I have enjoyed the Gears series for many years now. It started off with some muscly dude bros killing bug aliens using oversized guns with a chainsaw attached, to a series with a story that got more interesting and engaging as those characters got fleshed out and became super likeable. The consistent gameplay is what kept you playing and enjoying the games so you could engage with the slow but rewarding stories.
So Gears Tactics takes the series into a new genre to roll the dice on whether it has the legs to survive.
Tactical cover shooter?
Jumping into Gears Tactics I was expecting something totally different, but what shocked me the most was how much the third person cover shooting gameplay matches so well to a tactics game.
It shouldn’t have been so surprising because a third person cover shooter has you moving from cover to cover, trying to take enemies out without leaving yourself exposed. Whereas a tactics game has you moving characters from cover to cover trying to take out enemies without leaving your troops exposed… albeit a little slower.
This is of course a great thing because it still feels like a Gears game, but instead of innovating via a few new features or minor tweaks that start to feel a touch samey, this new genre balances heaps of new without shifting from what makes Gears great.
Prequels of War
The story takes a huge step back from the characters we have seen evolve over time, and takes place 12 years before the first game. It kicks off with the massive Hammer of Dawn attack that destroyed so much of the earth but didn’t take out all of the locusts.
Annoyingly the characters are all interesting and build a dynamic, but it doesn’t get fleshed out the way I have come to expect. This seems to be a casualty of the genre shift as most storytelling is told in cutscenes between battles whereas a surprising amount of the character development was told throughout the gameplay of the original games. This results in an awesome overarching story, with massively undeveloped characters including the antagonist.
Swarms of fun with some bugs
The gameplay for the most part is a polished experience. Each character has a number of moves per turn, and you can use them to run, shoot or lay down cover fire. This strategy can be a lot to take in at first, but it is so much fun to learn.
The annoying thing was hitting some bugs like when I couldn’t switch characters using any of the options available. What I wound up being able to do was shoot one of them and then revive them which worked a couple of times. But I hit this bug more than I would consider fair, and it was always after a long time of play which is infuriating if you are forced to close the application and reopen, or killing your character uses up valuable turns which puts you on the back foot.
Gearing up for sequels
Gears Tactics is a fantastic foray into the genre that is only hampenbed by some rough bugs, and too much content which ultimately becomes repetitive. A little more character time and a little less generic missions could have made this a tight, excellent experience, but it winds up overstaying its welcome too much.
Hopefully a sequel is in the works which refines what they have built here as it could do something truly special.
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