If you love to run out into a firefight with guns a blazing, you’d best think otherwise. Gears 2 encourages its gamers to think intelligently around a situation rather than running straight into fire. The cover-and-shoot method is still addictive as it was in Gears of War 1, so you won’t become bored halfway through. With more vehicular combat thrown in, there’s never a dull moment through the campaign that’ll have you turning off your console. From riding a brumak to a reaver, there’s a lot more diversity packed in when you compare it to the original. My only advice: find some buddies and play cooperatively because playing by your lonesome isn’t the most gratifying experience.
For some reason if the insanely long single player campaign, which you can play through by yourself or with a friend, wasn’t enough to convince you to buy this game thankfully Epic decided to include a massive number of multiplayer features. The basic team and solo modes are there as well as capture the flag type games and assault modes but the real shining star of the multiplayer portion of Gears of War 2 is the completely original and new Horde mode. This mode is basically a “king of the hill” style setup where each level has a specific number of bad guys, and this number (and difficulty) increases with each completed stage. Epic decided to make things really hard and include 50+ levels to play through, which with two people is impossible and with five is still difficult but much more fun to attempt.
Each of the different multiplayer modes is very different and the amount of players per game is still small but feels just right for a game such as this. The Horde mode will instantly become something of a “bragging right” and we can see Xbox LIVE gamers going at it with their buddies for months or even years to come, a staple of the “Gears” series and something we see in every other game going forward. Gamers can also play through the story in a fantastic co-op mode either online of offline via a two player split-screen option. What’s great bout a game like Gears 2 is that it plays exactly the same when playing co-op or totally by yourself, making the experience very similar no matter what mode it is played in.
The Unreal 3 engine has made a lot of progress over the last two years and Epic is a master at using it to perfection. There are a couple obvious improvements over the first game, the most noticeable probably being the ability for the game to showcase many more enemies on screen at one time. Using this upgrade for gameplay purposes the developers are able to mold the entire game around a totally different feeling, each second of Gears 2 feels as though it is taking place smack in the middle of a ridiculously large war.
Other nice improvements such as lighting effects and texture content will help showcase the HD power of the Xbox 360 gaming system. There are a couple great examples showing off the new water effects and body deformation but we won’t spoil those for you. Probably the best part of Gears of War 2 is the single player campaign, something that we couldn’t really say for the first in the franchise (lack of CG movies, plot direction, etc.).
After putting so many hours into the game it got really hard to find negatives or weak-points that this game has, other than the same meaningless problems of before. We have yet to play a perfect video game but Gears 2 get’s really freaking close; probably closer than any action game has gotten before. Every aspect of the game: gameplay, controls, features, graphics, and audio have a triple A feel to it and during the first play-through every single gamer will get multiple “oh shit” moments. This is one of those games that remind us why we love this industry, and its people like the development team at Epic that need to be watched as pioneers for the next couple years. Gears of War 2 takes every angle of an “epic game” and smashes it out of the park, there is not a single reason why you should not be playing this game right now.
