WARNING: This is a long article.
Christmas holiday was good to me, and I came out with several games that I look forward to playing. The one I decided to start off with was Gears of War 2.
Let me begin by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed Gears of War. I played it through on every difficulty setting, and it was one of the first games I actually owned for my Xbox 360. Its gory combat and fast-paced action sequences combined with just enough exposition to create a storyline worthy of the big-screens came together to form an experience I sorely missed with other action titles such as the HALO trilogy. I realize that action games have a notoriety for being shallow. They mostly feature explosions, headshots, and at best, very pretty renditions of explosions and headshots. The Gears of War series doesn't disappoint in this regard, but GoW 2 takes these to new and stunning heights that manage to impress even those of us who remember decimating our enemies with satellite-based weaponry and train-bombs.
Gameplay
"Getting the hang of it? It's just like riding a bicycle. A bicycle made of testosterone." - Explaining Gears of War 2's control scheme to a Gears of War veteran
Gears of War 2 is basically a retread of the first Gears of War in terms of gameplay, with few things changed. Some people may cry foul, seeing as how the control scheme, the concept, and mechanics are almost copy-pasted from the original. I would claim otherwise. Gears of War had a smooth and innovative control scheme and gameplay design that needed very little changing at all. With the context-sensitive Cover button that allowed you to crouch, dive, duck, wall-crawl, and otherwise avoid the vicious bullet-walls that your enemy would inevitably be hurling in your direction, you needed very little else; the Cover system was done very well and was in many cases extremely smart. This has not changed in the sequel, and now more than ever, you will need to combine the Cover system with a general awareness of your surroundings to survive the harsh battlefields that swarm with your bloodthirsty enemies.
Speaking of battle, the combat system remains a strong and effective use of the third-person, over-the-shoulder view. While several games have used it well in the past, Gears shows us what it can do when you're dealing with large, open battlegrounds and relying on strategically moving from cover piece to cover piece while avoiding getting mulched by Grinders. Naturally, it provides a greater sense of awareness of your enemy, your teammates, and what's going on, but some people may question its realism versus being a gameplay mechanic. "How do you know exactly what pillar your enemy is lurking behind so that you can pop out, shoot him in the head, and duck back down without being able to see him?" Well, the truth is, you really can't watch the entire battlefield at once without looking at it yourself. In Gears, however, being limited to seeing only what your character can see would result in your head getting sawn off every time you have to peep over the sandbags you're crouched behind, especially on higher difficulties. This makes the third-person view that provides a more accurate sense of the fight at hand very valuable to you, as a player, and with the easy transition between your generic third-person running-around-doing-the-dodge-roll-because-it-looks-funny and the third-person duck-and-cover-and-fire positions, it really helps you stay alive in those dangerous situations when you can't afford to be leaning around corners or standing up from behind your wooden box hideout.
As for the methods available to you to destroy your enemies, you have several, ranging from a weapon made of pure MANLINESS with fully automatic fire and a chainsaw bayonet to mortars that can rain fiery death onto enemies hundreds of meters away. The combat is fairly straight-forward in most regards; you find cover, you shoot at enemies with your weapon of choice. The aiming and firing controls are easy to learn, not too difficult to master, and generally allow even the most green player to pick up and whip some Locust ass. Reloading in Gears is a little mini-game in and of itself that I always thought was somewhat unique, if frivolous; you can reload your gun faster by hitting the "reload" button a second time when a little cursor beneath your weapon reaches the "sweet spot," with this spot varying in size and position depending on your gun's potential to kill things versus its reload time. In Gears 2, they made every weapon "standard," with the same-sized and positioned "sweet spot," which means that anyone with half a brain cell left can do it nearly every time, with only slight lag or over-eager miss-presses to blame for screw-ups. Hitting it exactly right is slightly more difficult, but rewards you with a damage boost for that magazine. It basically amounts to "Hitting the button on instinct to reload faster," or "Watching the reload cursor to hit it exactly on the dot for bonus damage." I don't know much about guns, but, how do better-loaded magazines increase bullet damage...?
For all the things I do like about the Gears series' gameplay design, there are flaws that exist in both, but most jarring are the ones in Gears 2. As much as I can praise the intuitive Cover system, Gears 2 seems to suffer from "The Cover That Isn't" syndrome. While running across a heated battlefield, holding the A button for dear life, you rush toward a low rise in the terrain and tap against it - usually enough to cause your character to duck behind it and avoid incoming fire. Instead, your character stands up and leg-humps the ridge ineffectually, forcing you to back up and try again, and often again, and often again before your character finally realizes that you want him to get the hell down. You may also find your character running straight down the middle of an area littered in cover, trying to outrun pursuing enemies, only to stop and press firmly, stubbornly, and wholly ineffectually against the nearest box while the enemies that were behind him line up their shots like they're in a carnival and you're a wooden duck with a target painted on its chest. I mean, I didn't tell him to veer left off his straight and clear path to stick to a box, but the game decided I did! Fun, huh?
