, would keep the system in place.

Another big change is the addition of one more move. In most turned based games your designated to 2 actions, usually when an aggressive action is taken it ends your turn. In tactics you start with 3 action points and can continue your turn after you fire your weapon or set up on overwatch, which you will do again and again.

This small change creates a strategic outlook that surprisingly feels a lot more like a cover-based shooter. You are looking for your moments against hordes of enemies but always find yourself still considering your flank and creating cover. This leaves you with an exciting battlefield that has a sense of depth and action but does not feel as calculating or even dominated as other games in the genre.

This particular Gears story happens during the Locust War – the story arch from the original, this time told from the perspective of Gabe Diaz, a motor pool COG who gets swept into the mission of killing Ukkon a special sort of Locust that is creating monsters –

Diaz, is a name we recognize from the series – Gabe is the never before seen father of Kait Diaz, one of the protagonists from Gears 5. Although the story is mostly told in cut-scenes – having an alternative look on the events of the original game from this new perspective is a perfect story to tell and helps flush out the meta world even more.

From what I described it seems like – this a great – sounds like a fun Gears departure and it is…. for the first few hours. Unfortunately the game is 30-40 hours – with a majority of that time, not spent exploring interesting and complicated set pieces that you recognise from the series but completing side mission after side mission that range from – collecting something, to running away from something to killing something.

Most of that time is spent grinding epic gear for your squad mates or finding new squad mates to churn into the grinder – the tedium doesn’t serve a frame work – whereas if you compare it to XCOM, in any of it’s last few iterations there is a massive framework that contextualizes all of these missions. You are building facilities on your ship, creating new super soldiers while explore the globe – Gears Tactics on the other hand has a very comprehensive upgrade system for each class but ends there.

I hate to include this, but I had an unbelievable amount of technical difficulty playing this game. With my pretty high-end rig and my Nvidia Graphics card I had full computer crashes at least a dozen times, hopefully most of those issues will be dealt with at launch.

Ultimately, Gears Tactics achieves the transition from third person shooter into turned based strategy game without compromising on the tropes that led to the series great success. If you are a fan of the series this departure will satisfy but if you are yearning for that perfect XCOM like synergy of tactical fun – you might be disappointed.