The directional Overwatch ability is also extremely useful – essential, really – for stopping enemy advances during their turn can be enormously powerful if you can cleverly predict enemies’ movements. You may only ever have four troops at once, but they can feel like an army.
#Gears tactics review free
Having a Vanguard soldier like Sid spend one of his three action points to charge into the midst of a group of Locust Hammerburst drones and skewer one on his Retro Lancer’s bayonet, only to recover that action point because of his passive Free Bayonet skill, then blast another one with his Rage Shot ability for extra damage to put them in the Gears-signature down-but-not-out state that allows him to perform an execution kill, which in turn grants his teammates an extra action to tear into the Locusts with four action points apiece instead of three, is a joy. That can turn them from generally effective fighters into spectacular killing machines that can mow down two or three times their number of enemies.
Where things really get interesting is when you start chaining together abilities from the five different classes that grant you additional action points, either for one character or your entire squad. You may only ever have four troops at once, but they can feel like an army.The fundamentals of combat are about improving your lethality by flanking, using melee charges, tossing grenades, and other abilities, and it’s great. The only ones that ever got on my nerves were the melee units – including those Ticker jerks – where I could never quite tell if they were in range of striking my troops or not. They all have distinctive and interesting abilities to counter, including some that automatically attack if you get too close (countering the insta-kill Lancer chainsaws) and some who explode in a cloud of debilitating poison gas on death to discourage executing them when they’re downed. Gabe leads a squad of up to four Gears into battle against a substantial lineup of recognizable Locust enemies (introduced at a steady clip throughout with a gruesome close-up and a couple of tactical tips) that range from basic grunts and exploding Tickers to buffing Kantuses and tricky Theron Guards. Still, the dialogue is written and acted well enough that it serves its purpose of establishing the signature Gears flavor and giving us a monster to hunt without getting in the way. And despite some hints that he might attempt it, the villainous Ukkon never develops beyond one-dimensional evil. Even the heated friction between grizzled old Gear Sid and the prickly engineer/sniper Mikayla never amounts to much. He has his tortured past of having fallen from grace after leading an operation gone wrong and going into self-imposed exile in the COG motorpool, but being brought back for one last job doesn’t really change his mind about anything – he was fed up with the COG’s corrupt leadership before we meet him. Through some impressively animated cutscenes we get to fill in a few gaps in the pre-Outsiders Diaz family history, though Kait’s father, Gabriel, never really comes into his own as a memorable main character. The story of Gears Tactics takes place 12 years before the original Gears of War – of course, when it comes to gleefully cutting alligator-looking dudes in half with chainsaw guns it’s very much business as usual. That comes at the cost of some replayability, but most of those fights are rewarding puzzles with fantastically polished graphical payoff. Gears Tactics is a spin-off with a more focused approach to the genre, ditching the larger strategy layer side of the XCOM formula in favor of pitched tactical battle after tactical battle.
#Gears tactics review series
Given the life-or-death dependency on taking cover in the Gears (of War) games, I can’t think of another long-running series better suited to sidestep from third-person shooter into XCOM-style turn-based tactics than this one.
0 kommentar(er)