The game's AI can also be praised and bemoaned, depending on how grumpy you are that day. During the single-player campaign you are often accompanied by at least one CPU-controlled ally, but you may be burdened with as many as FUCKING ALL OF THEM. At times it seems like humanity has literally thrown everything at the Locust threat and you're there, competing with every single buttmonkey redshirt (or in Gears' case, Helmet-Heads?) to not get shot, as invariably, the NPCs will always take the best cover positions to avoid enemy fire - which would be nice if you could get it, since if you die, the game is over. Your allies, to their credit, will duck behind and stay behind cover to provide support fire, singling out and targeting foes in unison to take them down rapidly...half the time. The other half of the time, they will run directly into the center of the enemy position and attempt to take cover on the same side of a sandbag dugout as the entire squad of human-hating psycho monsters. They will inevitably be "killed," but fortunately, you CAN revive any of your downed NPC squadmates, so long as you're alive. As a new addition to Gears 2, any of your other NPC squadmates can revive other downed NPC squadmates, something they endeavor to do like some kind of power-armored Jesus Christ. You will watch many a time as a hulking man in gunmetal armor crawls, bleeding, across the floor, begging you to help him, and another hulking man runs out into the middle of a heated crossfire to rescue him valiantly...only to fall down on one knee in a pool of his own blood and bemoan your slowness to come pick his ass up.
The enemy AI also leaves something to be desired. You will watch as Locust entrench themselves across the battlefield from you, spraying the area with bullets to keep you pinned down. You pop out, they duck down, and the cycle repeats...until one of them gets the idea to hide in FRONT of the sandbags, leaving him completely open to your hail of lead. Sometimes, an enemy will run out into no-man's land like a much uglier Rambo only to be mowed down and limp back toward the sandbags - and another enemy will leap out of cover to run over and revive him immediately, despite any number of bullets you put into either of their skulls. This sort of "The computer is a cheating bastard" is a relic from ye olde days of Nintendo, and can definitely be considered "Nintendo Hard." This is especially true on the higher difficulty levels. On Easy and even Normal, enemies can only take a few bursts from your rifle before they die and will miss you even if you were to stand up onto the nearest rocky outcropping and do the Charleston, but as soon as you hit Hard - or God forbid, Insane - they start soaking up entire magazines of damage-boosted ammo, while you're lanced through in three to four grazes to the left shin. On Normal mode, grenades, rockets, and several enemies that explode on you (and yes, there are SEVERAL) will take you down to almost-dead, whereas on Hard and up, practically everything is a one-hit kill. Grenades, rockets, the exploding fuckers, the large and hard-to-take-down monsters that will be employed against you generously, and sometimes even the environment will murder you at a moment's notice, forcing you to reload the nearest checkpoint again and again. This can make the already-repetitive encounters that make up a good 80% of your gametime even more so, as you're forced to run through the same waves of Locust who may or may not kill you again, depending on how the game feels about that casually-lobbed grenade landing next to your feet or mercifully bouncing off to only shave off half your health with shrapnel.
Despite these flaws, I still find myself having fun just running through and turning Locust into bacon bits with my chainsaw, because it's hard not to like a game that gives me a chainsaw.
Visual and Audio
I don't usually focus on the technical aspects of a game, because I don't consider myself much of a critic in the technical sense - if I like a game, I like it because it's a video game, not because it's using a revolutionary HD resolution and projected-directly-into-my-brain surround sound. Gears of War has been an exception for me due to the amazing quality of the visuals and the stirring soundtrack that fits in with its action, atmosphere, and theme. Gears 2 is nothing if not an improvement on this; the first time I played, I was amazed at everything happening on screen; particles flew around me as machinegun fire strafed my position, fires crackled and burned, bodies were hurled by a stray grenade skittering behind some cars. The sounds of battle, both near and far, filled my ears and the gunfire, the shouting, the thunderous boom of a truck's gas tank going up in flames, were stirring and really drew me into the experience of being there, ducking behind cover for your life, trying to find a way against these insurmountable odds.
