Gears Tactics or XCOM: Can We Have Both?

I’ve been playing a ton of Gears Tactics through Game Pass recently and I have to say up front: it’s a super great game. It’s a tactical game similar to the recent entries of the XCOM series, where you have some number of soldiers on a battlefield that you move around and perform various actions. These games are turn-based, so you’ll move your units how you want and shoot at the enemy and/or activate some special abilities. Once you’re done, the enemy horde of locusts / aliens gets a turn. Usually each scenario has some objective: kill all the dudes, hold specific regions on a map, get to a point on the map and then move to extraction, etc. There’s a TON to compare this game to the XCOM games, so I thought I’d lay out my thoughts here. A few caveats before I begin, though. I am currently on Act 3 Chapter 4 of Gears Tactics, so I’ve not played the entire thing yet but I think I’m on the tail end of this game and don’t expect it to change all that much (more on that later). Also, I am much more familiar with XCOM: Enemy Within/Unknown than XCOM 2, as I played the first one 2-3 times over and more recently. Lastly, I will try not to

The Good

Gears Tactics gets a lot of things right in this series of games. I absolutely love that soldiers can get 3 action ptions and then are able to do whatever they want with those. XCOM gives you 2 actions, and certain actions (like shooting) often end a unit’s turn. Gears basically says “oh hey sniper – you want to spend your whole turn shooting at stuff? have at it!”. There’s a lot more play with these action points in the skill trees and equipment as well, so it isn’t uncommon for a unit to take extra actions in a turn. I am building out my snipers in a way that if they have sufficient targets they take like 8 actions during their turn, so long as most of those is shooting stuff.

The tech tree in Gears Tactics seems much more involved than that in XCOM. You have a bit more freedom in regards to how you set up your units and what they can accomplish on their turns. Each unit essentially has 4 tech trees they can go down, and having come just shy of completing the game it seems you can easily complete one tree and start dabbling in another when the game ends.

In XCOM, enemy units act immediately whenever they are revealed. In Gears Tactics, they’ll simply only act on the next turn. That is great news, as it means you can push forward a little easier in Gears where I would be much more cautious in XCOM (where I’d often move my units 1 space and then enter overwatch). Sure, you can still move a unit into a cluster of dudes, but having time before they would react may mean you can put some shots/grenades on those units before they get to act. XCOM 2 did remedy this a little, as I believe your units started the mission by being concealed – and as long as you never entered line of sight with an enemy you could push forward (or something similar to that).

Speaking of those two items, overwatch is pretty great in Gears Tactics. In XCOM, entering overwatch simply means your unit will fire on anything that moves, seemingly regardless of range. In Gears, you have to specify a cone that the unit is going to focus on for their fire. This means you can more strategically focus on a specific area of the map where you want to protect, and it means your shotgunning units aren’t going to waste ammo on something WAY out of their effective range. There’s maybe some quirkiness with sightlines that takes some getting used to, but oh well. Further, XCOM discouraged you from using grenades as it would damage the items you could recover from fallen enemies (often items to research or sell). Gears gives you infinite grenades (on a cooldown), allows almost every unit to carry them, and goes “have at it!”

Finally, Gears doesn’t have the base management and overland map that can be a bit tedious in XCOM. There’s nothing here to excavate and build, no trying to figure out if you need “Scientists” or “Engineers” with unclear definitions on what those do, and no worry about losing a region of the world that may make you less effective. If you liked XCOM solely for the missions and hated that base management, Gears is great!

The Less Good

It’s not all sunshine and roses for Gears. While Gears really shines in a few areas, there are several where it lacks. Of primary concern is the scarcity and fragility of your units. If a unit goes down in Gears, you can revive them with other units or once per mission have them second wind on their own and reenter the fight, albeit with one fewer health bar. This can repeat until the unit has been downed 4 times, and then I assume they are gone forever? In XCOM, downed enemies could sometimes be revived, but also sometimes were just lost. This meant in XCOM you had to be a little more careful with your units, and worry about their health more. I certainly appreciate the units not dying immediately, but I often found myself not really needing my healer? The Scout in Gears can be specc’d out such that it takes some damage to gain extra actions on the turn. But the same tree also allows it to recover health from killing things. So, the same frontline unit (that likely would get damaged easily anyway) can sacrifice health for more actions, run up, and take out 3-4 dudes and then it’s back up to full health. That leads to some super fun turns, but it also means I’m not really worried about that units health ever. This may be because missions in Gears have you running 4 units or fewer, where XCOM could have you with 6. Granted, some of this may change on the harder difficulties, but XCOM can present these challenges when played on normal, so why doesn’t Gears?

Everything around the in-mission healing and work in Gears may even be fine as it is, with the greater issue being what happens when they return home. In XCOM, heavily damaged units are out of commission for some number of games, which could mean that unit is gone for 2-4 missions. Often, that means you need to make sure you have 1-2 backups for each role just in case your primary guy goes down. In Gears, even if your unit is downed a couple of times in the mission, they’ll be back up to 100% and ready to go for your next mission. The only times you need a B or C squad is for certain points in each act where you need to complete multiple missions to advance and units from one mission cannot go on the next one. Even then, all new recruits in XCOM that you received started at a base level. In Gears, your allowed roster of units expanded frequently, and there were always units to recruit at roughly the same level as your main guys (often with unspent tech tree points so you can specc them out exactly how you want). It would be great if Gears took some of this and made you even more concerned about the safety of your units.

