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