Gears Tactics brings the Gears of War series to a genre it had never tried, and it lands harder than a studio’s first swing usually should. Splash Damage built the game with The Coalition, and Xbox Game Studios published it. It hit Windows first, on April 28, 2020. Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S versions followed on November 10, 2020.
The pitch is simple. You command a squad of human soldiers, you eliminate the hostiles on a map, and you complete secondary objectives when a mission calls for them. Turn-based tactics, top-down, single player. No multiplayer at all.
That last part is the first thing to weigh. Gears Tactics strips out the versus mode the franchise built its name on and asks the campaign to carry everything. For the most part, it does.
Trailer, via GameSpot.
Gabriel Diaz and the Pendulum Wars
You play Sergeant Gabriel Diaz. Noshir Dalal voices him. Before the story opens, Diaz demoted himself to working in the motor pool after a traumatic battle in the Pendulum Wars. That detail matters, because the game keeps circling the question of what a soldier does after the fighting has already broken him once.
The setting is one year after the Locust Horde emerged. The Locust are a subterranean race that came up onto the surface and began a genocidal war against the humans of Sera. The Coalition of Ordered Governments, the sole surviving government, fell back to Ephyra on the Jacinto Plateau, where the Locust cannot dig through the granite bedrock.
To deny the Locust the spoils of war, COG leader Chairman Richard Prescott orders every major city outside the plateau incinerated by the Hammer of Dawn. That weapon is a satellite system capable of delivering laser strikes to the surface. Prescott also deploys mop-up detachments into key cities to kill the surviving Locust.
In Aldair, the mop-up crew of Alpha Squad answers to Diaz. This is where the campaign starts, and it starts with a countdown.
Ukkon and the Aldair Files
Mere hours before the Hammer strikes, Diaz gets orders from Prescott and Major Sid Redburn to pull classified intel files from the CIC building in Aldair. Redburn is the voice in Diaz’s ear for most of the campaign.
The files name Ukkon, a Locust scientist. Ukkon created the various creatures the Locust use as instruments of war. The Hammer of Dawn destroys Aldair. Diaz and Redburn survive. Ukkon then destroys the army base and kills the entire Aloha Squad.
Prescott orders Diaz to assassinate Ukkon, with the rights to do it by any means necessary. That is the spine of the game: a demoted sergeant handed a kill order and no army to carry it out.
Echo-Five, Mikayla Dorn, and the Stranded
Diaz and Redburn go looking for soldiers and find corpses instead. They set out to rescue one of the mop-up squads, Echo-Five, and discover Ukkon has been killing the mop-up crews one by one.
Alpha recruits a group of Stranded, the civilian militia that survived the Hammer strikes, after rescuing them from a Locust attack. Their leader is Doctor Mikayla Dorn, a highly qualified civilian engineer with knowledge of what Ukkon has been doing, and she escorts Diaz and Redburn to Claybourne, where Ukkon is located.
Mikayla shoots Ukkon in the face. He heals instantly. It is the campaign’s best turn, and it reframes the whole hunt. You are not chasing a man who can be killed by ordinary means.
Diaz realizes the COG is keeping secrets and fears those secrets will get his people killed. He moves the entire squad into the Vasgari desert to train and prepare. It is a strange, quiet stretch for a game this loud, and it earns its place.
The Nedroma Canisters and Rustlung
Alpha finds an empty canister Ukkon had used to inhale. It belongs to the Nedroma Health Institute, a quarantine zone and research facility for Rustlung, a respiratory condition caused by Imulsion exposure.
They locate Ukkon’s stash. The canisters are full of immune system boosters that work only against Rustlung, and they come with devastating side-effects. Ukkon is dying of Rustlung. The monster who makes monsters is a dying man buying time, and the game lets that land without a speech.
Three Actions, Overwatch, and Emergence Holes
The combat is the reason to be here. Each character gets three actions per turn. You can take cover, shoot enemies, or hold overwatch to fire on any moving enemy in your line of sight.
Players move freely around the map. There is no grid, which separates Gears Tactics from most of its competition in the turn-based tactics space. That freedom is not decoration. It changes how you flank, how you retreat, and how badly a single bad position can cost you.
When an enemy unit loses most of its health, a friendly unit can move in and execute the downed enemy. That execution gives every unit an additional action point. It is the best idea in the game. The finish is not a finisher, it is a resource, and it turns aggression into a plan.
You need grenades to destroy erupting Emergence Holes, which spawn more Locust. If a friendly unit goes down, you can revive them with reduced health. Five distinct character classes each carry their own abilities. Characters take mods and armour, and they pick up new skills when they level up.
Outside the hero characters, your friendly units are procedurally generated, and if they die in combat, the death is permanent. That permanence is what gives the procedural soldiers weight. Losing one is not a reload. It is a loss.
Veteran Mode and the Missing Multiplayer
The campaign is not the whole game. Side-missions run alongside it, and at numerous points the story requires you to complete one or more of them before you can proceed. That gating is the weakest structural choice here. It interrupts momentum at exactly the moments the plot is tightening.
Finish the campaign and Veteran Mode unlocks. It remixes campaign missions with modifiers like bonus damage and an accuracy penalty. It is a genuine second pass, not a difficulty slider with a new name.
There is no multiplayer mode. For a series that spent a decade as a competitive shooter, that absence is the loudest thing in the room. It is also defensible. A tacked-on versus mode would have been worse than none.
What Gears Tactics Gets Right
The execution mechanic and the free movement are the two ideas that will outlast this game. Both push the player forward instead of letting them camp. Both reward the kind of reckless, close-range play the Gears franchise has always been about, translated into a genre that usually punishes it.
The campaign structure is where it stumbles. Side-mission gating pads the middle, and the Vasgari desert stretch slows a story that had been running on a countdown. The Locust are a fine enemy. Ukkon is a better one, because he has a reason to be afraid.
The cast does real work. Dalal plays Diaz as a man worn down rather than broken, and Wilson gives Mikayla the authority of someone who has been right before and was not listened to. Spisak’s Ukkon is a scientist first, which is what makes him frightening.
The Verdict on Gears Tactics
Gears Tactics scores 8.4 out of 10. That matches the published critical aggregate across 11 outlets, and it is the right number.
This is a spin-off that understood its source material well enough to change it. The three-action turns, the free movement, and the execution bonus are not borrowed from other tactics games and reskinned. They are Gears ideas, and they hold up under a top-down camera.
The game’s limits are real. No multiplayer. Side missions that stand between you and the next story beat. A second act that wanders into the desert when it should be closing on Ukkon. None of that undoes the core.
What matters most is that Splash Damage and The Coalition built a tactics game that moves. Most games in this genre ask you to think. This one asks you to think fast, and then it hands you an extra action point for finishing what you started.
KEY FACTS
- Title: Gears Tactics
- Developer: Splash Damage, in conjunction with The Coalition
- Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
- Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
- Release dates: Windows, April 28, 2020; Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, November 10, 2020
- Genre: Turn-based tactics
- Modes: Single player only
- Score: 8.4/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 11 outlets)
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