Gears Tactics review

Reviewed on: PC

Gears of War is the PC and Xbox series with the biggest load of adrenaline and testosterone I have ever seen, and Gears Tactics is no different. It’s all-out action, explosions, muscles and gunfire everywhere, in other words, super cool. In this new chapter of the series you face your enemies in turn-based tactical battles, in the style popularized in recent years by X-Com. But does this style fit well with Gears’ proposal?

The answer, no beating around the bush, is yes. Gears Tactics is an excellent, fun game that is not ashamed of what it is. There is no wasted time: you start in the middle of the action and never stop. Unfortunately, though, despite being fun, the game ends up leaning toward the repetitive side after a while.

The game is focused on tactical missions, for which you choose a squad of up to 4 characters of different classes, among soldiers with heavy weaponry and others with lighter weapons, others focused on support, etc. During these missions, combat takes place in turns. First you use each of your characters’ action points to position them in combat, shoot, use items and everything else, and then it’s the Locust’s turn, the series’ enemies.

Technically, Gears Tactics is flawless. The game runs on the Series X at native 4K and 60 fps, and the visuals are beautiful. The loading times from the Series X’s SSD are also impressive, with missions loading in about 5 to 10 seconds. The sound effects are cool, the characters’ voices fit each of them well, but the music doesn’t draw any attention at all, quickly falling into oblivion. Oh, and during my many hours of play I didn’t run into any bug, however small.

Unlike other games in the genre, such as the aforementioned X-Com, there is no other more strategic part in this game. There is no base to be built or customized and there is no kind of progression in the campaign beyond your characters’ level and equipment. Basically, there is no relevant decision to be made outside the battlefield, and that strategic part is missed.

The campaign of about 30 hours has a structure similar to the other games in the Gears series: a few acts divided into chapters. Each chapter has one or more missions that will give you objectives such as rescuing captured soldiers, sabotaging structures or holding control points. It’s all very cool, but Gears Tactics falls short on variety in missions: after the first act you will have seen practically every type of mission, and those same objectives start repeating in the following acts. There are special cases, like boss battles, certainly highlights of the campaign, but they are few. This repetitiveness is made even more evident by the missions’ look, always in that destroyed-city setting in shades of brown and orange, and by the lack of things to do between one mission and another: you finish a mission, see the result, equip what you got, and go to the next.

The enemies, on the other hand, have a decent variety, and the Locust have several different types of units that require very different approaches. This new edition of Gears Tactics, released now for console, brings even more enemy types than those that already existed in the original PC launch earlier this year. This edition also brings the little robot Jack, a fifth squad member who has his own gameplay style and is super useful.

The available customization is nice but limited. Characters are divided into two types: heroes and recruits. Heroes are the story’s main characters, and recruits are soldiers randomly generated by the game. These recruits can be customized quite extensively: hair, clothes, accessories, names and nicknames, etc. Heroes, however, have a fixed look, unfortunately. In both cases, you can equip different armors and weapons, and all of them can be painted in different colors and textures, so they look more like you.
Despite these negatives, Gears Tactics gets the most important point right: combat. If you enjoy tactical combat games, Gears Tactics is a great pick, but go in knowing it’s not a game with the strategic depth of an X-Com, nor with the bizarre and weird charm (in a good way) of Mutant: Year Zero Road to Eden (an excellent game, by the way). It delivers what it promises: the all-out action of a Gears game in the form of tactical combat, and it delivers that very well, but nothing more.