The final significant game-altering mechanic is how Gears Tactics deals with the distribution of enemies on a map, or ‘pods’ as they’re known. This difference in approach to the pacing of the battlescape is probably the most significant fundamental difference Gears Tactics has to other games in the genre and I found myself enjoying the change of pace. When you combine this difference with squad member upgrades that reduce cooldown times of those abilities and equipment based on specific squad member actions such as using your chainsaw or getting a long range kill, it’s a recipe for using these powerful abilities as much as possible while making them available as often as you can. Abilities and equipment in Gears are on a turn-based cooldown system, meaning that (for example) in an infinitely long mission you could throw an infinite number of grenades or use special abilities an infinite number of times. Gears Tactics has obviously made a deliberate effort to turn this convention on its head and make the battlescape a fast-paced and brutal affair, appropriately in keeping with the feel of the other games in the series. Take in a grenade and you typically get one use of it in a mission… This inevitably leads to a considered approach to combat and a slower paced tactical layer where optimization of your limited resources is critical.
In X-Com, powerful abilities or equipment are given a limited number of uses in each mission, causing the player to deliberate on the best time to use them. The second fundamental difference is how each game handles the abilities and equipment of your squad, and in a large part it is these differences that define the feel of the tactical layer of each game. Whether that’s an improvement or not depends entirely on what you enjoy, but the lack of a strategy layer means that Gears is very much a curated and linear experience. It’s not selling itself as one – it’s a Turn-based Tactical game, and if you remember that you’ll be less jarred by the differences in our comparison. Gears Tactics is not a Turn-Based Strategy game. It took me a while to understand this, coming from a 25 year long X-Com background. The tactical element I made once a mission is selected.
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In gameplay, a strategic game would have you deciding how to achieve the endgame objective, and how to obtain resources and recruits. Strategy is the overall complex campaign plan that govern how tactical decisions are made. Tactics are the means used on a small scale to complete an interim objective, the moves you make in the battlescape or the gear and soldiers you take. I’ll be generous and assume that some others don’t understand the difference between Strategy and Tactics, rather than my usual cynical self, so let’s clear that up now. To be clear, there is no strategy element in Gears Tactics (hence the name), which is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated that other early previews have been holding this up as a superlative strategy game. Gears quite literally hits the ‘DEL’ key and does away with that in its entirety. In X-Com you have a strategy layer where you manage your bases, troops, research, manufacturing and overall plan to achieve the game objectives in your own way before heading into the tactical turn-based layer. The first and most glaring difference in the two games is how each handles the ‘Strategy’ part of the game. Utilizing comparisons (however unfair) gives us the writer and reader, a common point of reference to base our experience around, and in this case the obvious comparison would be the paragon of Turn-Based Strategy games, X-Com.
Human nature being what it is, it’s almost impossible to describe something without doing so in relation to another existing entity.
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All of the classic Gears enemies will show up and you’ll have to maneuver you small squad of Gears to complete the mission while moving toward the overall goal of killing a single protagonist through a linear series of story missions.Ĭompleting missions gives gear modifiers and experience points which can be spent on a frankly overwhelmingly detailed skill tree for each class of soldier which further specializes and differentiates them as you progress through the campaign. Gears Tactics is a squad-based game where you control individual Gears taken from 5 generic classes from a top-down perspective in a turn-based environment.
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