Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game’s About
…Seriously? You’re ****ing kidding right? Gears of War 2 is the sequel to the game that finally convinced all of us this new generation of consoles was worth buying into. Gears of War was and still is gorgeous, brutal and addictive. The fact that so many gamers continue to play Gears of War online to this day even in the face of significant weapon-balance and network coding issues, not to mention major competition from other shooters, speaks a great deal to the strength and raw, visceral appeal of the game’s core combat mechanics. Epic Games was smart enough to avoid playing with fire for the sequel, as they’ve left the fundamental gameplay experience essentially unchanged, save a few small additions and refinements. Consequently, neither Epic nor fans of the original are going to bet burned by Gears of War 2. It’s every bit the adrenaline-soaked experience that the original game was, even if it does lack the extra “Holy ****!” revelatory shock that comes with being the first of a new breed.
What’s Hot
Everything that made the original Gears of War so satisfying to play is back in the sequel. The cover system still acts as the fulcrum around which the fast-paced and violent battles take place. Running and gunning will get you killed quickly, while fighting for control of key positions and using the environment to your advantage reaps huge benefits. The major reason the combat works so well is because the cover system is so fluid; latching onto cover is as easy as pressing the A button, but it’s the ease and speed at which players can bolt from one piece of cover to another that puts the action in Gears of War and its sequel ahead of other tactical shooters. Those other games deal in tension and build-up, while Gears of War is all about constant, savage release. There’s an ebb and flow to the combat, a rhythm that you pick up along the way, but the action never stalls out. The only major addition to the formula is the ability to take a hostage and use them as a meat-shield. It’s effective, but it limits you to the more boring weapons in the game. Gears of War 2 brings larger and more varied set pieces to the campaign, but the everything is set up so well that the increased numbers never overwhelm the intimate, guerrilla-style warfare that separates Gears of War from straight shoot-em-ups like Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3.
The multiplayer in the original Gears of War was basically an afterthought — a bit of extra meat for diehard fans to chew on after they digested the co-operative campaign. This time around it’s undoubtedly the star of the show, having received the vast bulk of the updates from the original game. The weapon balance has been completely revamped after the first game received 2 years worth of post-release screwing around on Epic’s part. The shotgun was overpowered in the original, which lead many players to abandon all pretense of tactical shooting in favor of running, gunning and dive rolling. Doing so now will get you killed quickly, since the weapon is only effect at extremely close range, and relatively useless from more than six feet away. Consequently, matches feature a lot more variety in tactics and play-styles, as short-range shotgun dueling no longer outclasses every other option as far as efficacy. Most importantly though, the utterly horrific networking code that plagued the first game has been addressed, and in our time with the game the dreaded ‘host advantage’ was kept to a minimum. The end result of the tweaks is that the multiplayer feels more like the single player, where using cover and teamwork is more important than shotgun skills.
There’s also a ton of new multiplayer content, some of which actually impacts the gameplay, the rest of which can be written off as purely for spectacle but they’re appreciated none-the-less. Epic is either gutsy or stupid for making the grenades even more useful in Gears of War 2 than they were in the original. Now players can plant them in walls and floors as proximity mines. This could turn out to be a disaster once the masses at large start memorizing the maps, but for now it’s not completely broken since the grenades are pretty easy to spot. Players can also force each other to endure the humiliation of watching their carcasses get mutilated by one of several new weapon-specific executions. Honestly, there’s no more point to these than there was to the simple curb-stomp, and none of the new animations including the “improved” curb-stomp have quite the same impact as the classic. Serious players are liable to bypass them altogether since they’re slow and set you up to get sniped, but for the rest of us, they make for a nice game of “can you top this” with buddies on the opposing team. The guy on the other end of the equation can martyr himself if he has a grenade equipped or crawl away for help, but the latter is only really useful if you’re downed right beside a piece of cover.
