That's pretty manly.
Writers note: I have not played Gears of War 1, or 3 at the time of writing this. I am judging the game on its own merits.
For me, the popular shooters have lost what made them fun. Every main-stream multiplayer monster of today is a First Person Shooter, and a lot of games that want to be unique, decide to go down the First Person Shooter genre to gaurantee sales. FPS games have gotten slow, boring, repetitive, unimaginative and they all feel the same, or a cheap and easy way to make a quick buck. That's why Gears of War dragged me in. A giant monster of multiplayer that's not in first person? Over the shoulder so I can see my character and watch him kick ass? A camera viewpoint which allows me to have some actual peripheral vision? Just the camera angle first drew me in, so I did some research. One more interesting thing after another and soon I found myself borrowing the game, becoming quite pleased and promptly buying it a couple months after giving it back. While it has its share of problems, the game is finally able to put a spin on "point your guns at people and shoot" that actually holds my interest. And so, the following is why.
As per usual, lets start with the story set-up. From what I've gathered, humans kept doing their human thing on the planet Sera, fighting eachother until some alien rock-looking people called the Locust showed up to fuck things up. All of humanity had to link together to fight against the Locust, and even then it became what felt like a losing battle. In Gears of War 1, I'm pretty sure we were introduced to many of the characters, four of the most important ones being Marcus Fenix (very very angry man), Dominic Santiago (very
emotional man, his armor lite-brites are also broken), Baird (a very cocky, and comic relief character) and Augustus "Coletrain" Cole. (large screaming black man who suprisingly doesn't die.) In the first game, the four of them brought a huge-ass bomb to the middle of the Locust hive, and proceeded to blow them back to kingdom come, ending the war.
Or so they thought, since, in Gears 2, the Locust are alive and well, and have pushed the human army back to one big city called Jacinto, their last armored, safe haven. As you can guess it's slowly becoming less safe. To once again combat the threat, you will be playing as Marcus Fenix, and always have Dominic Santiago by your side, whether he be computer controlled or be played by your good ol' Xbox buddy (or you're playing as Dom) it's a campaign designed for Co-oping.
Now whether you're playing campaign, or going online/offline-with-AI-bots in Multiplayer, the controls for Gears are a multitude different, and more complex than pointing and shooting. The main huge stepping stone for Gears is it's cover system. By tapping the A button, and using the analog stick, you can quickly press your back up against a wall, chest-high barrier, the corner of a wall, all to avoid bullets and peek in, or out of a corner to shoot, and duck back to safety. The cover system can also allow you to quickly zip over to the next wall, or if you're against something tall you can crouch or stand, confusing your enemy should they be trying to rush to you and miss your head. I know that Gears is not the first game to do cover, but it's probably done it the best. In most games, the cover often feels cumbersome, heavy and just not worth it trying to struggle. But here, it's a quick tap of the button and you're in safety. Moving left and right along the wall, blindfiring (shooting out of the cover without peeking yourself out) and of course stepping or jumping out is all handled quickly, smoothly, and doesn't hinder the player whatsoever. The other glorious part, is that, usually no matter what you do when you take cover there's always a toe or hair sticking out even to people directly on the other side. This makes most games' cover useless but Gears remedies this by giving you a smaller hitbox that can only be nabbed at by being a lot more open to your attacker. While it's strange sometimes to watch bullets going through your shoulder and not hurting you, it's a damn blessing and actually makes this system worth something.
Otherwise, this game has also somehow managed to refine the old act of shooting people. You can shoot in two different ways. One is by aiming with one button, causing a reticul
e to come up on the screen, and then shooting with the other. This mode is accurate, zooms in slightly, but you walk slowly while using it. The other way is firing from the hip. Done simply by shooting without aiming. There's no aiming sight, and the gun becomes much more inaccurate, but this method is useful for quickly whipping around to shoot, jog-strafing while keeping your enemy under cover with a bullet-rain, and you can also perform this while in cover. Firing out of cover much less accurately, but keeping your head behind the wall, called Blindfiring. Pretty self explanatory. Either aim and shoot slow and straight, or, jog and fire wildly and fast. Your choice. Different strokes for different situations.
