Gears Tactics arrives in April

Gears Tactics was announced at E3 in 2018, but raised a few eyebrows when it didn't make an appearance at the following E3 in 2019. It looks like it's back on track, though, because at The Game Awards tonight it received a new trailer (above) and a release date: April 28, 2020.

Set 12 years before Gears of War at the start of the Locust War, Gears Tactics is a turn-based strategy along the lines of XCOM. "It's our take on the classic turn-based strategy genre, with a character-driven story, faster, more aggressive gameplay, a customizable squad and equipment—and of course it wouldn't be a Gears game without massive boss battles," Coalition studio head Rod Fergusson said in 2018.

The trailer states Gears Tactics will have a 40+ hour campaign. It will come to Xbox Game Pass and Steam.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.