If you're not playing on Insane, you probably won't care much about the stream of recruits that join your squad, though the option does exist to give them custom names and makeovers, if you want to. Unless you play on the highest difficulty setting in Gears, you can revive soldiers multiple times, and on the recommended intermediate setting there was only one time in my entire campaign where I came close to permanently losing someone. Gears Tactics does lose the sharp edge of danger XCOM has, where dealing with units dying through the campaign is arguably a feature. I love how it makes every turn an exciting chance to clear the whole screen of enemies in one go, and it pushes me to experiment with how I combine my squad's many abilities. You're trying to extend your turn as long as possible, every kill offering up the opportunity to earn three more actions, and another kill, and three more actions, until everything lies dead at your feet. These two things give Gears Tactics a remarkably different flavor: You're not trying to make the best of your meager options each turn.

Every time one of your soldiers performs an execution move on a near-death enemy, the rest of the squad gets an extra action point for the turn, the game design equivalent of a platoon shouting Hooah! Gears is more freeform, giving each of the four soldiers you take into a mission three actions per turn any combination of moving, shooting, and special abilities you want. Every turn in XCOM is about the tension of how few moves you can make, the dramatic risk of missing a single shot and scrambling for a backup plan. While it first looks an awful lot like XCOM, which has inspired a wave of strategy games this decade, Gears Tactics plays differently. (I like to imagine that the chainsaw's lengthy cooldown isn't because it's overpowered, but because my hero, Gabe Diaz, has to spend the next few turns scraping bone chunks and viscera out of the blades). It knows you've got frag grenades that can turn a pack of five scurrying wretches into chicken nuggets, or a chainsaw gun that has a 100-percent chance to slice even a full-health Locust soldier in half. Gears Tactics is an aggressive strategy game that throws piles of enemies at you, because it knows just how powerful the tools at your disposal are.

Gears of war 2 missions