And finally, the movement of your character is also done well enough. If anything, the movement might be what suffers in a couple questionable areas, but it still works great. The left analog stick will move and strafe your character in all four directions, and the right makes him turn side to side, or look up and down. He can walk, jog, and if you hold down the A button, he will go into Roadie Run. This causes him to crouch, and run forward at high speed. He's a little harder to steer like this but by combining the Roadie Run with other well-practiced movements, he can flow seamlessly across the battlefield. Unfortunately the Roadie Run camera also starts shaking spastically, which I could have lived without but it isn't a huge deal. Finally for movement is the dodgeroll. It's a little big questionable how it actually works. I just mash the A button two or three times to get my Gear soldier to dive roll in whatever direction I press. He can dive forward, backward, left or right and all directions are fast, and you can even turn the camera while rolling to face a specific direction when you stand, even if he sometimes fails to roll where you'd like, preffering to dive somewhere more dangerous.
Now that we've covered how you move, let's cover your armory. You have four slots to hold four weapons, each of which is accessible by the D-Pad. The Up slot is your grenades. These range from Smoke, to Frag, to a poisonous gas cloud Ink grenade. Each of these can he carefully aimed, hip-thrown, or if you're feeling fancy enough, you can press B to tag the grenade onto a wall, turning it into a proximity mine. (Even fancier is the ability to tag it right onto an opponent. Haahaha.) In your Down slot your pistol. There is three of these in the game, ranging from a basic fast-fire okay damage gun, to a slow, powerful magnum revolver, and to a burst-fire SMG. You may only hold one type of pistol, or grenade at a time. Finally, in your left or right slots, you can hold two of many types of weapons in the game, and here's where the real mean guns come in.
For the most part, you have quite a few basic. A burst rifle, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, there's even a deadlier version of a grenade launcher. But the game has some wicked choices within it too, the most popularly known being the Lancer machine gun. What makes it special is it's melee attack. When you hold B, the gun will lift up, and start revving it's chainsaw. Yes, chainsaw. Quite a few mechanics are packed into the chainsaw fun alone. While holding up the chainsaw, you move just a slight bit slower while trying to close in on your enemy. Should you get close enough to them, they're sucked into an instant-kill that saws them right in half. It may sound cheap, but it's hard to pull off because if someone shoots you, your saw will go back down, and you won't be able to use it for a couple more seconds. Each time you attempt to in this timeframe, your character will simply jump back a little. So the chainsaw needs to be used at the right time, at the right place. And finally into the chainsaws, if your opponent is facing you, and they as well have a Lancer, (they don't need to be revving for this) you'll enter a chainsaw duel. Both saws will collide in the air, and whoever mashes the B button the most pushes the other person back and saws them right down the middle. It's very rare for those duels to happen but when they do, and you win, it's the most satisfying feeling you usually get out of the game. Oh boy is it satisfying.
There's a couple other fantastic guns lying around as well. Specifically, the Torque Bow. It has no scope, but it's a charge-up weapon that, once fully charged, will stick it's bow right into an enemy and explode, usually guaranteeing a one-hit kill. It's hard to use but if you're even luckier, you can fully charge it to go through one enemy's head and hit another one. Or blow up two at the same time. Etc. Then there's the heavy weapons. There is two of these, and they can't be held in your inventory. You pick them up, and they're often slow and cumbersome to use. These consist of the Mortar or Mulcher. The first is a high-lobbing airstrike style bomb which you can use to sweep out enemies behind cover, or support your troops. The second is an absolutely devastating gatling gun that you either walk with while firing, place on the ground or place onto cover to shoot. Slow to use, but will bring someone into pieces within seconds of concentrated fire.
Almost all of these weapons can be reloaded, and even there comes in a cute little twist. When you reload, a tiny bar shows up in place of your clip counter, and shows a little sweet spot while a line glides along it. If you press the reload button again as soon as that line hits the sweet spot, (think of the power meter in golfing games) you'll reload much faster, and your new ammo will get a temporary damage boost called an Active Reload. This makes this one of the only games where you don't specifically want to be fully loaded all the time. If you know where the enemy is, you can leave a few shells out of your gun until you're ready to "Active Reload" and bring them down. However, if you miss the sweet spot, your gun will jam, causing your reload to be significantly slowed down by a few more seconds which can mean the difference between living or dying, so be careful.
