Sadly you have to do 3 side missions each time in Act 3. Put’s a slight downer on an otherwise fantastic game.
Gears Tactics feels like one of those games that established some pretty great fundamentals for a sequel that can learn from what did and didn’t work.
The only side mission type that was ever hard for me was the ‘rolling artillery’ one. That does require you to be pretty efficient or your team is going to get caught. Overall they just need to cut down on the number of side missions especially in the 3rd Act which really starts to drag on.
Just starting act 3 now. Side missions will be too many for sure.
Combining the support unit’s ability to give actions to an ally with the sniper’s ability to restore max actions = lots of enemies dead. Also love the heavy with boosted grenade powers and reduced count down timer.
Uggg, I just got to the 3rd set of side missions of Act 3. I may lose them quickly on purpose to get to the last mission. That’s really the only big complaint I have. The missions themselves play out great, especially when you can chain things giving extra actions. I definitely prefer Gears handling of movement and actions better than the X-COMs, but overall I think the X-COMs had more going for it as a whole.
I even like the characters more than I expected to in Gears. Never played a Gears game before.
… and done. That last mission was pretty long and I made it more difficult on myself by using skills on the wrong ally 2 times, and accidentally coming out of stealth mode 1 time. Glad I played Gears Tactics, and glad I lost those last 3 side missions quickly on purpose to get to the last mission.
I don’t regret playing on the normal difficulty (intermediate) even though it was kinda impossible to lose a mission. There were missions gears went down, but reviving was pretty forgiving. Veteran probably would have given a better experience, but you never know until you play it.
Yea the chaining of kills to get other characters actions is a core tactic to learn. Can be like a little puzzle thinking over how to use each character to maximize action points possible.
I had started this on PC, but gotten distracted with other games. I installed it on Series X last night and played through the second mission. I have to admit, it’s really cool. It helps that on Series X I got rock solid smooth cutscenes and gameplay, an area where my PC struggled a bit. I’d forgotten over the last few years just how much better a game feels when there’s no hitching and dropped frames and other such things.
Playing on Veteran up through Act 1 Chapter 6 and haven’t lost a mission or had to reload yet. I imagine it gets much harder as the game progresses. Having a great time.
IIRC Act two begins the missions with unit and class restrictions. Some off those can get very difficult. I am look at you “hold two control points with only two units.”
I’m kind of curious to see all the enhanced stuff I can, so I’m going through my library and the Game Pass library looking for anything that is “X/S enhanced”, so I installed this one. It definitely looks much prettier in 4K than it did on my poor potato computer, and I like the way it controls with a gamepad too. I don’t think I like it enough to start all over again but I may do a few more veteran missions.
I thought the game was easy until I got to the bosses, my god they are brutally hard in this game, at least on veteran.
Yeah, that’s my only real complaint about the game. I ended up dialing the difficulty down to easy for the final boss.
I’m only on the second boss but will probably have to drop the difficulty, can’t come close to beating it.
One thing that really helped me was that you can close an “Emergence Hole” before any mobs come out. Just have a scout (or anyone really) plant a grenade on the “e-hole” and get out of the blast radius. An empower from the support class can really help here because planting the grenade will take one move.
That and scouts with grenade cool downs are great for the bosses. Can’t usually get in range to hit the boss but they can blow up the spawns so the rest of your team doesn’t have to.
snicker
That’s good to know, I never even used the plant grenade action before.
I’ve been dinking around with Gears Tactics again on my Series X and I’m really enjoying it. I had already beaten it on PC and just figured I’d load up the old save and see what I could do and I’m liking the veteran missions. They’re really no different from the standard missions during the campaign but that’s kind of what I like about them - I don’t have any annoying boss fights to deal with anymore, so I can just pick through the missions as I like and try out different builds with my crew and goof around. I doubt I’ll stick with it for too long but it is cool that there’s a post-game there.
I loaded this up to try the new “Jacked” mode. It adds Jack (the flying robot) as a companion in the main campaign. He doesn’t take a slot and has his own skill tree.
He is really useful, to the point that I’m not sure they balanced the game around him. They added some “deviant” enemies that buff their companions, but it doesn’t make up for how useful this robot is.
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Trouble reaching chests or rescuing soldiers? No problem, Jack can interact with (seemingly) anything and can stealth every turn.
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Trouble with those pesky melee immune enemies? No problem, Jack can pop an area effect that disables opportunity attacks.
In his skill tree he can even hijack enemies, throw poison grenades, create those really powerful enemy weapons, and more.
Not sure I’ll make it through the entire playthrough, but he seems to make the campaign a lot easier.
I only played through once with Jack, and I agree he makes the missions pretty easy.