Gears Tactics

Review

After many years of war, the inhabitants of the planet Sera were living peaceful and prosperous lives. But on one fateful day, a day known as the Emergence Day, a horde of monsters called the Locust appeared from beneath the surface and attacked every city on Sera. Civilians, along with the COG army, took massive casualties, but the toughest soldiers managed to survive the monster’s onslaught. As one of them, your mission is to recruit new soldiers and take down the Locust horde and its leader, Ukkon! Good luck soldier, in Gears Tactics!

Gears Tactics is a turn-based strategy game developed by Splash Damage, The Coalition and published by Xbox Game Studios on the 29^th of April 2020. The game is available on Xbox One, Windows 10 and on the Steam platform.

The game consists of 3 Acts. Act 1 has 6 chapters, while acts 2 and 3 have 8 chapters each. After having selected 1 of the 5 difficulty levels (Beginner, Intermediate, Experienced, Insane or Ironman), you’ll be introduced to the first of many amazing cutscenes, and you’ll start your first mission (which is an excellent tutorial).

Each chapter within the acts is divided into two categories: the Story missions and the Side missions. In the Story missions, you’ll be able to select four soldiers (including the main characters), but in the Side missions you might be restricted to only 2 soldiers, and depending on the mission you select, you may not be able to use some of your main characters. Bear in mind, when you are playing a chapter with side missions, you might need to up to two side missions to move on to the next chapter.

There are five classes of soldiers you can recruit and play within Gears Tactics. You have the Vanguard, Sniper, Heavy, Support and Scout. Each of these classes has a skill tree that contains 34 skills to learn, which lead to four different specialities. For example, you can lead a sniper unit to become either a sharpshooter, a hunter, a stalker, or a marksman depending on which skill you activate. Each of your soldiers will receive 2 skills points each time they level up. It will cost you 1 skill point to learn a skill that you can use in battle, or to learn a passive skill that has ongoing benefits. I’ll let you discover them.

There are several side missions, including Rescue missions, in which you start with only two soldiers and you have to free two prisoners from their pods within a certain number of turns and then return to the evacuation point.  In the Collect Supply missions, you have two crates on the map in the middle of a circle. Each of these crates has a number on it (usually the number 7). In these missions, you have to post one soldier in each of the circles in order to collect 1 supply from each crate at the end of each turn, and you’ll also have to deal with a constant onslaught from Locust! If the Locust owns the perimeter where the crates are in the middle of the circle, they will destroy a supply each turn. To win, you must collect 10 crates. That gives you a bit of an idea on the side missions and be reassured there are a few more types as well.

In the Story missions, you’ll have objectives to reach as well as facing the big bosses in the last mission of each Act. So far, I’ve managed to finish Act 1 and 2 on the Intermediate difficulty, and a few chapters on the Experienced difficulty.

The gameplay is superb.  Most of your characters will have 3 actions per turn, which you have to use wisely on moving, shooting, reloading, overwatch and a few other actions. That will also depend on what skill each of your soldiers has learned. There will be different coloured cases within each map. They contain upgrades for your weapons and armour; the blue cases have rare items, the yellow cases have legendary items, and the purple cases have epic items.  Try to collect them if you can, and you’ll be able to open them when you successfully complete the stage. In terms of the enemies, they will be dropped from above,  they’ll come up from under the surface and from all directions. You’ll find yourself in the middle of fast and epic battles!

Marvellous graphics, sound effects and the voice over is fabulous. I love the customisation and the fact that you can lead your soldiers to learn one or two specific skills paths or a bit of the four available skill paths in each of the classes. The story is excellent with plenty of well-made cutscenes. It’s brilliantly produced! The only thing I found a little odd is that some of the maps looked really similar; several times I asked myself, “Haven’t I done this map already?”