Finally, I just wanna quickly touch on the health system. You have no actual health bar. Rather, as you're shot and damaged, a red skull with slowly start fading in on the center of the screen. If you can get behind cover and wait long enough, the skull will go away and you're free to fight again. Yes, regenerating health. Oh well, it's the new thing I guess. If it lights up all the way however, well, read below.
Whether you be burning, smacking, shooting or exploding your enemies, if they don't die right away they'll be crawling on the floor slowly after you damage them enough. If you happen to be the one brought down to your hands and knees, you have only a limited time to crawl back to a partner and have them revive you, before you either get killed by an enemy or simply bleed to death. If your enemy is the one you've sent crawling however, now you get your opportunity to rub it in with Executions. If you didn't kill them right away you can walk up and finish them off with many a satisfying kill. Chainsawing them, curb-stomping them, and of course my personal favourite, kicking them over onto their backside and punching the hell out of their face. Some weapons even come with their own unique executions. This is also an opportunity for strategy. You can use a crawling enemy to draw other enemies to you, or you can pick him up and use him as a meatshield, allowing you to tank the battlefield for a little bit till your shield is expired from being too riddled with bullets. But if you can't get close to finish the kill, you can always just keep firing bullets into him from afar till he's dead. That works too.
So, generally that's the gameplay covered. But for a mainstream game, it's probably gotta look and sound good right? Well, first let's tackle the looks. Let's just say that the environments do look like they're textured, the characters animate fluidly, and it's all still pretty pleasing. But it does have one big, g
laring issue with it's art design. Brown. I understand that it's going for a barren wasteland war mood, but there's times where what was on screen was quite literally just different shades of brown that I was surprised I could see through. Hell, it was hard finding pictures for this review that didn't look like a mess! It's an amazement that we've come far enough to display trillions of colors on-screen at the same time and yet developers choose to pick the three blandest colors and stick with them. I guess it looks nice, you just gotta see what brown can do for you.
Otherwise I can tackle sound. I'd have to give the musical score here a definite plus. During combat in the campaign, intense mood-setting and sometimes even epic choruses of a soundtrack will echo the intensity and stakes of your combat. The sound in game also seems to have some time put into it. Almost every gun sounds hard, and fun to use. You also get great feedback hearing your enemy groan in pain, and hearing the bullets splatter into their flesh. Even the characters talk believably, and are fun to listen to when they get angry. Unfortunately, the characters are a little blandly voiced, mostly shown by their in-combat quotes seem to all be the same. I've heard the same line spouted from about five different mouths here. To make blandness worse, the huge downside of the sound is that like a lot of games these days the multiplayer lacks any music to be mentioned. I have my own tunes to play, but that's hardly an excuse. Give the job to a couple of nerds with music programs, chances are they'll fix something up to go with your levels nicely. But no, the multiplayer comes, unsurprisingly with no music to speak of. Oh well. Unreal Tournament soundtracks go real well here anyway.
Before I sink into multiplayer which I've now mentioned a few times, I can quickly sum up the campaign. It's a rather well-done campaign. Linear for sure, but it will reward your exploration with ammo, or maybe even a collectible text-file that you can read, 40 something of which are scattered across the full campaign. Between walking, searching and preparing is your combat. Mostly it consists of good ol' cover fights that you can handle a couple ways. Usually the battlefield is swayed just right into your favor anyway, allowing you to get the high ground on enemies, or arm yourself with a giant gatling turret for a storm of them to come through a door. There's even a couple vehicle sections, and some monstrous bosses and whatnots to fight. The Locust come in many different sizes. From human, to bastardly-small, and really really big. Hell, there's even a giant dinosaur looking thing armed with gatling guns and missile launchers. It's not an amazing campaign, but you might play it a couple times, and you'll enjoy your first time through going from cities, to underground, to mountains to what have you.
