HomeReviews
Gears Tactics reviewTop gear
Top gear
Gears Tactics review
This is 100% a Gears Of War game, that also happens to be a top flight strategy effort.
I’ve been playingGears Tacticswith every spare moment of the last week. The second I’m done writing review, I’m going back for more. It’s superb. In fact, it’s good to the extent where, as risky as it is to say such a thing, I’d argue it sets the new gold standard for turn-based tactics.
I don’t think anyone really expected a turn-based tactics game from the Gears Of War series. I was pretty nonplussed when I heard about it, to be honest. At best, I was expecting something like theHalo Warsgames. That is to say, a solid effort, but one which measured up neither to the depth of its strategy peers, nor to the blockbuster charisma of its license. But Gears Tactics, it transpires, is full of hybrid vigour: overflowing with action game brawn, but with plenty of brains behind it all. It turns out that, even in the preposterously hench world of Gears, the mind really is the strongest muscle.
Perhaps the fact that nobody had any expectations for Gears Tactics has worked in its favour. Its designers were free to pick and choose from the classic squad tactics toolkit, as they had no community to alienate, and no features to include out of a sense of duty to tradition. The most notable omission, as a result, is the lack of any strategic/management metagame at all. As soon as a mission’s done, you re-equip your soldiers with newly looted gear and skills gained from levelling, and jump into another one. Story missions are bookended with cutscenes, and sometimes there’s a choice of side missions to go on. But beyond that, there is only beasting.
“Resource management is for cowards” - Albert Einstein (pictured)
If that sounds like a drastic amputation, bear with me. Because I am, let’s not forget, a lover of management games. I enjoy base-building, fighter-intercepting, fund-wheedling and gun-procuring as much as anyone. But they offer a slow drip dopamine release, rather than the rush that comes from wrangling a chaotic guerilla fight towards dramatic victory. And while I loved XCOM 2’s War Of The Chosen DLC, and all the complexity of its strategic layer, I did find the gear-shifting between the modes of play faintly jarring. Sometimes fights felt like annoying distractions from my global resistance management simulator, while sometimes the geoscape felt like a stressful, baffling diversion from up-close carnage.
That little skull icon to the left of an enemy health bar has now become such a welcome sight to me, that I’ve begun to find the sight of skeletons innately satisfying. Like the reverse of a Venetian nobleman seeing a memento mori in a sexy painting and getting sad.
This simple mechanic leads into wild, snowballing chains of opportunity, and if you judge your initial risk right, ugly deadlocks can blossom into routs. But getting too carried away can leave you dangerously overextended, as your luck finally runs dry in the middle of a horde of snarling grey muscle lizards. It’s all very finessed, all very finely balanced: objectives and level designs give you every motivation to play aggressively, but unthinking recklessness will be punished. Your constant challenge is to becleverlyhyperagressive, and you soon begin to develop a stockbroker’s instinct for calculating risk and reward.
Ah, grenades, my faithful pals.
Crucially, however, the difficulty curve never swerves too far in the other direction either. On the default difficulty setting it’s pretty forgiving, but not easy. I never really encountered that slightly deflating moment of “oh, is that all it’s going to throw at me?”, or felt like my troops had become too powerful for the situations facing them. Partially, this is because Gears has a backbone of fully designed story missions (I didn’t count, but it felt like 20-odd), interspersed with partially randomised side missions, so it knows roughly where you’ll be in terms of power level when you reach each of its many milestones. More than that, though, it lets you set your own difficulty within missions. Each one has an optional objective, such as troop class restrictions or time limits, which award weapon and armour upgrades if accomplished. And if that’s still not enough, further loot is scattered around the map in crates, leading to yet more risk/reward calculations as you try to work out whether it’s worth diverting soldiers into hotspots to retrieve them.
Here’s a headscratcher: my sniper can grab an epic crate (GT uses the classic rarity colour scheme), but if they do that, they’ll be isolated in the midst of a load of explosive rat lads. What should I do? Yes, that’s right: charge straight through the rats, and win some cool metal trousers.
Of course, the pacing of a Gears game wouldn’t be complete without ridiculous boss battles, and Gears Tactics has ‘em. There’s only a small number of the really big lads to face, but they’re grand old fights. The first is the Brumak, which is sort of like the product of a loveless marriage between a T-rex and a cave troll, with massive guns strapped to it. The second is a honking great spider with goggles called a Corpser, and it’s a proper disaster. Both are utterly massive on the field of play, and put you through the wringer with great long batterings that - in classic monster boss style - transition through three distinct phases as you chip away at the big red health bars.
This Gearsiness seeps into every element of GT’s design, beyond just the mechanics. Everything is either made of needlessly chunky, battered metal, or needlessly chunky muscles. Even the vehicles, somehow, looktotally ripped. The narrative design too, is appropriately meatheaded. And I don’t mean that at all as a dismissal. Yep, it’s full of melodrama and time-worn cliche, but every last grunt of it is exactly where it needs to be. It takes genuine talent and craft to write good, engaging pulp, and GT’s writers have done a bang-up job of doing just that. It’s not a complex story, but it’s more solidly told than your average big action flick, and I enjoyed it lots.
In the process of hunting Ukkon, Gabe puts together a squad of very wide men and normally proportioned women, recruited from a group of civilian workers. They initially loathe Gabe because of the aforementioned horrible government and their atrocities, and think he is a nasty fash. But Gabe is actually a decent, thoughtful sort of bloke, as befits this more thinky instalment in the Gears series, and he wins them round. He won me round, too. Him and all his burly colleagues are impeccably voice-acted, and are well-versed in the bants of war.
Witness the American Football Man.
This brings me to my one significant criticism of Gears Tactics, which is the UI of the loadout segment in between missions. You would think, given everything the developers have done to keep the action flowing, that the one bit of Gears Tactics that doesn’t directly involve killing would be as slick as possible. But it’s really not. Efficient play means constantly switching up peoples’ loadouts to match their skills, and moving second-tier gear to less experienced soldiers as your A-team get the best new toys. It’s quick and slick when you’ve only got a few troopers, but as your roster grows and you pick up more and more loot, it gets to be a bit of a fuckingtaskto outfit them all.
Warlike and Grimace in: The Wrong Motherfucking Trousers
So, in conclusion. This is 100% a Gears Of War game, that also happens to be a top flight strategy effort. Arguably the best of its kind on the market, in fact, despite a bit of trouser trouble. It’s a spectacular thing to play through, and it’d be more than enough to merit the fifty quid price tag if it deleted itself on completion. Thankfully, however, the replay value is much greater than you’d expect. There’s the randomised side missions, for a start. And even for the linear-ish story missions, the massive spread of subclasses and squad compositions allow for way more playstyles than you can feasibly test out in one run. Plus you can play them on “veteran” mode after one completion, offering a new suite of game rule modifiers to present you with fresh challenges. It’s the first game in ages that gave me the urge to start a second playthrough in the same session as my first completion, which says a lot.
Speaking of which, I think it’s time to play a bit more Gears Tactics. You should do the same.