Gears 2 goes a long way toward being a cinematic experience and I don't think anyone will be disappointed, although at times the 360 does seem to stutter over some textures, especially rendering small objects in the distance - one shot of several helicopters flying over the city saw some visual lag as buildings swiftly had to load their windows. But these moments are few and far between, proving that the console is a beast in performance and can still awe you with beautiful visuals and crisp sound.
Story
For as much as Gears 2 is an action game, it does continue the story from the first Gears of War game - you don't necessarily have to play the first to get the gist of the second, but it helps you identify with the characters as well as pick up on some of the plot devices that are going on all around you. The game tells its story mostly through exposition in short cutscenes and in-game dialogs as well as some new collectible items you find littered all about the levels. Despite the fact that putting it all together may still leave some gaping holes and a multitude of clarification questions, I did have to stop myself and try to keep in mind that each of the Gears games has been sadly short, and they aren't the wordy, 90-minute-opening-movie extravaganzas many games have become these days. If you're into the same kind of plot you'd get from a relatively well-done action flick, Gears 2 will keep you entertained as you move from Act to Act, and if you wanted more of the characters and more of the plot from the first, its sequel delivers.
Multiplayer
While I'm sure the Gears of War series has had an extensive run online of competitive players who want raw action in various scenarios, I don't much get into the Xbox Live multiplayer action and have thus far missed out on that portion. However, Gears and Gears 2 offer people like me an alternative, the kind you used to get when you and a friend plugged in two controllers in Contra way back in the day and went to kick some ass. The ability to locally play two-player co-op through the entire campaign is intensely fun, giving you and a friend the ability to essentially replace the cumbersome CPU partner and bark orders, warnings, and jabs back and forth all on your own. You become an effective team, providing cover for one another while taking down major threats in coordinated fashion. One person can snipe off grunts from afar, the other can bait them out to receive a well-placed bullet to the head. It makes the game easier, to be sure, but that says nothing for the fun to be had while you and a pal tear through the Locust hordes in heated encounters together, in the same room, able to talk at a normal volume and be clearly understood.
Summary
All in all, Gears of War 2 is a game I would have to try very hard to dislike. It's fast-paced, instant-gratification with a hint of story, a dash of drama, and plenty of badass. It's a great way to relieve stress and it continues along the same successes that made Gears of War such a fun ride to begin with. I eagerly anticipate a third entry in the series.
Christmas holiday was good to me, and I came out with several games that I look forward to playing. The one I decided to start off with was Gears of War 2.
Let me begin by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed Gears of War. I played it through on every difficulty setting, and it was one of the first games I actually owned for my Xbox 360. Its gory combat and fast-paced action sequences combined with just enough exposition to create a storyline worthy of the big-screens came together to form an experience I sorely missed with other action titles such as the HALO trilogy. I realize that action games have a notoriety for being shallow. They mostly feature explosions, headshots, and at best, very pretty renditions of explosions and headshots. The Gears of War series doesn't disappoint in this regard, but GoW 2 takes these to new and stunning heights that manage to impress even those of us who remember decimating our enemies with satellite-based weaponry and train-bombs.
Gameplay
"Getting the hang of it? It's just like riding a bicycle. A bicycle made of testosterone." - Explaining Gears of War 2's control scheme to a Gears of War veteran
Gears of War 2 is basically a retread of the first Gears of War in terms of gameplay, with few things changed. Some people may cry foul, seeing as how the control scheme, the concept, and mechanics are almost copy-pasted from the original. I would claim otherwise. Gears of War had a smooth and innovative control scheme and gameplay design that needed very little changing at all. With the context-sensitive Cover button that allowed you to crouch, dive, duck, wall-crawl, and otherwise avoid the vicious bullet-walls that your enemy would inevitably be hurling in your direction, you needed very little else; the Cover system was done very well and was in many cases extremely smart. This has not changed in the sequel, and now more than ever, you will need to combine the Cover system with a general awareness of your surroundings to survive the harsh battlefields that swarm with your bloodthirsty enemies.
Speaking of battle, the combat system remains a strong and effective use of the third-person, over-the-shoulder view. While several games have used it well in the past, Gears shows us what it can do when you're dealing with large, open battlegrounds and relying on strategically moving from cover piece to cover piece while avoiding getting mulched by Grinders. Naturally, it provides a greater sense of awareness of your enemy, your teammates, and what's going on, but some people may question its realism versus being a gameplay mechanic. "How do you know exactly what pillar your enemy is lurking behind so that you can pop out, shoot him in the head, and duck back down without being able to see him?" Well, the truth is, you really can't watch the entire battlefield at once without looking at it yourself. In Gears, however, being limited to seeing only what your character can see would result in your head getting sawn off every time you have to peep over the sandbags you're crouched behind, especially on higher difficulties. This makes the third-person view that provides a more accurate sense of the fight at hand very valuable to you, as a player, and with the easy transition between your generic third-person running-around-doing-the-dodge-roll-because-it-looks-funny and the third-person duck-and-cover-and-fire positions, it really helps you stay alive in those dangerous situations when you can't afford to be leaning around corners or standing up from behind your wooden box hideout.