So finally, I'm gonna bite into the big fat multiplayer fish. None of the actual controls here have changed, but the fact you're fighting human players who have the same power as you definitely will change your strategy. Each game mode consists of up to 10 players total, five for each team Human and Locust. For both teams, you can also pick your character you wish to use, well over the amount required for everyone to have a unique character. You cannot use the various campaign monsters on the Locust team here, both sides are exactly the same with a man, and a gun and two legs. For these you have about ten levels to fight in, most of which are symmetrically designed, and you have the game modes as follows.
Warzone, is a spin on Team Deathmatch. Each team must simply eliminate the other, and every player gets one life. This means that, if you die, that's it until one of the teams is completely wiped out and the next round starts. The winner is chosen by whoever reaches 5 round wins first. This number can be changed in Custom Matches.
Execution. This is the same as Warzone, but crawling enemies rules are changed a bit, if someone isn't killed instantly they'll be crawling on the ground. In this state, they can only be killed by someone getting close enough to perform a special execution on them. You MUST be close to them to finish the kill, and if you don't they'll revive themselves at the end of their bleedout time and be ready to come hailing back at you. Luckily, they can only go down three times before simply dying so it doesn't become endless shooting.
Guardian. This mode picks up the stakes and strategy. One player on each team is chosen as the leader. As long as this person is alive, the team may respawn and respawn as many times as possible to continue protecting the leader and assaulting the other. Once the leader dies however, every team member is instantly on their last life. So the objective is to kill the leader by any means neccessary, and then finish sweeping the team. Next round, the leader is chosen randomly.
Wingman. This mode is a multi-team based mode. Two people are on each team, with a total of five teams, made up of ten players. This mode follows Execution rules for the killing, but your score is actually decided by how many people you kill, rather than how many matches are survived. I actually didn't like this choice, as it forced you to go out guns blazing and brick your quiet, sneaky ninja tactics, but it's still fun nonetheless. It's also the only mode where you can watch a human curb-stomp another human.
Submission. A spin on Capture the Flag. One random NPC with a shotgun is spawned somewhere in the map. Both teams must attempt to shoot him down to his knees (he cannot die) take him for a meatshield (he doesn't block any bullets) and bring him to a designated area. If someone can hold their Meatflag in the specific area for a certain amount of time, they earn their team a capture. This mode is considered one of the more chaotic, as it can be over in seconds, or one round can go on for minutes. Personally, between me and my friends we're a little dissapointed that an optional eleventh player isn't allowed to play as the Meatflag. It would be impossible to win, but it's also impossible for the Meatflag to die so it's be fun holding yourself off against ten people trying to kidnap you. But it isn't there, and it's a small idea I wish had made it into development.
King of The Hill. This is about the only classic mode that hasn't had a spin put onto it. Simply put, a random weapon spawn on the map is chosen as the Hill location, and teams will be fighting eachother to gain total control of this hill. As long as you hold the hill, it will continue giving you a steady flow of points. Once a team reaches the point limit, or once time runs out, the team who has gained the most points from said hill receives a round point. Usually this goes to 2 round wins, changeable in a Custom match.
Annex. Oops! King of the Hill does have a cute spin! Annex is different from King of the Hill in that the Hill actually moves. Once the hill is drained of all it's points, it will dissapear, and another random weapon spawn will be chosen as the new location. Whichever team reaches the point limit first, wins a round. It's fun to have both teams viciously fighting eachother just to gain control of the hill and suck away it's one remaining point.
Through all of these matches, you will gain experience based on how well you do. All the way from level 1, to level 100, it's somewhat satisfying to level up, but I'm not sure
why. You don't actually get anything for leveling up except a shiny new medal. Some new character unlocks or something would have been nice, but there's absolutely no rewards for leveling up except achievements. I reached level 100 because I'm an achievement whore, and you don't even get the higher level achievements unless you have specific DLC, which is simply put, a stupid stupid move. There's no excuse for it.
