In true Gears fashion the plot clicks along at a steady pace, and developers Splash Damage and The Coalition have fostered a handful of narrative twists and emotional story beats among the grunts and ooh-rah’s to catch you off-balance. Before long, the trio find themselves on the hunt for Ukkon, the enigmatic Locust leader responsible for creating Corpsers and Brumaks, amongst other toothy horrors. Away from the front lines of the Locust War and disenchanted by the Coalition’s frequent disregard for the sanctity of life, Gabe wants nothing to do with their warmongering ways – until he crosses paths with grizzled veteran Sid Redburn and Stranded leader Mikayla Dorn. From the onset and throughout, Gears Tactics pushes the envelope, taking the turn-based, thinking person’s gameplay of Firaxis’ franchise and injecting it with a swaggering confidence that is purely, quintessentially, Gears.Ī prequel set 12 years before Dom Santiago breaks Marcus Fenix out of prison in the first Gears of War, Tactics begins with Gabe Diaz (father of current series protagonist Kait Diaz ), wallowing in self-imposed exile as a lowly transport mechanic. What’s even more surprising than the fact that they made this game at all is that it’s such an exceptional pairing of genres. Still, it’s easy to overlook Gears’ storytelling and emotional depth when it does its best to hide it all under curb-stomp executions and meat-coated chainsaws.Īnd yet, here we are, faced with Gears Tactics, the result of pouring all that big, dumb Gears of War batter into an XCOM-shaped mould and nuking it in an oven made from recycled Lancers. Often dismissed as big and dumb, it’s a franchise of over-the-top explosions, sweaty biceps and growled one-liners that has nevertheless stood for almost 14 years as one of the Xbox’s flagship properties. Perhaps check out Steam reviews of the game, you'll get a good idea what it's like if I failed to convey the essentials.Of all the loud, shouty shooters you could choose to distill into a strategy-heavy action game, you’d be forgiven for putting Gears of War (or lately, simply “Gears”) at the bottom of the list. But I've already enjoyed the game on PC for a couple of years. If Elden Ring didn't exist, Battle Brothers would be my game of the year for Xbox. It does play like a PC game though, so it's not made with 100% controller in mind, but I find the port is good enough once I messed around with it for awhile. The vast majority of the game is just combat, all the rest is just traveling on the map from one place to another (you can speed up the travel time so it won't take too long) and buying+managing stuff which also is very simple and a lot of it is automated. The combat has a neat amount of depth to it but it never feels like some overwhelming strategic simulator, it hits the right spot. The battles are simple to grasp, but hard to master. Cheap ones come with lesser stats+equipment, but they're more fun to develop into some real battle beasts if they make it that far. Many of them will die in a battle, and you will need replacements. They can sustain injuries from previous battles too! Some of them will heal, some of them will not, and you can get to a point where you're too attached to some guy whose fighting days are over because of his punctured lung, missing nose and crippled leg - and you just can't let them go. You can name them all, if you're not satisfied with the RNG names. If your soldiers really like that one guy, but he dies, it will lower their motivation. They each have some background/personality traits, although it's not too deep, but it's fun how they behave in certain superficial encounters or how they relate to each other. Food, meds and such will be automatically consumed as time goes on, so you don't need to micromanage that stuff at all, it's automatic. You need money to buy food, meds, equipment and you also need to pay your hirelings (soldiers). You travel from one city to another to get contracts which almost always involve battles. So there is management, but the management is always in favor of the next battles, and there really isn't a story going on. You manage a squad, you can hire new guys, you can equip them and so on. Perhaps Battle Brothers? If the "small PC game" visuals don't throw you off (I like it, and by the way it is a PC port), it's an excellent turn-based medieval fantasy combat game.
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