Bit of a wall of text. It’s good for awhile but shortly becomes repetitive. I have the xbox game pass so I was able to play it on my PC without buying it. If you ever played XCOM think combat like that but take out literally everything else about the game. No base management, no resource spending, no researching new tech. The game is going from one mission to the next, spend your skill points and equip the latest upgrades on your weapons.
What bothered me was there’s no reason to get attached to your soldiers outside the story characters. It takes forever to lvl them up and every mission you can recruit new soldiers. Odds are they are higher lvl then some of the ones you’ve been trying to lvl up. So your faced with the decision “Do I keep this heavy or do I disband them and hire this new one that’s already higher lvl then him?” There’s no attachment building to your troops. In XCOM I made soldiers after family/friends and I restarted games because I didn’t want them to die. In Gears Tactics you can’t even customize the solider fully. You can change their hair and hair color. Everything else is armor cosmetics. You can’t change their face, race or gender. If I wanted to name a sniper after my nephew I had to hope the game gave me one that happened to be a white guy. The kick to the nuts is the final boss fight you have to bring the story characters. So the people you’ve been training this whole time take a back seat.
There’s only like 4 mission types and after Act 1 I got sick of it. Act 2 I was like “again?”. Act 3 I just wanted to get it over with. It’s either kill all enemies, rescue 2 people from torture pods within a time limit, gather crates while being pushed forward by artillery fire, or stand in this objective and hold out till the timer runs out.
The few things they got right was the combat. Everyone has 2 actions. Doing anything costs an action. What’s nice is you can move and shoot or you can sit still and shoot twice. Executing a locust gives all other squad mates an additional action. So you wanted to run up and chainsaw someone or curb stomp a grenadier because your squad got more turns. Their version of Overwatch was also superior. You click overwatch, your given a cone and you point the direction and distance you want to cover. If anything goes in that cone during the enemies turn you fire for as many action points you have. In XCOM when you clicked overwatch your soldier shot the first thing that came into his vision. It could be a sectoid a mile away that you had no chance of hitting or a chrysallid 3 feet away heading straight to you. Gear’s overwatch gave you more control and the more action points you saved the more shots you could fire.
IMO if you want to play a strategy turn based game, look for XCOM and XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. Gears tactics for all it’s ups and downs, is a watered down version of XCOM. The modding community is very active for XCOM. I’ve put over 1k hours into XCOM: WOTC and I still go back to it. Gears Tactics I beat it once, it felt like a chore half way through and I don’t want to play it again.
Just because a game sold well does not mean it’s a success. No Man’s Sky sold a lot of copies and Steam had to reforge their refund policy because of that game. I feel this game only sold half as well because it had Gears in it’s title. How many people bought Halo Wars and didn’t realize it wasn’t a FPS?