As well as speaking of DLC, I'd also like to point out the Social Xbox Live playlist. The Social playlist will always be in your multiplayer menu, constantly. Even if you don't have the map packs. The problem is, if you don't have all the maps you are not allowed to play on Social. It's a tease, mean, and strange move that probably angers anyone with just vanilla Gears. More and more games tease you with DLC you can't select, and it's getting on my nerves.
But regardless, the multiplayer is competent, somewhat fresh, and if you have no access to online, thank god the game allows you to play fully with bots, allowing you to play offline, create funky custom matches or simply practice new moves or refine old one. Unfortunately with the bots, they're bumright dumb. They work... okay. For the most part they move, shoot, use a reasonable weapon for the situation, they work okay. But occasionally they'll perform the stupidest moves. Usually this means they'll take cover on a wall that's right out in the open, and then not react whatsoever when someone is busy shooting them. It also takes bots ages to kill eachother off, so watching them fight is like watching an exercise in motor-skills retraining. Though I'd rather have them dumb, than not at all. However, besides their intelligence, the bots also have the ability to do physically impossible things. This includes roadie running with a heavy weapon (their character model spazzes out pretty humorously) shooting bullets sideways out of the barrel, looking one way with their camera the other way, or just recently, a campaign enemy fired its mortar backwards, causing me to unexpectedly blow up when I flanked him from behind. I really wonder what causes some of these but they're funny to watch anyway.
Finally, there's Horde mode. I left this till the bottom of the list because it can be a single, or Co-op experience. Up to five players play as the human cog army. You will find yourself battling wave, after wave of campaign-style computer controlled enemies in an effort to live as far as you physically can, all the way up to Wave 50 in whatever multiplayer map you choose. They're all compatible. Sadly you can't have AI partners, but if you feel like being a badass, you can go it alone and see how long your single ass can go (which often isn't long) or team up with a few friends or some randoms in ranked matches, and see how far you go with backup. Using cover-deployable metal shields you can make ghetto-style bases, and hopefully everyone will cooperate together. The downside is that after Wave 10, it'll repeat the same enemies for every ten waves, each time just boosting their stats. For example, there will be sires on waves 6, 16, 26, 36, and 46 upwards. It's a livable problem, but it sure looks lazy. Still, it does give you a few waves every time it loops to get prepared for the tougher waves past the 5, 15, 25, etc marks. The other dissapointment is that none of the monumental enemies from campaign are brought here. It's understandable that they couldn't squish in, but I still would have loved to see one of those giant dinosaurs with guns slapped in there to mess with me. Oh well. Horde mode is at it's heart, a deadly Survival Mode which I believe every game with fun combat needs.
And to close this review, I'd like to finally attack the game community and some of it's networking faults. The community is not something I can blame the game for though, so the negatives here about people are not the game's fault. It's the people who play it, so technically this section is null and void, but hey it's gotta be said. The good thing about the community is that it's actually one of the few online games that's almost empty of five year olds. I rarely hear a squealing voice or whiney baby. But the people that are there do say annoying things. Constantly throwing out slanderous sexual insults, and the ever-so-common "omg host advantage" that makes me want to rip my ears out. It's obvious that hosts of a match have a slight advantage. It's just science. But blaming your entire loss on it is a poor practice that makes you look a schlub.
In combat, it's hardly ever consistent either. There's times where I've done so suspiciously well that I actually feel bad for the person on the other side of my badassness. Then there's the times where we have a well-fought even match and despite who wins I walk out feeling satisfied about a good match. But the ones that get under my skin are the ones I'd like to call "shotgun rushers". This usually consists of three, or the whole team of players that literally dash across the battlefield and simply close the distance to blow everyone away with shotguns. I'd like to believe I can try and combat this technique, but I swear even when I have my shotgun inside their stomach and I fire, they hardly flinch, and usually when you get one shotgun rushing team you're bound to encounter a few in a row. I'll be honest, I sometimes quit out of rage. A bot will replace me anyway so it's all good right?
As a quick piece of networking issues as well, the games level system seems to be broken for some people. I've had friends that have been reset down level one, apparentely multiple times. It's never happened for me, but I'd watch out. Another irritating thing is that when you are connected to Live, the game has to go into updating mode for almost every menu. You can't select menu items while it's doing this. I don't know why it feels the need to go into Updating processes every time I start it up or return to the menu, but there's the occasional times where I guess the servers shit themselves and it stays in Updating process for ever, making me shut it off. Certainly something I would have lived without rather.
