Gears tactics steam full#
Gears tactics steam free#

One of the ways Gears Tactics differentiates itself is in its distinctly non-PG approach to mature content. Like the reverse of a Venetian nobleman seeing a memento mori in a sexy painting and getting sad. 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. They knew that, to stay true to their source material, they had to let as little as possible get in the way of constant, chainsaw-facilitated life cancellation. In that way, The Coalition did have an expectation to meet. Action frenzy after action frenzy, broken only by OTT cutscenes, is the flavour of big budget shooters after all, and particularly of the Gears series. But this game does not suffer for lack of one. Again, I stress: management layers are not in any way bad. Mission leads into mission as you chainsmoke fights, and you can lose whole nights of sleep to the urge to push just one mission further.

It's thrown nearly everything it has into the tactical layer, and it does everything it can to keep you there, like a Vegas casino bringing you whiskey sours to keep you anchored in the depths of shitfaced blackjack. Gears, meanwhile, has only one gear: 'of war'. 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. 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. But they offer a slow drip dopamine release, rather than the rush that comes from wrangling a chaotic guerilla fight towards dramatic victory. I enjoy base-building, fighter-intercepting, fund-wheedling and gun-procuring as much as anyone. Because I am, let's not forget, a lover of management games. If that sounds like a drastic amputation, bear with me. 'Resource management is for cowards' - Albert Einstein (pictured)

Story missions are bookended with cutscenes, and sometimes there's a choice of side missions to go on. 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. The most notable omission, as a result, is the lack of any strategic/management metagame at all.

Gears tactics steam free#

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. Perhaps the fact that nobody had any expectations for Gears Tactics has worked in its favour. It turns out that, even in the preposterously hench world of Gears, the mind really is the strongest muscle.

Gears tactics steam full#

But Gears Tactics, it transpires, is full of hybrid vigour: overflowing with action game brawn, but with plenty of brains behind it all. 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. At best, I was expecting something like the Halo Wars games. I was pretty nonplussed when I heard about it, to be honest.

I don't think anyone really expected a turn-based tactics game from the Gears Of War series. But just as happened when XCOM arrived in 2010, Gears Tactics has redefined just how much fun can be had with that simple recipe for squad-based xenocide. In that much at least, little has been reinvented. After your actions run out, the baddies have a turn. There, they have a set number of actions each turn, to spend on moving around the map, shooting baddies, or using special abilities. It's a game about assembling squads from a pool of soldiers, and sending them on missions. After all, the formula set by 1994's X-COM is the foundation for pretty much the entire genre, and Gears Tactics sits squarely atop it. I say that as a lifelong XCOM (and X-COM) fan, too, and without disrespect to those games. 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. The second I'm done writing review, I'm going back for more. I've been playing Gears Tactics with every spare moment of the last week. Developer: Splash Damage, The Coalition.This is 100% a Gears Of War game, that also happens to be a top flight strategy effort.