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Gears of War 2 review

On Xbox 360. Developed by Epic Games. Published by Microsoft Games Studio

Gears 2, so the saying goes, was bigger and more bad assier.

Gears II Men picks off where the story (such as it was) left off. Marcus Fenix, the hairiest bald space marine, still likes he’s hit the protein shakes a little too hard and now his friend Dom is looking for his wife. The Locust are trying to sink a Serran city called Jacinto and apparently there’s some internal squabbles back at the Locust homestead. Its all just an excuse for balls to the walls action.

So the first Gears game was good but i didn’t love it like I did Halo 3 and CoD games. I found the difficulty, even on the wimp mode Casual too much of an ass kicking to enjoy it much. Gears 2′s normal mode is far more forgiving than the first game so the more hardcore nuts out there should start on hard. Gears also manages to not recycle its unique code. You ride control certain beasts once, you drive a tank once, not over and over. The shooting has merely been refined but it was easily the best part of the original. The sequel, with its more sensible difficulty and extra polish takes the best parts of the first game and makes them blissfully enjoyable to play.

So If you’ve played the first one (or even uncharted, lol) you know how the shooting works with stop and pop  gunplay with its cover mechanic improved. But you don’t get the feeling that you’re playing the same thing over and over since everything is suitably mixed up. The game does kick your ass at times, but not always you’d expect it. Unlike the first game with its tough bosses, the sequel’s bosses aren’t an amazing challenge, but they are diverse and interesting. Yes, find out what to do and do it three times is in effect but I’d rather that than the final boss from Far Cry on Xbox 1 which just had 60 billion hit points. Hey, i prefer easy bosses. That said, I found the times when the game did kick my ass was in some of the firefights but It rarely got so frustrating that I wanted to quit. No Brutes and no Krillitane made me a happy gamer.

Removing the chaff from the first one, fixing the difficulty and adding so many new styles that aren’t constantly recycled over and over again, the game never gets boring. There’s never any area that feels like the Library from Halo CE that just goes on and on (unless you play Horde- more of that later). Multiplayer, never the best feature of the first game, despite its popularity, is vastly improved (with one caveat). The star here is a coop mode called Horde, which is basically Zap Brannigan sending wave after wave of his men at you. You have one life per round and its up to your team mates to heal you if you lose too much health, otherwise you have to wait till the next wave to respawn, so long as at least one member of your team survives. The other modes, all variations of more common MP games are there and they too are a lot of fun. Except the matchmaking (at the time of writing) was so amazingly broken that it could take 5 or 10 minutes to get into a match. Once you got into one, it was great but jeeze that wait for a match almost make me want to update firmware on my PS3 and see which finishes first. I’m not willing to bet money but it would be a photo finish.

This game has the best sorta realistic graphics on 360. Apart from the character designs of the Cogs, which are somewhat exaggerated looking, the things very pretty. It actually looks very ugly and dour, it just does it very well from an artistic and technical perspective. Framerate is a pretty constant 30 fps and never hitches and never suffers from badly timed texture loading. Halo 3 may still be the better game overall, but the graphics of Unreal 3 here are first rate. Its still the best advertisement for the Unreal 3 engine by far.

Sound is also top notch with excellent sound design helped by a cool and grand musical score. Voice work is top notch with the likes of Terry Tate as Cole Train and of course John Di Maggio as the voice of Marcus Fenix and a few others. Also here is Carolyn Seymour as the voice of the Locust Queen (she was in a really old BBC SF show Survivor but you’ve seen her in Trek, Quantum Leap and lots of other series)

So overall, I very much like Gears 2. Its a good value package with a single player that’s not over in 6 hours, a lots of coop and multiplayer options and will probably be installed on a lot of 360′s for a little while at least.

Controller1.com rating 3/3