Gears of War brings fast-paced brutal action to turn-based tactics.

Gears Tactics is set 12 years before the first Gears of War. Cities across the planet Sera are beginning to fall to the monstrous threat rising from underground – the Locust Horde.

With the government in disarray, a squad of survivors emerge as humanity’s last hope. Outnumbered and fighting for survival, players must recruit and command a squad to hunt down Ukkon, an evil mastermind who makes monsters.

In Gears Tactics, you’ll step into the boots of Gabe Diaz, voiced by Noshir Dala, as he recruits, equips, and commands his squad on a desperate mission to hunt down the relentless and powerful leader of the Locust army: Ukkon. Against all odds and fighting for survival, you must outsmart the enemy in brutal, turn-based tactical combat in an immersive and character-driven story. Experience the intensity of one of the most-acclaimed gaming sagas in an exciting new way.

While previous Gears games started with the console as a fixed reference point, the development teams at The Coalition and Splash Damage had to consider an incredibly wide range of processors for Gears Tactics. Not only did the game have to live up to series expectations as a graphics showcase, it had to seamlessly scale across thin and light notebooks, ultra-powerful desktops and device configurations yet-to-come, including those featuring the Xe graphics architecture debuting this year.

Throughout the development of Gears Tactics, The Coalition worked with Intel and the Xe-LP architecture to optimize the game. New to Gears on PC is support for Variable Rate Shading (VRS). Async Compute capabilities have been improved, and content has been built to scale across a wide range of devices. VRS, a relatively new technique, reduces the pixel complexity of a scene to effectively give Gears Tactics a performance boost without sacrificing visual fidelity. Async Compute allows for certain graphics workloads to be run in parallel, allowing the game to perform more back-end graphics processes to keep your session running smooth. And with new Intel hardware compatibility, that translates to fantastic performance across the upcoming Intel Xe architecture.

In short, Gears Tactics will look amazing on high-end PCs and runs perfectly on laptops and lower-spec machines to help bring the franchise to a broad new audience of PC gamers.

You can see this represented across the official hardware spec requirements outlined below.

PC System Requirements

Minimum:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• Processor: Intel i3 Skylake (6100)| AMD FX-6000
• Memory: 8 GB RAM (2GB VRAM)
• Graphics: AMD Radeon R7 260X | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 45 GB available space
• Sound Card: DirectX compatible

Recommended:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• Processor: Intel i5 Coffee Lake (8400)| AMD Ryzen 3
• Memory: 8 GB RAM (4GB VRAM)
• Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 570 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 45 GB available space
• Sound Card: DirectX compatible

Series fans will want to check out Gears of War: Bloodlines, the new novel by New York Times bestselling author Jason Hough, that sets the stage for the events of Gears 5 and Gears Tactics, and the father-daughter relationship between the games’ leads, Kait and Gabe Diaz. Gears of War: Bloodlines is available in paperback, ebook and audiobook on April 21, 2020.

The aggressive gameplay of Gears Tactics retains a signature Gears tone and feel – you will command your squad in fast paced, turn-based battles, advancing and surviving intense and visceral encounters with the unstoppable, swarming Locust Horde enemy. Prepare yourself to take on and defeat towering deadly bosses that defy your strategies ad completely change the scale of the battle.

Pre-order Gears Tactics to receive the Thrashball Cole Character Pack which includes Augustus Cole as a recruit and the Thrashball Armor Set, complete with rare abilities.

Gears Tactics will launch April 28, 2020 on the Windows Store and Steam and will be available the same day with Xbox Game Pass for PC.