As for the methods available to you to destroy your enemies, you have several, ranging from a weapon made of pure MANLINESS with fully automatic fire and a chainsaw bayonet to mortars that can rain fiery death onto enemies hundreds of meters away. The combat is fairly straight-forward in most regards; you find cover, you shoot at enemies with your weapon of choice. The aiming and firing controls are easy to learn, not too difficult to master, and generally allow even the most green player to pick up and whip some Locust ass. Reloading in Gears is a little mini-game in and of itself that I always thought was somewhat unique, if frivolous; you can reload your gun faster by hitting the "reload" button a second time when a little cursor beneath your weapon reaches the "sweet spot," with this spot varying in size and position depending on your gun's potential to kill things versus its reload time. In Gears 2, they made every weapon "standard," with the same-sized and positioned "sweet spot," which means that anyone with half a brain cell left can do it nearly every time, with only slight lag or over-eager miss-presses to blame for screw-ups. Hitting it exactly right is slightly more difficult, but rewards you with a damage boost for that magazine. It basically amounts to "Hitting the button on instinct to reload faster," or "Watching the reload cursor to hit it exactly on the dot for bonus damage." I don't know much about guns, but, how do better-loaded magazines increase bullet damage...?
For all the things I do like about the Gears series' gameplay design, there are flaws that exist in both, but most jarring are the ones in Gears 2. As much as I can praise the intuitive Cover system, Gears 2 seems to suffer from "The Cover That Isn't" syndrome. While running across a heated battlefield, holding the A button for dear life, you rush toward a low rise in the terrain and tap against it - usually enough to cause your character to duck behind it and avoid incoming fire. Instead, your character stands up and leg-humps the ridge ineffectually, forcing you to back up and try again, and often again, and often again before your character finally realizes that you want him to get the hell down. You may also find your character running straight down the middle of an area littered in cover, trying to outrun pursuing enemies, only to stop and press firmly, stubbornly, and wholly ineffectually against the nearest box while the enemies that were behind him line up their shots like they're in a carnival and you're a wooden duck with a target painted on its chest. I mean, I didn't tell him to veer left off his straight and clear path to stick to a box, but the game decided I did! Fun, huh?
The game's AI can also be praised and bemoaned, depending on how grumpy you are that day. During the single-player campaign you are often accompanied by at least one CPU-controlled ally, but you may be burdened with as many as FUCKING ALL OF THEM. At times it seems like humanity has literally thrown everything at the Locust threat and you're there, competing with every single buttmonkey redshirt (or in Gears' case, Helmet-Heads?) to not get shot, as invariably, the NPCs will always take the best cover positions to avoid enemy fire - which would be nice if you could get it, since if you die, the game is over. Your allies, to their credit, will duck behind and stay behind cover to provide support fire, singling out and targeting foes in unison to take them down rapidly...half the time. The other half of the time, they will run directly into the center of the enemy position and attempt to take cover on the same side of a sandbag dugout as the entire squad of human-hating psycho monsters. They will inevitably be "killed," but fortunately, you CAN revive any of your downed NPC squadmates, so long as you're alive. As a new addition to Gears 2, any of your other NPC squadmates can revive other downed NPC squadmates, something they endeavor to do like some kind of power-armored Jesus Christ. You will watch many a time as a hulking man in gunmetal armor crawls, bleeding, across the floor, begging you to help him, and another hulking man runs out into the middle of a heated crossfire to rescue him valiantly...only to fall down on one knee in a pool of his own blood and bemoan your slowness to come pick his ass up.
