Recent reviews by Dusda

This game is amazing, and it actually does the live service thing right. It's so good, even Sony backed off making it worse!

game good.

So after Ted Lasso I was actually curious to try a soccer game, and with EA dropping the FIFA name it felt like a good time to give it a shot.

The game took forever to load and ran like ♥♥♥♥ on my monster desktop. It failed to recognize three different controllers, remaining stuck on keyboard and mouse even when I unplugged both.

After I tried and failed to play for about half an hour I gave up and refunded. How does anyone put up with this garbage?

A fun little shooter with goblins!

This game is dope.

Xcom 3 needs to steal as much as it possibly can from this game.

The presentation is nearly flawless. the gameplay emphasizes line-of-sight without any weird jank, moving units around never resulted in anything unexpected, the sound is chunky and brutal. The game is beautiful. This is totally Xcom, and yet totally its own thing.

The core mechanics of Gears Tactics are gold. It leverages line of sight in lots of interesting ways; allies obstructing targets will be shot, enemies close to the cone of fire will be hit sometimes. Cover is intuitive and makes sense without putting things in a "board game" context. They interact in interesting ways, too: if you overwatch an enemy unit, and then push them into line of sight with a grenade or something, that overwatch will trigger. Some gear can make units push enemies out of overwatch or cover and into a trap you've set up. You can really invent your way out of sticky situations.

There is no pod activation; instead, the game uses a combination of set enemy placement and randomized drops of pods when you are guarding a central point.

You have basically no reason to save scum. The game does not let you save each turn, instead favoring a checkpoint-based system. You can also restart a mission at any time, or abort to re-deploy with a different team.

Don't be fooled by the more approachable save system, though. In between major story missions, the game has several side missions. When you send a team on a side mission, they don't come back to base until the next story mission, so you still have to think about where to put your best units without over committing to one mission.

Executions are the soul of this game. When you down an enemy, they have a chance to be down-but-not-out, instead of dead. In this state, nearby allies can execute them; if they do, every other ally gets an extra action. This creates a momentum in the game that is deeply satisfying. It is a damn brilliant mechanic, basically solving that "turtle down and make the enemy move first" problem.

That idea is further amplified by certain abilities. Vanguard units (the ones with bayonets) can run in a straight line (must have line of sight, no obstructions) and instantly kill a target. Snipers have skills that give extra actions on hit or kill. Support classes can give actions to other units, and earn bonus action points for themselves when a target unit gets a kill. Gears Tactics has this theme of momentum throughout, matching the aesthetic of Gears while mostly solving the overly-careful slow pace of Xcom without enforcing heavy-handed constraints (like the dreaded time constraints of Xcom 2).

Speaking of overwatch, this game solves that problem as well. Instead of activating a unit when a target moves within it's zone, you aim the unit with a cone. That cone depends on the class; snipers get a long and thin cone, scouts (with their shotguns) get a short but wide cone. Overwatch is definitely a major aspect of the game, but it makes you plan it to cover specific areas of the battlefield. This helps solve problems with units over-committing a target you didn't want, or focusing too much on one target, or to a flank you didn't want to deal with.

Really, the only knock I have against this game is the lack of a strategy layer. You have a Barracks where you can use skill points on units and equip gear. The user interface for this is passable but clunky, you'll spend a lot of time moving up or down the menus moving one attachment around. There is no base to develop, no research to progress. Gear is only acquired by completing missions and picking up loot boxes during them. You can't do anything with units that aren't on missions, and the missions are almost completely linear. It lacks that "I am a commander managing a massive crisis" element. If this game gets a sequel, it is just *begging* for a layer here. I don't mind too much, though, since this is an original title with room to grow.

Seriously, if you like turn-based strategy at all, this is among the best I've played. It's great.

The first few hours are rough, the game feels unfair and harsh.

After that climb, though, this is great. It takes some stuff from the usual shooters, scaled to 24-28 players, and adds a few of it's own. I think it's a great mix.

The reload mechanics in particular; the button has three functions. Press once to change magazines, preserving the previous one. Double tap to drop the magazine and quickly insert another. Hold to display the hud, which tells you how many magazines are left, and a visual (no exact counts) of how full your current magazine is.

They fixed it.