In Gears Tactics, characters unlock skills across four specialisations

In Gears Tactics characters belong to one of five classes; Support, Vanguard, Sniper, Scout and Heavy. Each of these classes has its own signature weapon, skills, abilities and specials. They also have their own skill trees which players can use to customise these characters how they see fit and to suit their playstyle.

In each skill tree, only a certain number of skills can be unlocked of the total number. This means that each character can specialise in certain areas but won’t be able to unlock every skill.

In the case of Gears Tactics protagonist Gabe Diaz, as a Support character, he’s able to specialise in Surgeon, Paragon, Combat Medic or Strategist.

Gears Tactics

Each of the skills unlocked for a character changes how they function on the battlefield. For instance, you can see in the image above that Gabe has the Stim[LV1] skill which he can use to heal a target for 100 Health. He also has Empower[LV] which grants an ally 2 actions and +20% damage for one turn.

Design Director Tyler Bielman gave a quick rundown of each of the Support class’ specialisations.

The Surgeon is primarily focused on single-target healing. The Combat Medic is more about team-based healing. The Paragon is really about unlocking the potential of your other units and giving them more actions. And the strategist turns Gabe more into a wrecking crew with that Lancer

Each of the classes has an entirely different skill tree and each character can be specced however you like. This gives players plenty of control over their squad and their abilities going into battle.

Gears Tactics will launch for PC on April 28.