Messing around with customization between missions sucked up way too much of my time – and that’s not particularly a bad thing. The equipment menus could’ve been redesigned for more convenient loadout swaps, sure, but the high volume of tweakables was pleasantly surpris

Class customization is satisfactory. There are five classes, each featuring four branches of subclasses. I found the amount of skill-tree variety to be just right – nothing overly complex nor dumbed-down. The selection of weapon mods and armor perks brought me the experience I just about expected. You can build each of your units to be adaptable and well-rounded or have them specialize. I personally enjoyed building up Cole Train as a beefy tank and Mikayla as a critical hit-machine, for exam

Perhaps best of all, however, is the cosmetics selection. Equipment and appearances (limited on certain heroes) are each highly-customizable, more so than I expected from a Turn-Based mechanics strategy game – and without any microtransactions in sight! Almost immediately, I turned Sid Redburn into Uncle

The weapon applications are similarly impressive. Torque Bows, Longshot Snipers, Gnashers – they all hurt just as much as they did in the originals. Even the unique Active Reload mechanic is (somewhat) emulated via the "fast fingers" perk for the Sniper class. Seeing the wide array of Gears weapons in action from a birds-eye view is pretty fr

However, there is a bit of a setup to perform an execution. First, players will need to cripple enemies by dealing enough damage to an enemy unit that they fall to their knees, but not enough to kill them. Then, a player will have to move a unit to that downed enemy putting themselves in harm's way to perform an execution . Once looming over your enemy's body, switch to your pistol and execute the tar

The move pays off here. The game is well-designed, has great strategy elements, and most importantly, is fun to play. Admittedly a little surprising, but the team behind Gears Tactics has made a worthwhile addition to the action franch

Checkpoints are so plentiful that, to be frank, they are a bit ludicrous. The player can even get checkpoints in the middle of a boss fight, which means they can use all the outlandish strategies they can think of until they defeat a b

There are also different sizes of cover. Short cover allows players to shoot over the top of the cover but leaves them more vulnerable to attacks. Tall cover completely protects the player from frontal attacks, but only allows players to attack around corners and not over the top of co

Yes, bullets really can pass through enemies in Gears Tactics . What this means for the player is that some of their shots can hit more than one enemy at a time, especially if they can arrange their sightlines so that two of them over

And last but not least, Sniper Drones are exactly what they sound like. These guys don't take a lot of hits to kill, but hitting them before dying is the real problem. Their range is much wider than any other enemy unit meaning they can attack your unit before you can attack them. Prioritize taking out these guys or else they will cause a lot of problems for the pla

Wretches are a more volatile class that, while still weak in terms of hits they can take, they will rush friendly units and attack with melee attacks. Overwatch is best used against these enemies as they will never attack from far off and will always try to get as close to the player as possi

The ultra-violent third-person shooter franchise Gears of War just made its return in a weird way. The newest entry in the series, Gears Tactics , uses the iconic universe as a setting for a squad-centric strategy g

In addition to post-launch content for its character brawler Bleeding Edge , Ninja Theory is hard at work on Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 for the Xbox Series X. Unfortunately, the Xbox Games Showcase revealed little about the upcoming action game outside of the impressive reveal trailer back from the 2019 Game Awards. Ninja Theory did post a new developer diary, revealing the game's location is set in Iceland , though not much more was said about the Unreal Engine 5 ti

Outside of that, Ninja Theory also has the mysterious Project: Mara , a game it announced back in January. The title goes further to explore the real-world and grounded representation of mental terror based on first hand accounts and in-depth research. Not much is known about the game outside of the promises that it's going to be an experimental title attempting to showcase a new storytelling medium for gam

As mentioned before, each unit has a set number of actions they can take in a single term, and these actions are defined by action point. Points can be spent on moving, shooting, throwing grenades, and using abilities. When using an action a certain number of points will be used up, however by performing an execution on an enemy, a player regains action points. Theoretically, if a player chained multiple executions their turn could last fore