That includes swarming Wretches who just love to bunch together for a well-placed grenade Therons and their Torque bows Grenadiers wielding shotguns and hulking Boomers who take considerable firepower to put down. Going up against the Locust horde means seeing some familiar, ugly faces. And by the gruffness of Marcus Fenix’s voice does it feel good! Then there are the uber-powerful grenades, chainsawing Locust, bayonet charges and a host of other abilities that make going on a rampage feel gooooooooooooooooood. There’s no limit to this madness, so if the stars (or dying enemies) happen to align you can rack up a bunch of extra actions. Couple this with maps often having savage choke points, aggressive enemies and the fact that you’re typically outnumbered, Overwatch becomes a valuable tool indeed.īut on the flipside, if you run up and perform an execution on a downed foe you’ll not only get a gory animation but also a bonus action point for every other squad member. In other words, by default if you don’t move a character they could shoot three times in Overwatch. It’s a staple of the genre, but Gears Tactics makes it more dangerous because your soldiers can fire one for every action point they have left. Take Overwatch as a good example this lets you set up a cone of fire, and when an enemy wanders into they’ll get shot. What’s interesting is how Gears Tactics manages to encourage both defensive and aggressive play styles. And to its credit it feels fairer than the likes of XCOM which has a nasty habit of giving you a 50% chance of hitting your target despite standing in front of said target with a shotgun. It’s nice to be able to check out the actual maths behind it all. But by tapping the R key you can bring up the Tac Com which gives you a complete breakdown of every factor influencing those numbers. When you want to take a shot you’ll be presented with the usual percentage-based chance of actually hitting your target. Right, now we get to the gameplay proper. It’s an interesting system that lets Gears Tactics tell a story with proper characters while still having some semblance of perma-death in the game. Of course, why would you bother ever taking the random grunts? Well, because the game often limits what heroes can be sent on some missions, forcing you to grab a few rookies and head out. Outside of these heroes you also have randomized grunts that you recruit, and losing them means nothing more than losing the time and effort you’ve put into levelling them up. Your main hero units can never die, so if they go down and get finished off you’ll simply have to restart the mission, or the entire game if you’re on Iron Man mode.
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Bigger fans than I will be able to determine if the revelations in Tactics make sense in the broader storyline.Īnother thing we need to tackle is how Gears Tactics handles death.
When does gears tactics take place series#
Though I am a Gears fan and have been with the series since the start I’m far from knowledgeable about the timeline.
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Whether the lore presented fits in with Gears as a whole is a trickier question. It’s basic, but fun enough to justify all the shooting and chainsawing stuff in half. However, the impressive cutscenes and strong voice acting do put Gears Tactics leagues ahead of every other game in the genre in that regard. The story is nothing special, featuring a cast of shallow characters. Having been given nothing in the way of help except for the grumpy Sid Redburn, Diaz heads out to find himself some troops and some equipment to tackle Ukkon. We catch up with Gabe Diaz (father of X Diaz from Gears 5) as he is given the job of hunting down and killing Ukkon, a unique Locust enemy. Gears Tactics takes place just one year after Emergence Day and thus is the earliest story told in the Gears’ games. Still, Gears Tactics takes the formula, applies some of its own ideas and then executes the whole thing with supreme confidence.īefore we delve into the gameplay though, let’s chat about the story and where it fits into the Gears universe. You spend action points to move your troops around, open fire, set up overwatch points and activate abilities, then the enemy takes their turn to do the very same things. That isn’t to say Gears Tactics isn’t built on the foundations that 2013’s XCOM reboot laid, because it very much is.