Animations are top-notch as well coming from XCOM 2, I was impressed to never see anybody appearing to fire in the wrong direction or hover in the air for a moment before moving. Character models are fantastically detailed and the ruined, mostly urban environments of the planet Sera are elaborate. No matter where you move or what you do, Gears Tactics really does look spectacular – nearly up to par with Gears 5 itself. Overall, though, it became a bit annoying after a while to have to mouse over so many potential destinations to see what I could reach and what I couldn’t, since it’s not clear just by looking at the map. There’s even a movement-range bonus you can get for having your troops dash and slide into cover, which is a great nod to classic Gears moves and an extra incentive to stick to cover. There’s no visible grid to constrain you as you move the cursor over the map, with markers on the projected path line to clearly indicate if you’ll spend one, two, or three movement units to get there. “Movement in general feels very fluid, which is both liberating and eventually a little tiresome. Grenades are handy for this, too – and there are class-specific abilities that are even more effective. For instance, Disabling Shot comes standard with every solider’s sidearm, which has high accuracy and a good chance to knock a grub off his guard. Countering a web of overlapping Overwatch cones without taking a hit can be a tricky puzzle, and you have many abilities designed for doing exactly that. The Locusts think it’s handy, too: they’ll almost compulsively use Overwatch to pin you in place rather than take a shot on their turn. The satisfying “clink!” when an enemy steps into your killzone and sets your plan into motion is one of my favorite sound effects in Gears Tactics. The directional Overwatch ability is also extremely useful – essential, really – for stopping enemy advances during their turn can be enormously powerful if you can cleverly predict enemies’ movements.
You may only ever have four troops at once, but they can feel like an army.
Having a Vanguard soldier like Sid spend one of his three action points to charge into the midst of a group of Locust Hammerburst drones and skewer one on his Retro Lancer’s bayonet, only to recover that action point because of his passive Free Bayonet skill, then blast another one with his Rage Shot ability for extra damage to put them in the Gears-signature down-but-not-out state that allows him to perform an execution kill, which in turn grants his teammates an extra action to tear into the Locusts with four action points apiece instead of three, is a joy. That can turn them from generally effective fighters into spectacular killing machines that can mow down two or three times their number of enemies. Where things really get interesting is when you start chaining together abilities from the five different classes that grant you additional action points, either for one character or your entire squad. “The fundamentals of combat are about improving your lethality by flanking, using melee charges, tossing grenades, and other abilities, and it’s great.
Still, the dialogue is written and acted well enough that it serves its purpose of establishing the signature Gears flavor and giving us a monster to hunt without getting in the way. And despite some hints that he might attempt it, the villainous Ukkon never develops beyond one-dimensional evil. Even the heated friction between grizzled old Gear Sid and the prickly engineer/sniper Mikayla never amounts to much. He has his tortured past of having fallen from grace after leading an operation gone wrong and going into self-imposed exile in the COG motorpool, but being brought back for one last job doesn’t really change his mind about anything – he was fed up with the COG’s corrupt leadership before we meet him. Through some impressively animated cutscenes we get to fill in a few gaps in the pre-Outsiders Diaz family history, though Kait’s father, Gabriel, never really comes into his own as a memorable main character. That comes at the cost of some replayability, but most of those fights are rewarding puzzles with fantastically polished graphical payoff.The story of Gears Tactics takes place 12 years before the original Gears of War – of course, when it comes to gleefully cutting alligator-looking dudes in half with chainsaw guns it’s very much business as usual. Gears Tactics is a spin-off with a more focused approach to the genre, ditching the larger strategy layer side of the XCOM formula in favor of pitched tactical battle after tactical battle.
Given the life-or-death dependency on taking cover in the Gears (of War) games, I can’t think of another long-running series better suited to sidestep from third-person shooter into XCOM-style turn-based tactics than this one.