This is a great game for fans of the franchise and an ideal entry point into an under-served genre of gaming for console gamers. Each new recruit will come with a level-appropriate batch of skill points to spend at your leisure.And for the most part, Tactics totally delivers on its promise of Gears-themed-XCOM. It costs you nothing to recruit a new unit, just an empty slot on your roster, which gradually increases over time. Speaking of skill points, if you notice your roster of randomly generated soldiers is starting to fall behind in levels, check out the recruitment page from the barracks menu and see if another soldier of the same class is available. Ultimately, it doesn’t hurt combat, but it can leave you feeling like you’re falling behind even though you’re still doing just fine. By the start of Act 3, my hero units had only reached levels 5-6, which translated to roughly one whole branch of a skill tree, or some split between multiple branches. If you’re hoping to max out one branch of a unit’s skill tree, make sure you’re committing early, as a unit can go at least a few missions before they level up. If possible, try to revive them with another squadmate, as that lets them use up whatever remaining action points they may have had.Įven after taking the core set of hero characters and countless randomly generated units out into the battlefield what feels like dozens of times, I’m still surprised at how few experience points each has gotten. When an enemy’s health bar has the skull icon over it, that means the attack will kill it.Įvery unit, both heroes and randomly generated, has the “Second Wind” ability, which lets them revive themselves after being down, and also gives them one action point, but at the cost of one-quarter of their health bar permanently, at least until the end of that mission. The closer a grenade is to an enemy, the more damage it will take, unlike XCOM where it was a flat hit or miss. While gunfire has the chance to miss, grenades always land exactly where you aim, so this damage preview becomes key. Speaking of throwing grenades, every attack in Gears Tactics will let you preview how much a successful attack will damage an enemy. Thankfully, I never noticed it being a chunk bigger than my support unit could heal, although why waste resources like that in the first place?Įxplosive attacks will also affect friendly squadmates, so watch where you drop those grenades, proximity mines, or where you shoot an explosive ticker enemy. It’s possible to take a chunk of health off of that squadmate when shooting at the Locust. If an enemy like a wretch, ticker, or grenadier has managed to get into close quarters with your friend, be careful where you aim. Only overlap overwatch cones when it’s imperative to do so.įriendly fire is on in Gears Tactics, and it’s quite easy to forget. If one shot is enough to kill the enemy unit, you’ve basically just wasted the other squadmate’s shot. Being aware of these lines is key for knowing what move to make next.Īnother important point: If an enemy moves through an area that’s covered by two overwatch cones, both of your squadmates will fire upon that same enemy. Segmented lines mean that the enemy is obscured or only partially visible, often to the point that you’ll only have a small chance to hit. But where to move? When you’re selecting what bit of cover you want to move into next, you’ll spot very thin white lines tracing to enemy units that are visible from that position. Gears Tactics, like many tactics games before it, relies on you outflanking enemies and lining up the perfect shot on them. Additional cosmetic options will unlock as you progress throughout the story. You can even alter the type of metal their armor is made out of. Simply go to the barracks menu, click on a unit, click on their individual armor slot, and under the cosmetics heading there will be a primary and a secondary color choice, with a surprising amount of options. It’s a little hidden away, but you can turn each of these gravelly grunts into giant purple, yellow, or multi-colored monstrosities. Failing to bring a support unit makes any fight tougher, and special units like the grenadier, boomer, or theron guard can quickly disassemble your squad, but if you like your tactics games to be positively punishing, turn it one notch up. Don’t get me wrong, Gears Tactics can still be challenging. In my personal playthrough, I lost only two units - one during a boss fight that I didn’t feel like restarting, and one as a completely random mistake that any amount of forethought could have avoided. Gears Tactics’ default difficulty isn’t a cakewalk, but it’s definitely nowhere near the one-wrong-turn-and-you’re-dead level of tension that XCOM has.
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