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1. Home
2. Reviews
Gears Tactics Review: "A fast and
aggressive strategy game"
By Josh West April 27, 2020

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(Image: © Xbox Game Studios)

Pros

• The combat is quintessential Gears of War

• Captures the essence of the series' action

Cons

• Lacks variety in mission and encounter design

• Difficult to invest in story or characters

Gears Tactics desperately attempts to strike a balance between turn-based strategy and all-out
aggression. It's a surprisingly tight line for a genre title to walk, with the contemplative nature
of the former tenet of design at odds with the hawkish ethos informing the latter. Splash
Damage and The Coalition should be commended for how smartly the collaborating studios
have been able to translate the character of Gears' combat to a new arena, even if some of its
spirit has gone AWOL in the transition.

Fast facts
(Image credit: Xbox Game Studios)

Release date: April 28, 2020

Platform: PC
Developer: Splash Damage, The Coalition
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios

The game moves at a fast clip, with each of its turns defined by the amount of viscera you're
able to pull from guts to ground. Even as Gears Tactics has you easing off the throttle of the
thumbsticks, it's still a game of fluid motion and crisscrossing firing lines. Maneuvers may be
executed with the click of a mouse rather than the tease of a trigger but it's no less engaging.
You'll still find yourself in search of flanking routes, carving out holes in enemy lines with
your Lancer, and locking yourself into waist-high cover to avoid returning enemy fire – the
Locust as formidable a foe as ever.

Gears Tactics is fast, smart, and aggressive in its action, but sadly it can be slow, shallow, and
meek in the way that it threads you between encounters and attempts to hold your attention
once the bullets stop flying. Tactics is, for better or worse, still a Gears of War game at heart,
even if the camera has been torn out from the shoulder and hoisted high into the sky.

A fresh perspective

(Image credit: Xbox Game Studios)

If you're looking for a way to frame all of this, then look no further than XCOM. The
inspiration is clear, with Gears Tactics clearly owing a debt to Firaxis' particular brand of
turn-based strategy. Still, Gears Tactics makes a number of smart decisions that do more than
enough to not only set it apart from its contemporaries but make its action feel authentically
Gears of War too. The most notable of which are in the decisions to remove the movement
grid and the way that the cadence of play is paced.

For starters, with movement removed from a grid you have more freedom to experiment than
you would typically expect from a turn-based strategy game. Gears Tactics takes a freeform
approach to combat, with each of your Gears equipped with a baseline of three action points
that can be spent at your discretion on any combination of movement, shooting, and skills.
This seemingly small decision unlocks so much potential, making Gears Tactics feel more
like a traditional action game than you might expect it to be capable of.

You're able to quite effortlessly weave between points of cover, with action-point cost
mitigated by ensuring that your unit clicks into waist-high debris at the end of a run. You're
able to rotate freely between any of your Gears in the field in any given turn too, which means
that you can quite readily respond to threats as they emerge from the fog of war, airdrop into
the sprawling arenas, and crawl out of those pesky Emergence Holes. You can choose to stand
and fire until you expend your action points, move soldiers into advantageous positions and
then shoot, or use your squad in any combination that you can think to command. Gears
Tactics has taken the core XCOM combat system, identified the wrinkles, and ironed them
out to make for a faster and more aggressive strategy game.

Gears Tactics carves out its own space in the genre, thanks in no small part to some smart
mechanics that have been factored into the moment-to-moment. A subtle revision of the
Overwatch mechanic – a cone represents your zone of sight, anything moving within it
triggering a combat action – has a more aggressive application, used to thin encroaching
enemy lines rather than hold down defensively advantageous positions. Another sees the
ability to replenish an action point for your entire squad by performing grizzly executions on
downed enemies – a staple of the Gears of War games, its implementation here is fantastic.

(Image credit: Xbox Game Studios)

"It feels like a Gears game first and foremost, rather than some strategy game wearing its
skin"

In fact, so many of the systems at play here work to feed into the feeling that you're playing a
Gears game first and foremost, rather than some strategy game wearing its skin. Gears Tactics
relishes the opportunity to push masses of enemies at you, particularly once you begin to push
through the game's later encounters. Utilising the strength of your squad combined is only
part of the puzzle. Victory is earned only by chaining together skills and executions.

