![]() 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. 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. 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.
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