Utilising the strength of your squad combined is only part of the puzzle. Gears Tactics relishes the opportunity to push masses of enemies at you, particularly once you begin to push through the game's later encounters. In fact, so many of the systems at play here work to feed into the feeling that you're playing a Gears game first and foremost, rather than some strategy game wearing its skin. "It feels like a Gears game first and foremost, rather than some strategy game wearing its skin" Another sees the ability to replenish an action point for your entire squad by performing grizzly executions on downed enemies – a staple of the Gears of War games, its implementation here is fantastic. A subtle revision of the Overwatch mechanic – a cone represents your zone of sight, anything moving within it triggering a combat action – has a more aggressive application, used to thin encroaching enemy lines rather than hold down defensively advantageous positions. Gears Tactics carves out its own space in the genre, thanks in no small part to some smart mechanics that have been factored into the moment-to-moment. Gears Tactics has taken the core XCOM combat system, identified the wrinkles, and ironed them out to make for a faster and more aggressive strategy game. You can choose to stand and fire until you expend your action points, move soldiers into advantageous positions and then shoot, or use your squad in any combination that you can think to command. You're able to rotate freely between any of your Gears in the field in any given turn too, which means that you can quite readily respond to threats as they emerge from the fog of war, airdrop into the sprawling arenas, and crawl out of those pesky Emergence Holes.
You're able to quite effortlessly weave between points of cover, with action-point cost mitigated by ensuring that your unit clicks into waist-high debris at the end of a run. This seemingly small decision unlocks so much potential, making Gears Tactics feel more like a traditional action game than you might expect it to be capable of.
Gears Tactics takes a freeform approach to combat, with each of your Gears equipped with a baseline of three action points that can be spent at your discretion on any combination of movement, shooting, and skills. The most notable of which are in the decisions to remove the movement grid and the way that the cadence of play is paced.įor starters, with movement removed from a grid you have more freedom to experiment than you would typically expect from a turn-based strategy game. Still, Gears Tactics makes a number of smart decisions that do more than enough to not only set it apart from its contemporaries but make its action feel authentically Gears of War too. The inspiration is clear, with Gears Tactics clearly owing a debt to Firaxis' particular brand of turn-based strategy. If you're looking for a way to frame all of this, then look no further than XCOM. Tactics is, for better or worse, still a Gears of War game at heart, even if the camera has been torn out from the shoulder and hoisted high into the sky. Gears Tactics is fast, smart, and aggressive in its action, but sadly it can be slow, shallow, and meek in the way that it threads you between encounters and attempts to hold your attention once the bullets stop flying. You'll still find yourself in search of flanking routes, carving out holes in enemy lines with your Lancer, and locking yourself into waist-high cover to avoid returning enemy fire – the Locust as formidable a foe as ever.
Maneuvers may be executed with the click of a mouse rather than the tease of a trigger but it's no less engaging. Even as Gears Tactics has you easing off the throttle of the thumbsticks, it's still a game of fluid motion and crisscrossing firing lines. The game moves at a fast clip, with each of its turns defined by the amount of viscera you're able to pull from guts to ground.
0 kommentar(er)
