Conclusion

Gears Tactics is a surprisingly refreshing addition to the isometric top-down strategy shooter genre. The developers have clearly taken inspiration from XCOM, Commandos, Desperados and others, which is a good thing as veterans of the genre will feel right at home. There are some notable changes though, and most of them are for the better. For example, instead of ending your turn immediately when shooting, you are now free to spend your action points (three by default) on any mix of running, shooting, and skills. This makes combat more fluid, and you are more often looking for synergies between your soldiers. The only exception is "Overwatch," which immediately ends your turn, but gives you additional attacks during enemy movement if you had more than one action point left. What I like very much about the Overwatch system in Gear Tactics is that you can clearly see the area the enemy is targeting, which adds to the strategic experience and removes the guesswork. Just like in XCOM, your percentage chance to hit is dependent on line of sight, so if there's a car or other obstacle between you and the enemy, your chances are going down. The same applies for the cover mechanics, which were ported 1:1 from XCOM—no cover, low cover, and high cover. A certain level of physics simulation has been included too; bullets can ricochet and hit other enemies or possibly injure your squad mates, so be careful with that shotgun.

Gears Tactics has no base building or strategy layer, your missions are pre-selected and the story is completely linear. In XCOM I really loved the research aspect that allowed you to focus on certain techs to upgrade your soldiers to match your playstyle. As an alternative, each soldier in Gears Tactics has three armor slots, four weapon slots, and a medium-sized skill tree that varies between the five classes. Gear is found for free in loot boxes that are on the map—your soldiers have to pick them up. Once the map objective is completed, the level will end, so you'll have to grab all chests during the movement/fighting phase, which puts additional strain on your action points. Should I pick up that blue chest or help my team mates kill the enemy? Most equipment (which seems ultra random) will grant additional abilities you can stack to build super-soldiers, tanks, or glass cannons. Besides combat equipment you may also customize the looks and color theme of your team, so you can build your own pink private army.

AOE damage is important in this genre because it lets you take out multiple enemies at once. In XCOM, grenades were your early game choice for that, but with them being single-use, I often ended up saving my precious 'nade too long and never ended up using it. In Gears Tactics all items are infinite use, but throttled by a several-turn cooldown (which can be shortened with various skill choices). The grenade targeting mechanics are topnotch as you can easily see which enemies will be affected, and damage falls off with distance, which forces you to make choices. Melee combat is important in Gears Tactics as finishing moves and insta-kills can restore your action points or ammo.

Enemies in Gears Tactics are not particularly smart. They are mostly dumb bullet sponges that try to overwhelm you with numbers. There are several enemy types though, which use different attacks—melee, ranged, sniper, grenades, etc. What I found extremely unsatisfying is that enemies get spawned in randomly on the map during certain stages of the fight, with the appropriate visuals, giving you the impression of "cheap shot" developers. Besides the obvious choice, playing on a pre-populated map, I probably would prefer it if enemies spawned invisibly, in the fog of war, so that I at least wouldn't realize the devs were too lazy to properly design their maps.

Most levels are repetitive, both in concept and design. There are some capture the flag or defend the base elements, but these are nothing new. Some filler missions that basically repeat the same objectives exist, sometimes cloaked as "training for your rookies." Missions have optional elements that give extra loot, but they're as basic as "finish in X turns," "don't use grenades," "bring no sniper," or "collect all lootboxes." The story line is not bad, but not exciting either—it is well-told through the numerous cutscenes, though. Replay value seems to be non-existent because the game is too linear, and I haven't encountered any noteworthy strategic choices. Later in the game, you'll often find yourself grinding boring side-missions to loot epic gear for your soldiers, which is a must if you play on the higher difficulties.

