While it may seem like a simple re-skin of Xcom, there's enough changes to make Gears Tactics a bit more approachable for the likes of me. By ditching the metagame (you simply assign gear to soldiers, no elaborate base building), and tweaking some of the game rules (move, shoot, reload in any order, so long as you have the action points to do it) - I found Tactics to be a well balanced, challenging but not discouraging turn based shooter. As an interesting balance, the game has a handful of story characters who can't die permanently, so rather than having to limp back to base without them, you simply have to restart at your last checkpoint if they die.

The campaign is a bit too long with too many repetitive side quests, but they at least give you plenty of opportunity to experiment with the various different units. To my surprise, the more glaring issue is the ugly, buggy presentation. I started playing on a low end PC and chalked it up to that, but moving over to an Xbox Series S it wasn't much better. Every level starts with about five seconds of textures popping in, and once in they are grimy and unappealing. When showing you mission critical events (enemies moving, characters arriving, bosses attacking etc) the camera often gets stuck in the environment and the screen is a mess. It's a really surprising showing from an Xbox first party game, especially one listed as 'optimised' on the new machines.

The biggest frustration was an hour deep into the final boss, a story character died, and when I selected 'load checkpoint' it restarted the whole mission from the beginning. Pretty frustrating, and capped off a surprisingly unpolished experience for a Microsoft game. Nonetheless, I'd check out a sequel for sure.