All of the maps are excellent, with well placed cover, choke points, and perfectly positioned power weapons. Many of them feature a great deal of verticality, offering players the chance for fight for the high-ground as well as cover. Some of them, like the mountaintop Avalanche, have dynamic elements that completely reshape the battlefield in the middle of a match, forcing both teams to alter their strategies. All the maps are large by Gears of War standards, but the action flows through them naturally, so there’s very little downtime with players searching for each other. The new gameplay modes are easily the most valuable additions to Gears of War 2, all of which are creative and incredibly fun. Submission stands as the best, a capture-the-flag variant with a living, fighting flag for teams to drag back to their end of the map, while wingman is a surprisingly engaging mode that pits five teams of two against each other. By far the best is the Horde mode, though — a consolation prize for the lack of four-player co-op that pits players against waves of increasingly difficult enemies. Sounds simplistic, and it is, but it’s also addictive as hell.
What’s Not
For any game aiming to achieve shock and awe, familiarity is enemy number one. Gears of War 2 adds a great deal of new content, but at the end of the day it definitely feels like more of the same. That’s not a bad thing, it just means that the game didn’t leave quite the same impression as the first game, which completely reshaped my impressions of what a game could look like, how visceral a shooter could be, how smoothly cover could be integrated into fast-paced combat and how much stupid, brain-dead fun you could have with a game that didn’t take itself too seriously to put a chainsaw on an assault rifle. Gears of War turned out to be much more than I expected, while Gears of War 2 only managed to deliver exactly what I expected.
Cliff Bleszinski and the rest of the Epic team spent a lot of time talking about how much better the storyline would be this time around, but at the end of the day it’s no better or worse than the shallow narrative from the original game. It’s obvious they put some effort into trying to make players care about Dom, Marcus and the rest of the team (plus new recruits), but they just haven’t spent enough time developing these characters to forge any meaningful connection with them. Are they entertaining caricatures? Sure. Am I rooting for them to survive and win the day? Well, versus hoping the ugly lizards wipe out humanity, you bet. But do I really give a **** about Dom’s wife? No. And the only times I care about Dom are when I want to kill him myself for wandering into my line of fire (more on that later). Furthermore, Epic needs to decide what kind of tone they want for this franchise and stick to it. Playing through Gears of War 2 actually reminded me of the movie Spider-Man 3 in a weird way – just like that movie wanders from Peter Parker dancing down the street to the somber scene of Black-suited Spiderman on the bell-tower, Gears of War 2 dances back and forth between attempting to set a serious tone and letting the characters spout juvenile dialog. There’s nothing wrong with being an over-the-top action romp like Predator, but Predator had no illusions of trying to make a serious point.
Finally, it turns out that it’s a lot more fun to kill Brumaks than it is to ride them, or any Locust creature for that matter. Any vehicle at all, in fact. The vehicle sections of the campaign are the low point of the entire game. They range anywhere from mediocre to poor depending on what difficulty you’re playing on and what you’re level of patience is. I got through them easily enough in Hardcore mode, but they were just incredibly boring. Try them on Insane, though, and you’ll probably be making some controller-shaped holes in your wall. Almost as annoying is the return of Dom’s lone brain-cell, the one that constantly urges him to wander his way into the middle of a fire fight, or stop dead in front of you when you’re trying to roadie-run to safety. It doesn’t happen frequently enough to break the game, but it’s a nuisance when it happens. Do yourself a favor and play the campaign on co-op every time, even if it means playing online with a stranger who doesn’t speak the same language as you.
Final Word
Gears of War 2 isn’t quite the landmark title that first game was, but it’s still one of the best third-person shooters ever made. The balance has been fixed, the multiplayer has been expanded, and the campaign is more epic in scope. A few small flaws drag it down from masterpiece status, but it’s still far and away the biggest must-own Xbox 360 game of the year. The Halo franchise may still be playing out on the Xbox 360, but it’s Epic and the Gears of War franchise that are shaping the console’s identity and legacy.
