Gears Of War 2 Review
The holiday season is upon us and that means for gamers it’s time for a vast array of Triple A titles to be released. Gears of War 2, developed by Epic Games and published by Microsoft Game Studios, was released on November 7th, 2008 to high expectations. The original Gears of War is one the highest rated games and best sellers on the Xbox 360. The original Gears did a lot right such as introducing a fantastic cover system that may have changed the way we play shooters for ever. On the other hand, it didn’t have much of a story and the multiplayer wasn’t as polished as it should have been. Make no mistake this isn’t Gears of War 1.5, but a true sequel.
The overall presentation of Gears 2 is significantly improved from its predecessor. This is really no surprise for Epic Games. After all, when you develop an engine like Unreal and license it off to other studios, you should know full well how to take advantage of it.
The mechanics of Gears of War 2 are similar to the original with several minor improvements that really enhance the overall in game experience. The changes to the cover system are a welcome improvement. Now you can disrupt entering cover and press A to roll. The single player campaign is roughly 10 hours on normal difficulty containing 5 chapters to play through. The main complaint about Gears of War’s single player campaign was the story was sparse, bordering on non-existent. Gears 2 focuses on Dom who, while helping Marcus Fenix fight the locust invasion, is searching for his wife Maria. The cut scenes are hit and miss. Some of them make you feel connected to Dom while others have you scratching your head. This is still an improvement from the original.
Multiplayer is no longer an afterthought in the Gears universe. GoW2 includes 10 new maps as well as the original 5 maps re-made for GoW2. Multiplayer matches have grown in size from 8 to 10 players. Also of mention is the addition of bots. The bots can be quite useful depending on the difficultly you choose. Online match types you can encounter are Warzone which is the classic deathmatch, Execution which is similar to Warzone but with one life, King of the Hill and Annex in which you have to capture points but have different rules. You also have Guardian in which you have to keep your team leader alive in order to respawn. Once he dies there are no more respawns and it’s a battle to the end. Wingman puts you and your partner against another team of 2 where you only have 1 life and a winner is crowned over a series of matches by kills and deaths. Finally we have Submission which is like capture the flag but instead of a flag you have a person known as the meatflag. The AI doesn’t want to be caught and will kill you. Your job is to knock him down and escort him to your scoring point. Most interestingly, Gears introduces a new game mode called Horde. Horde puts you and up to 4 friends fighting wave after wave of various Locust enemies. After you complete each wave, the following one gets more difficult. There are 50 waves in total.
Conclusion
I didn’t follow any media coverage during the lead up to Gears of War 2. The one exception was during X’08 where I spent a little time on multiplayer getting my butt kicked by the man himself Cliff Bleszinski. I wanted to go into GoW2 with a clean slate much like I did in the original and it worked. I was blown away by this epic experience. It still has some room for improvement, but it has come a long way. In GoW2, there were characters I actually felt emotionally connected to at times which was a welcome change. All in all, if you liked Gears of War you will surely love Gears of War 2.
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