The enemy AI also leaves something to be desired. You will watch as Locust entrench themselves across the battlefield from you, spraying the area with bullets to keep you pinned down. You pop out, they duck down, and the cycle repeats...until one of them gets the idea to hide in FRONT of the sandbags, leaving him completely open to your hail of lead. Sometimes, an enemy will run out into no-man's land like a much uglier Rambo only to be mowed down and limp back toward the sandbags - and another enemy will leap out of cover to run over and revive him immediately, despite any number of bullets you put into either of their skulls. This sort of "The computer is a cheating bastard" is a relic from ye olde days of Nintendo, and can definitely be considered "Nintendo Hard." This is especially true on the higher difficulty levels. On Easy and even Normal, enemies can only take a few bursts from your rifle before they die and will miss you even if you were to stand up onto the nearest rocky outcropping and do the Charleston, but as soon as you hit Hard - or God forbid, Insane - they start soaking up entire magazines of damage-boosted ammo, while you're lanced through in three to four grazes to the left shin. On Normal mode, grenades, rockets, and several enemies that explode on you (and yes, there are SEVERAL) will take you down to almost-dead, whereas on Hard and up, practically everything is a one-hit kill. Grenades, rockets, the exploding fuckers, the large and hard-to-take-down monsters that will be employed against you generously, and sometimes even the environment will murder you at a moment's notice, forcing you to reload the nearest checkpoint again and again. This can make the already-repetitive encounters that make up a good 80% of your gametime even more so, as you're forced to run through the same waves of Locust who may or may not kill you again, depending on how the game feels about that casually-lobbed grenade landing next to your feet or mercifully bouncing off to only shave off half your health with shrapnel.
Despite these flaws, I still find myself having fun just running through and turning Locust into bacon bits with my chainsaw, because it's hard not to like a game that gives me a chainsaw.
Visual and Audio
I don't usually focus on the technical aspects of a game, because I don't consider myself much of a critic in the technical sense - if I like a game, I like it because it's a video game, not because it's using a revolutionary HD resolution and projected-directly-into-my-brain surround sound. Gears of War has been an exception for me due to the amazing quality of the visuals and the stirring soundtrack that fits in with its action, atmosphere, and theme. Gears 2 is nothing if not an improvement on this; the first time I played, I was amazed at everything happening on screen; particles flew around me as machinegun fire strafed my position, fires crackled and burned, bodies were hurled by a stray grenade skittering behind some cars. The sounds of battle, both near and far, filled my ears and the gunfire, the shouting, the thunderous boom of a truck's gas tank going up in flames, were stirring and really drew me into the experience of being there, ducking behind cover for your life, trying to find a way against these insurmountable odds.
Gears 2 goes a long way toward being a cinematic experience and I don't think anyone will be disappointed, although at times the 360 does seem to stutter over some textures, especially rendering small objects in the distance - one shot of several helicopters flying over the city saw some visual lag as buildings swiftly had to load their windows. But these moments are few and far between, proving that the console is a beast in performance and can still awe you with beautiful visuals and crisp sound.
Story
For as much as Gears 2 is an action game, it does continue the story from the first Gears of War game - you don't necessarily have to play the first to get the gist of the second, but it helps you identify with the characters as well as pick up on some of the plot devices that are going on all around you. The game tells its story mostly through exposition in short cutscenes and in-game dialogs as well as some new collectible items you find littered all about the levels. Despite the fact that putting it all together may still leave some gaping holes and a multitude of clarification questions, I did have to stop myself and try to keep in mind that each of the Gears games has been sadly short, and they aren't the wordy, 90-minute-opening-movie extravaganzas many games have become these days. If you're into the same kind of plot you'd get from a relatively well-done action flick, Gears 2 will keep you entertained as you move from Act to Act, and if you wanted more of the characters and more of the plot from the first, its sequel delivers.
Multiplayer
While I'm sure the Gears of War series has had an extensive run online of competitive players who want raw action in various scenarios, I don't much get into the Xbox Live multiplayer action and have thus far missed out on that portion. However, Gears and Gears 2 offer people like me an alternative, the kind you used to get when you and a friend plugged in two controllers in Contra way back in the day and went to kick some ass. The ability to locally play two-player co-op through the entire campaign is intensely fun, giving you and a friend the ability to essentially replace the cumbersome CPU partner and bark orders, warnings, and jabs back and forth all on your own. You become an effective team, providing cover for one another while taking down major threats in coordinated fashion. One person can snipe off grunts from afar, the other can bait them out to receive a well-placed bullet to the head. It makes the game easier, to be sure, but that says nothing for the fun to be had while you and a pal tear through the Locust hordes in heated encounters together, in the same room, able to talk at a normal volume and be clearly understood.
Summary
All in all, Gears of War 2 is a game I would have to try very hard to dislike. It's fast-paced, instant-gratification with a hint of story, a dash of drama, and plenty of badass. It's a great way to relieve stress and it continues along the same successes that made Gears of War such a fun ride to begin with. I eagerly anticipate a third entry in the series.