Gears Tactics features five specialised classes (Heavy, Scout, Sniper, Support, and Vanguard)
that can be upgraded and heavily customised throughout the game, each with its own
strengths and limitations, offset by their utility in engagements. Building out a balanced squad
is key, as is ensuring that the skills learned by each unit are complementary to the others
deployed on any given mission. Skill trees let you loosely invest in one of four combat
proficiencies, each giving you access to new Active and Passive abilities that can help you
mitigate the hordes of enemies constantly flowing in your direction.

Gaming this system is where Gears Tactics really comes into its own; it's possible to create
huge chains of death and dismemberment by properly balancing unit strengths, flanking
routes, the pulsating rumble of a Lancer's chainsaw, and those all important
executions. There's a real joy to be had in taking down nine or more enemies in a single turn
without your squad sustaining a single point of damage. This is a game designed around
continuously pushing forward and building momentum. Every one of the game's systems and
mechanics is geared towards that style of play. Gears Tactics rewards aggressive action and
punishes those that attempt to divert from that ethos by overwhelming you with enemies,
resulting in the loss of squad members. Still, some of you will find the lack of variety a little
grinding eventually; the game struggles to offer room for much else in its structure or mission
design.

Prepare for war

(Image credit: Xbox Game Studios)

While there's some pretty clean XCOM comparisons to be drawn, the way Gears Tactics
handles downtime is a little lacklustre by comparison. While your squad spends much of the
game in motion, travelling as part of a convoy with a group of Gears in-training, there's no
base to grow and evolve, and no similar lines of broader progression to speak of. Instead,
you'll spend time levelling up units, customising the look of your favourites, and pouring
through lists of weapon and armour attachments to work out the best combinations.

You'll find plenty of equipment as you play, rewarded for hunting down storage crates in-
amongst the chaos of combat and for completing mission modifiers, although you'll soon have
so much of it that it soon becomes a little perfunctory. Gears of War was never a series
designed to have you sat in menu screens, and that a legacy Tactics can't escape.

But the cadence to Gears Tactics combat is wonderful. It's the type of game that you can
easily lose hours to, and it can be challenging enough that you're likely to. That isn't to say
that it is without fault, however. As great of a job Gears Tactics does with replicating the
momentum of Gears' combat, it isn't able to so easily capture the essence of the series outside
of its fixation on violence. You're looking at a 20-hour story here with a real lack of heart; the
focus on family that is present and accounted for in every Gears game is largely MIA here,
making it difficult to care about the characters or their situation.

(Image credit: Xbox Game Studios)

"So fixated on forward momentum that any attempt it takes to breathe feels suffocating"

Story driven strategy games (there's no multiplayer options in Gears Tactics) aren't easy to
pull off, and it's clear that plenty of lessons could – and should – have been learned from
StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty and the benchmark it, and its various expansions, set years all
those years ago in this respect. The cutscenes and character work lacks the polish and depth
that we've seen reflected in The Coalition's Gears of War 4 and Gears 5 too; Gears Tactics
comes across as stiff and spliced together, rather than this cohesive adventure that you're
excited to see through to the end.

Compounding this further is some rather ponderous encounter design, laced together by a
bland mission structure. Repeat objectives, often across repurposed maps, quickly lose their
lustre. Gears Tactics also forces side-quests, designed to break up the campaign and push you
to try new squad compositions, but these missions are among the most lifeless portions of the
game. Gears Tactics is so fixated on forward momentum that any attempt it takes to breathe
feels suffocating.

There's a lot to love in Gears Tactics. The ebb and flow of the action is strong enough that it
can be easy enough to overlook its flaws, but they are still there – present and accounted for.
It's a game desperately in need of a little variety; perhaps the same can be said of the core
franchise games too, but it's particularly noticeable when there's a degree of separation
between a command and the resulting action.
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The Verdict
3.5

3.5 out of 5

Gears Tactics

Gears Tactics is a smart, fast, and aggressive strategy game that's in need of a little more
variety

More info
Available platforms PC
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Josh West

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Hello there! I'm the Features Editor for GamesRadar.

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