Developer Blog: Bosses

We’re back with another Gears Tactics Dev Blog, our new blog series that drops oh-so juicy details about our upcoming strategy game releasing April 28th.

In our second blog, we’re talking about the biggest and baddest enemies of them all – Bosses.

For those of you who have yet to enter the world of Gears of War, or just need a refresher, your enemy are the Locust – an underground dwelling species that has invaded the human world of Sera from their Hollow deep below the surface.

The Locust are a diverse group of monsters ranging from scaled-humanoid Locust Drones to flying squid-legged Reavers to the giant missile-laden Brumak. The Locust army has monsters for every occasion. And some of them are big…REAL BIG.

These most formidable comes from the evil mind of Ukkon, a mad scientist ‘monster who creates monsters,’ that has transformed the oversized monsters of the Hollow (seriously, these things are HUGE!) into tools for humanity’s destruction.

In Gears Tactics, your role is to hunt down Ukkon and shut down his deadly monster production line. As you would expect, he’ll use everything in his arsenal to try and stop you. This is where Gears Tactics delivers a huge, unique entry for the genre – big boss fights.

At the end of each Act in the Gears Tactics campaign, you face off against Ukkon’s biggest creations including the spider-like Corpser, the massive Brumak and more. These boss battles have been intricately designed to be the ultimate combat puzzles.

Each boss has unique mechanics that will push you out of your comfort zone and force you to fight on the monster’s terms. The Corpser, for example, raises its legs one turn before slamming them down creating impact zones that will cause huge damage to anyone caught within it (friend or foe). The impact zones are marked by a red area that targets the location of your units. Staying safe sounds simple but the Corpser’s legs are armored, meaning you’ll only be able to damage them when they’re raised.

Of course, this is at the same time you need to: get the hell out of those dangerous impact zones, deal to the additional throngs of enemies threatening to overrun you, and all while trying to find new, vital cover positions not under the threat of a leg slam.

And did we mention the area-of-denial high damage mines it throws out every two turns? Yeah, that too.

Now it wouldn’t be a proper boss fight without multiple phases to work through.

As the battle progresses, things get tougher and tougher. The core mechanics of the fight will stay the same, but each phase shakes up the combat puzzle enough to offset your strategic rhythm and challenge your decision making.

For example, for every third of health you take off, the boss will increase the number of special mechanics they can use in a turn. The additional enemies will also become tougher variants forcing you to continually adapt your strategy.

We aren’t masochists though, so you do get a handy checkpoint at these moments too – to give you respite as you try to nail down your strategy. And for the Ironman mode players – you get the break but still have to be perfect as there are no checkpoint reloads for you. No pressure.

The rest is for you to discover and master yourself when you take on Ukkon’s biggest and scariest creations at the end of this month when Gears Tactics releases on April 28, 2020.

In the meantime, we’ll be back next week for another Developer Blog as we dive into the Characters at the heart of Gears Tactics.