Graphics are really nice for a tactical shooter, but definitely fall behind when compared to the fidelity of Gears 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, or Metro Exodus. It is amazing to see how versatile Unreal Engine 4 is, as it seems able to handle any genre and delivers an excellent experience. If you take a look at our screenshots, you can see that graphics for the isometric perspective are nearly flawless, but the close up action shots/cutscenes could definitely do with higher poly-counts and better textures. It looks to me like they heavily reused artwork from Gears 5 to bring down production cost—not unreasonable. There's a bunch of small bugs and rendering issues, but nothing game-breaking, loading the last checkpoint or restarting the game fixed them all for me. You may save at any time by exiting the game, and the game auto-saves for you quite often, too.

There are lots of graphics options that cover everything. You may disable motion blur or depth of field, and any FPS cap/V-Sync can be removed completely, too. A little special goodie is support for Variable Rate Shading, a DirectX 12 Ultimate feature that dynamically adjusts the shading rate of pixels to improve FPS. The goal is to render pixels that have (nearly) the same color in a single block to improve FPS. While we saw an outstanding implementation of VRS in Wolfenstein that's pretty much invisible to the eye, the one in Gears Tactics is slightly worse. Due to the game's perspective with many thin, high contrast lines for the tactical UI, the issues of VRS are a bit more noticeable. The game's slower pace makes you more susceptible to those effects, too. Overall it's a decent VRS implementation that can gain you around 10% extra performance at the "on" setting. There's a second setting, "performance," which is more aggressive, but also has more visual artifacts. I doubt that what we're seeing here is really the best implementation of Variable Rate Shading. I'm convinced that as developers learn how to use this technology, image quality will improve greatly. Still, VRS in Gears Tactics can be a viable method to get more FPS, especially for low-spec machines—if you can live with the hit in image quality.

We benched Gears Tactics with the latest drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA, but only AMD reports support for Gears Tactics in their changelog. While the game features an integrated benchmark, we didn't use it because it is way too randomized, with FPS results often differing by 10% or more. Instead, I crafted a careful route of single-player gameplay that consists of all the relevant gameplay elements, without it being affected much by the game's random-number-generator approach.

Overall performance of Gears Tactics is good; for 1080p, a Radeon RX 570 or GTX 1060 3 GB is sufficient. 1440p at 60 FPS or above is accessible to owners of the GTX 1660, Radeon RX Vega, or RX 5600 XT—pretty nice. 4K Ultra HD requirements are higher, but not nearly as high as some other games, a RTX 2080 reaches 60 FPS at that resolution, AMD's flagship, the Radeon VII, is close enough at 52.2 FPS. NVIDIA graphics cards do better than AMD because NVIDIA has invested a lot of time in optimizing Unreal Engine for their cards (both Pascal and Turing). On the AMD side, Navi definitely does better than earlier generations, but one outlier is the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which performs very well for some unknown reason. It is possible that Gears Tactics detects limited VRAM and secretly dials down texture details, which could also explain why the 3 GB GTX 1060 does so well at 4K, with more FPS than the GTX 1060 6 GB, which makes no sense either.

VRAM usage is extremely reasonable, around 4 GB for 1080p, which ensures all cards can run this resolution easily. Even the GTX 1060 3 GB does fine and sees no FPS loss. For higher resolutions, VRAM usage does increase, with a pretty big jump at 4K, but it shouldn't be a problem since all cards in this segment have 8 GB VRAM or more. Texture resolution could still be much better. As long as you're in isometric top-down view everything is fine, but once the action shifts to cutscenes, or 3D action sequences, you'll immediately notice that the textures are blurry. I've also seen Unreal Engine's typical texture pop-in several times while playing the game.

Gears Tactics is too expensive, I would say $30–$40 would be a reasonable price. If you haven't played XCOM 2 yet, go for XCOM and wait until Gears is available at a discount. Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is just a few bucks for the first month, which could be a cost-effective way to play Gears Tactics, too. Gears Tactics requires a Microsoft Xbox login for even the Steam version, which is kinda annoying, especially for people who are having issues logging in (check the negative Steam reviews). How a company worth more than a trillion dollars is unable to come up with a decent experience for their gaming services/store amazes me every time.