Gears tactics all armor upgrade#
Gears tactics all armor series#

I’ll add that in general I like the increased focus on close combat. There are also some advanced units that bring unique weapons and skills to the battlefield, and in a really neat addition you can pick up their weapons after they die (but you don’t get to keep them after the mission – booo!). There are some boss creature battles which require some changes in strategy to take down. Gears has thrown some interesting pieces into the mix. The only exception to this is simultaneous missions, in which soldiers out on one mission have not yet returned, so you can’t send them on another. All upgraded weapon and armor are recovered from crates on the battlefield, and you can deal them out to the squad members also between missions. Squad members injured in battle don’t need to spend time to heal up.

Gears tactics all armor upgrade#

Technically extra squad members you don’t bring on missions stay at your base, and your squad spends upgrade points at the base to gain new skills between missions, but the base is not a strategic element of the game. Expendables like grenades are infinite – you don’t need to build more when you use them as you do in Phoenix Point (another squad tactical game I’ve been playing a lot of recently). You’re not building facilities, or manufacturing weapons or armor, or researching anything.

Gears does away with all of the base mechanics. I’ve never understood why XCOM solders that shoot first can’t use their remaining action to move to cover. You can also, in something that has always driven me nuts about XCOM, take a shot and then move. When you go to take a shot, you get a table showing you your chance to hit, score a critical hit, and how much damage you’ll do, and then you can take choose to take the shot or not. There are all kinds of modifiers to those actions that can take place, as certain skills and kills can award additional actions. Each member gets three actions which can be used as you like – move some distance, reload or shoot a weapon, or activate a skill.

Active skills have a cool down time after use, and some of the cooldowns are long enough that you really have to be careful when you use them, because you won’t get another use for many turns to come.

Each has their own upgrade trees which contain passive and active skills. Squad members are broken into the typical squad classes – heavy, ranger, sniper, scout. Much of the usual squad tactical game mechanics have been brought in. Creature models are nicely detailed, and they sure do cut up nice. I say pretty well because initially the artwork looks quite interesting and highly detailed, but just a few levels in you come to realize is very limited – when you’ve taken cover behind one waist-high bazaar table, you’ve taken cover behind them all. Right off the bat you can tell this is a Gears game – their love of a battlefield littered with waist-high barriers hasn’t lessened any – and the distinctive Gears artwork has transitioned pretty well to the squad view of the world. Now Gears: Tactics is on my desk, and it brings a level of dazzling violence to the tactical genre, but suffers from redundant level and mission design and some balance issues. People say five is good, but I haven’t played it. I played one through three, and more or less had my fill of waist-high barrier shoot-em-ups.

Gears tactics all armor series#

As a prelude, I should probably say I’ve been middling on the Gears series to date. So, here’s one set in the Gears universe. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still playing Doom Eternal, but even with the frustrations of my sniper missing two 95% shots in a row, and in so doing allowing my ranger to get mauled, the balance of strategy and action offered by XCOM and its mimics keeps me coming back. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but squad-based tactical shooters are rapidly displacing twitch FPS in my game rotations. Good artwork, but severely limited and quickly becomes repetitious. The Ugly: Game often makes it too easy to hang back in overwatch and let the enemies run into your kill zones.

The Bad: Some design decisions greatly reduce tactical and strategic depth. Who doesn’t love to chainsaw an enemy in half? The Good: XCOM-style tactical action with some cool, new ideas.