Gears Tactics

The game is played from a top-down perspective and is a turn-based tactics title in which players issue commands to a squad of human soldiers to eliminate the hostiles in a map and depending on the mission, complete secondary objectives. Players can freely explore the map without being confined to a grid. Each character can perform three actions, such as taking cover, shooting enemies, or remain in overwatch to shoot any moving enemy in their line of sight. When an enemy unit loses most of its health, a friendly unit can move in and execute the downed enemy, which gives all units an additional action point.

Players need to throw grenades to destroy erupting Emergence Holes which spawn more Locust enemies. If a friendly unit is downed, players can revive them to bring them back into battle with reduced health. The game has five distinct character classes, with each having its own unique abilities. The characters can be extensively customized with mods, armours, and they can acquire new skills after they level up.

One year before the game, a subterranean race of creatures called the Locust Horde emerged on the surface and began a genocidal war against the humans of Sera. The sole surviving government, the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG), fell back to the COG capital of Ephyra on the Jacinto Plateau where the Locust cannot dig through its granite bedrock. To prevent the Locust from invading the plateau and to deny them the spoils of war, COG leader - Chairman Richard Prescott (Liam O'Brien) - orders all major cities outside the plateau to be incinerated by the Hammer of Dawn (HOD), a satellite weapon of mass destruction capable of delivering laser strikes to the surface, in a scorched earth campaign. In addition, Prescott deployed a mop-up detachment in key-cities to eradicate the surviving Locust. In the city of Aldair, the mop-up crew of Alpha Squad is led by Sergeant Gabriel Diaz (Noshir Dalal), who had demoted himself to working in the motor pool after a traumatic battle in the Pendulum Wars.

Mere hours before the Hammer strikes, Sgt. Diaz receives orders from Chairman Prescott and Major Sid Redburn (Bruce Thomas) to retrieve classified intel files from the CIC building in Aldair. Diaz and Redburn find the files on a Locust scientist named Ukkon (Jason Spisak), who has been responsible for creating the various creatures the Locust have been using as instruments of war. The HOD destroys Aldair, but Diaz and Redburn survive.

The game's development was handled by Splash Damage with The Coalition providing assistance. The Coalition wanted to introduce the franchise to a wider audience and the development team identified that there were a lot of similarities between the franchise, which was a series of squad-based third-person shooters with cover-based combat, and turn-based strategy games. According to Alex Grimbley, the game's executive producer, "[the team] actually just took existing Gears and just moved the camera up". The team took four and a half years to develop the game. The game is not related to Gears of War: Tactics, a cancelled spin-off developed by Epic Games.

The team wanted the game to play at a faster pace when compared to other competing games in the genre. Thus the team decided to give each unit three action points instead of two to ensure that players can get to perform various actions within one turn. The team put a large emphasis on the game's narrative, and the team aimed to tell a "personal and emotional story" and invested a lot of resources into creating the game's cutscenes and employing the voice actors. The team consulted 343 Industries, which worked on Halo Wars, a strategy spin-off of the Halo franchise. However, unlike Halo Wars, the game was considered to be a PC premium title instead of a strategy game designed for console owners.

The game received generally positive reviews upon release, according to review aggregator Metacritic. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received strong approval, being recommended by 85% of critics.

a great Gears game and a great tactics game", stating, "The core — getting onto the battlefield and agonizing over every move — is excellent." a solid new front in the Gears theater of war." GameSpot and GamesRadar+ praised the Gears aesthetics, strong character customization, meaningful character progression, and innovative tweaks to the modern RPG formula, while criticizing the filler story and lack of mission diversity. IGN praised the game's graphics and animations, writing, "Character models are fantastically detailed and the ruined, mostly urban environments of the planet Sera are elaborate.