Review: Gears of War and XCOM had a baby, and it's called Gears Tactics

Gears of War has enjoyed a lot of time in the spotlight recently. Last year’s Gears 5 was a fantastic entry in the franchise, providing bombastic action setpieces and a solid story to boot. This year, Xbox is releasing Gears Tactics - a turn-based tactics game in a genre that the XCOM franchise tends to dominate. We received a copy of the game from Microsoft, and now it's time to talk about it. 

At the most basic level, Gears Tactics is virtually indistinguishable from an XCOM game - besides some ludicrously good visuals and an entirely different invasion force. However, key choices in gameplay design cement its identity as a Gears of War game first and foremost, keeping the ‘live free and die chainsawing’ spirit of the franchise while giving players a more tactical style of gameplay seamlessly. 

The story is just good enough

Gears Tactics acts as a prequel to the very first Gears of War game, following a soldier named Gabe Diaz. Gears fans might recognise the name, due to him later fathering Kait Diaz - Gears 5’s main protagonist. Gabe abandoned the frontline a long time before the story begins, choosing to endure mop-up duty after a mission went wrong. He gets scooped up into the action soon enough however, when he is handed a secret mission to kill Ukkon - a Locust scientist who creates monsters for his masters. 

I’ll give it to you straight - there are a lot of great things in Gears Tactics, but this story isn’t one of them. It’s not bad or even dull, just generic and rehashes themes and storylines the franchise has gone over before. Hunting down a Locust scientist hardly seems like a necessary story to experience in the Gears franchise, and the main cast of characters on display here aren’t anything special either. Compared to the series’ mainline entries, this story just doesn’t hold up. 

That’s not to say that you should just skip past all the cutscenes, however. Something special about Gears Tactics is that it seems to have received just as much technical care as Gears 5. All of its cutscenes are dramatic and movie-like, with incredible visuals and bombastic action sequences. Facial animation on the main characters is pretty amazing, though inconsistent when you look at the more expendable soldiers in the team. 

Kudos to the developers for making this game seem exactly like a mainline Gears game where it counts, only with the camera pulled way back during gameplay. 

Gears of XCOM

Gears Tactics is a turn-based game that throws you into wonderfully detailed environments filled with enemies. During missions, you might have to escape from one place to another, rescue hostages located around the map, or even engage in bossfights. Whatever your objectives may be, the moment-to-moment gameplay usually settles into taking cover and firing at enemies until they’re all dead, and then progressing through the level. Like XCOM, you’ll have to deal with missing your shots if you’re too far off, and take care to plan ahead in case enemies flank you from behind. That’s where the Tactics bit of the name comes in. 

It really feels like this was an inevitable detour in the Gears of War franchise. Its cover-based shooting and few-against-many scenarios translate perfectly to an overhead turn-based videogame. While Gears Tactics adopts many of XCOM’s gameplay mechanics and features, it manages to stay authentic as a traditional-feeling Gears of War experience. 

It’s hard to describe how perfectly this game adapts the franchise’s gameplay loop into a strategy game. Simple things like sliding into cover and plunging a chainsaw into an enemy’s gullet feel great here, purely because they're series staples. While Gears of War is all about giving the player insane weapons and big action sequences to prove their worth in, it’s also about strategy and making the right moves at the right time. 

To further prove its uniqueness, Gears Tactics doesn’t follow the grid-based movement system of XCOM games. Instead, its movement system is much smoother, allowing you three actions’ worth of movement to go wherever you want in a more fluid way. It feels less like moving pieces around on a chess board, and more like moving miniatures around on a table. There's a general rule of how far you can go, but however you get there is your choice. 

Tinker tailor soldier Gear

Gears Tactics doesn’t come with an XCOM-like base-building metagame for players to pursue in between combat encounters. Instead, players can tinker with their squad of choice in the Barracks. Playable characters are separated into two categories - heroes and troops. Heroes are basically the main characters of the story, with set appearances and importance in the campaign. Occasionally, you’ll be forced to take one or two specific heroes along in a mission - but they can be the most powerful soldiers you have, so that’s not a bad thing. 

Troops on the other hand, are expendable. These are Gears that you’ll pick up over the course of the game, with facial features that you can customise entirely, and rename to your liking. If they die, you’ll lose them forever - but you’ll get new ones to take their place and often, your squad will become better for it. Troops don’t matter in the grand scheme of things - they just come in different classes, which might be better suited for different missions. They’ll come and go, most fading into irrelevance when you pick up other troops with better stats. 

Besides offering a ton of customisation options (which is always nice to have), the Barracks also allows players to upgrade their playable characters. You’ll find brand-new equipment for troops and soldiers after every mission, especially if you seek out supply cases in the environment. These can give you weapon parts, which might come with useful boosts to character stats - such as higher evasion, critical chance and health. You will also be able to build up each character’s skill tree once they level up - which can give them extremely nifty new abilities to use in combat. 

There’s a lot to mess with in the Barracks, and I personally liked this little RPG touch to the game. It’s a fun little distraction to keep gameplay flowing without too much repetition - but the UI on display here is really bad. It takes way too many clicks to get where you want to go, and replacing weapon parts doesn't feel intuitive at all. 

It’s not all perfect

Gears Tactics lays down an excellent foundation for future tactics-based games in the series, but its structure could use some adjustment in places. The game does feature a couple bossfights - but they’re far too mechanically similar to avoid feeling like long and drawn out battles. Their presence in the game is greatly appreciated - and further lends to that trademark Gears of War flavour, but it doesn’t seem like the developers have figured out how to adapt bossfights into a tactics-based game nearly as well as everything else. 

The story can also feel a little too padded-out by the end, throwing compulsory side missions at the player before they can progress in the main story. If they’re compulsory, they’re not side missions. If they’re not side missions, they should feel necessary - but they’re not. Both types of missions can end up forcing the same objectives on you back-to-back with very little change, leading to a frustrating feeling of repetition. It feels like Gears Tactics wanted to be a longer game than it ended up being, hence the way side missions are implemented here. 

Verdict

Gears Tactics manages to adapt many of the franchise’s best qualities into an excellent turn-based tactical game, without having to water anything down. It feels like a Gears game through and through, and it even outclasses XCOM in a couple departments. While it has its weaknesses - such as a lacklustre story and repetitive mission structure - it is satisfyingly meaty, and holds enough potential to spin-off a franchise of its own.

Xbox Game Studios clearly set out to make a tactical Gears game on the same level of quality as Gears 5, and it shows. Visually, this game will blow you away - and its PC version (the game will come to Xbox One later) features an awesome amount of graphical settings to fiddle with too. If Gears Tactics gets a sequel, XCOM might have a serious competitor on their hands. 

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