The enemies of Gears are in no way as varied as those in XCOM. XCOM features a wide variety of enemy types that operate extremely differently: the chryssalids that didn’t move all that fast but hit like a truck in melee range, the terrifying cyberdisc that had a TON of health and could wreck your squad if you let it take a shot, the mind-controlling ethereal that could turn your units against you. Gears has a little variety, but mostly you just face the same dudes that use overwatch and shoot from cover with average weapons. You have some annoying guys in melee range (especially the tickers that explode if they get to close to ya) and a few more specialized units that move towards you with high-powered weapons (that you can later loot and use briefly), but there’s not that much variety. Relatively early on you fight a Brumak in gears, in what proved to be one of the most challenging missions of the game. Natural video game logic to me went “oh crap, I’m gonna see this guy again soon”. So far, it looks like that was just a one-off boss that I won’t see again. Even the emergence holes signature to the Gears games seem to be sparsely used.

Speaking of, XCOM played with your units a lot more – they could cower down in fear having you not able to take turns, could go crazy and just start wildly shooting whatever came near, or could be mind controlled causing you to have to kill all of the enemies while avoiding one of your own units. In Gears, the most similar thing is having a unit pinned down by an enemy sniper or covered by someone’s overwatch, both of which are maybe only a nuisance for 1-2 turns before the threat can be taken out.

Mission variety is also lacking in Gears. Mostly, the mission types are:

1. Kill all the things (most of the missions).
2. Hold these supply points for so many turns.
3. Rescue units from these murder pods, often in so many turns (these are cool since often you only start with 1-2 units and have to rush to the pods to get reinforcements).
4. Collect various supply caches on the map while these bombers are chasing you and decimating everything that falls behind a certain line (ok, these are super cool).

Thinking about it, XCOM maybe doesn’t have any super unique missions either and most of theirs may just be kill all the dudes. But, XCOM missions had a variety of settings. Often, part of the mission involved setting up units outside of a building/ship, and then figuring out how you wanted to breach the building and take out whatever threat was inside. Or it was a big open-air trainyard that you had to navigate with enemies from all sides. Most of the maps in Gears are open air maps, with very few structures to get in the way of sightlines and even fewer options to get your units onto higher elevations.

This next criticism may not work all that well, but I had issues with the units I used. I’ve already stated that the healer felt kind of useless since you rarely had to worry about units taking damage (especially late-game). The vanguard seemed like a cool class but I don’t feel like I used them effectively – I maybe used them more like a midline support class rather than a frontline assault class. The sniper and scout classes were great with no real issues. The heavy class was a cool concept – park it in one spot and it just keeps shooting. The problem was often my sniper and assault would take out all reasonable targets and so then the heavy spent their turn moving most of the time. I don’t remember having this kind of class awkwardness in XCOM, but maybe it’s because that let you have 6 units max, and you could mix it up how you wanted (my default was 2 assaults, 2 snipers, a heavy, and a medic).

Lastly, the inventory management is kind of annoying in Gears. You pick up upgrade crates during missions and are awarded them upon mission completion. Each character has a main weapon, pistol, and grenade slot. The main weapons can have upgraded stocks, sights, magazines, and barrels, and weapons are not shared between classes. Each character also has a helmet, torso, and leg armor. In the end, I wound up with A TON of armor and weapon upgrades and it was kind of a pain to see if everybody had the most efficient gear for their class. Since I mostly focused on the same 4-6 units, that was pretty much fine. But, for those times when I had to outfit 2-3 full squads of 4 – I kind of didn’t care what gear the other units had so long as they had something equipped. XCOM made this a little simpler – you could research upgraded versions of weapons and armor, which would be visibly different from each other. You could easily recall items from your units not in the mission, and it was pretty simple to go in and make sure everyone is adequately equipped.

The Verdict

After all of that said – Gears Tactics is still pretty great! I had a lot of fun playing through it, and I’m already thinking about a second play through on the next difficulty level (since honestly the last few missions have been a piece of cake). I had some annoyances with it, but nothing that made it unplayable by any stretch. If anything, I’m left wanting an XCOM game that used the overwatch and action economy that Gears has, since those systems are WAY more fun than what XCOM uses. I should also mention my enjoyment of Gears is probably colored by me being a member of Game Pass – which allowed me to play the game for free. Had I spent $60 on Gears Tactics, I’d probably be pretty disappointed in the value for money I paid. The same $60 can buy you either of the 2 recent XCOM games, and possibly both in a Steam sale (maybe an unfair comparison, but I’m assuming Gears Tactics won’t be discounted that heavily for a while). So really – check out Gears Tactics if you have Game Pass. I think you’re going to have a great time. In many ways, Gears Tactics is much more accessible than the XCOM games are.