Tried Gears Tactics for a couple of hours yesterday. Despite the harsh devastated setting, it’s actually a cozy, nonthreatening version of X-Com EU, even on the 3rd-out-of-4 difficulty level I picked. There’s tons of abilities and random swings in the player’s favor but almost never in the aliens’. They don’t even seem to get critical hits. And it seems there’s not much room to rathole into a losing strategy on the strategy layer either, e.g. you can never lock yourself out of any part of the skill tree.
I guess this ought to appeal to me since it removed every element of X-Com that filled my heart with a salty brine of bitterness. But the aesthetic is tasteless (not to mention clashing with the cozy substance of the experience) and the gameplay is too familiar to hold my interest.