XCOM: Enemy Unknown was no stranger to these mission reruns, but they had a bigger pool of scenarios and locales to draw from. It didn’t take long before I started to see familiar scenarios crop up. The different mixes of classes, objectives, and maps kept me on my toes for about a third of the game. I initially found the level of challenge fair on the intermediate difficulty. Turns out character story driven games are a lot tougher to play through when you have VIPs to progress with. If a named character like Gabriel Diaz or Sid Redburn died in battle, the game was over - save file deleted.

I originally set out to play the game at the intermediate difficulty with Ironman mode on, but that turned out to be a mistake. Gears Tactics focused on their cast of named characters for story missions while customizable nobodies filled out the roster for side missions. I initially thought Gears Tactics would have been fine without one because other games like Mario & Rabbids: Kingdom Battle fared very well with just a simple character management layer. To my surprise, a meaningful strategic layer was absent. The Baird of this prequel era could have been the head of R&D, for example. I thought there would even be a research and development element considering the fact that Gears 5 had upgrades to tech. The idea of building up a small army to fight back against the Locusts made was a suitable premise that wouldn’t be too dissimilar to the aliens invading Earth in XCOM.

I knew Gears Tactics was going to take place shortly after the COG disseminated their own cities in a failed effort to snuff out the Locusts. Instead, my focus on how the strategic layer was going to function in the context of Gears of War. I had blind faith that The Coalition and Splash Damage were going to execute on the tactical layer. Gears of War has the enemy variety, the weapon variety, and inherent cover focused gameplay to make the transition from third person shooter to a tactical strategy game. When Microsoft announced a tactical Gears of War game in the vein of XCOM, I believe many were like me in thinking: this is a match made in heaven.

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