That brings me into my final negative for this review. The shotguns. From what I hear, they've been nerfed many times throughout Gears 2's life and they're still a little overpowered. Why use any other gun at all when the shotgun is an up-close instant kill, and can down someone in two shots from halfway across the battlefield? The shotgun is also pretty inconsistent as well. Whereas I'll be taking cover on a barrier and someone is covering on the other side, I'll fire a shell directly into their head and they won't move a muscle, but then they duck out of cover, and blow me into bits in one blow. There's many variations of this damage inconsistency, but they're all anger inducing, no doubt. However they seem to be limited to the shotgun, so that's not a global problem, even if the shotguns make up a large portion of play.
FINAL SAY:
Despite ending the review on a sore note, Gears of War 2 is what I would call a great game that actually stands out from the rest of the shooter crowd. Except of course for the big use of brown colors. With of course it's slew of problems (the gamer community being the worst but I can't blame them) it's still fun to play, kick some ass, it's a bit unique and most importantly, it's made even more fun if you grab a few friends and go online or decide to blow eachother to bits and pieces. If you want a competitive game with guns that's actually different than the mindless masses try checking this out. It's cinematic, complex gameplay may be your fancy!
For me, the popular shooters have lost what made them fun. Every main-stream multiplayer monster of today is a First Person Shooter, and a lot of games that want to be unique, decide to go down the First Person Shooter genre to gaurantee sales. FPS games have gotten slow, boring, repetitive, unimaginative and they all feel the same, or a cheap and easy way to make a quick buck. That's why Gears of War dragged me in. A giant monster of multiplayer that's not in first person? Over the shoulder so I can see my character and watch him kick ass? A camera viewpoint which allows me to have some actual peripheral vision? Just the camera angle first drew me in, so I did some research. One more interesting thing after another and soon I found myself borrowing the game, becoming quite pleased and promptly buying it a couple months after giving it back. While it has its share of problems, the game is finally able to put a spin on "point your guns at people and shoot" that actually holds my interest. And so, the following is why.
As per usual, lets start with the story set-up. From what I've gathered, humans kept doing their human thing on the planet Sera, fighting eachother until some alien rock-looking people called the Locust showed up to fuck things up. All of humanity had to link together to fight against the Locust, and even then it became what felt like a losing battle. In Gears of War 1, I'm pretty sure we were introduced to many of the characters, four of the most important ones being Marcus Fenix (very very angry man), Dominic Santiago (very
emotional man, his armor lite-brites are also broken), Baird (a very cocky, and comic relief character) and Augustus "Coletrain" Cole. (large screaming black man who suprisingly doesn't die.) In the first game, the four of them brought a huge-ass bomb to the middle of the Locust hive, and proceeded to blow them back to kingdom come, ending the war.Or so they thought, since, in Gears 2, the Locust are alive and well, and have pushed the human army back to one big city called Jacinto, their last armored, safe haven. As you can guess it's slowly becoming less safe. To once again combat the threat, you will be playing as Marcus Fenix, and always have Dominic Santiago by your side, whether he be computer controlled or be played by your good ol' Xbox buddy (or you're playing as Dom) it's a campaign designed for Co-oping.
Now whether you're playing campaign, or going online/offline-with-AI-bots in Multiplayer, the controls for Gears are a multitude different, and more complex than pointing and shooting. The main huge stepping stone for Gears is it's cover system. By tapping the A button, and using the analog stick, you can quickly press your back up against a wall, chest-high barrier, the corner of a wall, all to avoid bullets and peek in, or out of a corner to shoot, and duck back to safety. The cover system can also allow you to quickly zip over to the next wall, or if you're against something tall you can crouch or stand, confusing your enemy should they be trying to rush to you and miss your head. I know that Gears is not the first game to do cover, but it's probably done it the best. In most games, the cover often feels cumbersome, heavy and just not worth it trying to struggle. But here, it's a quick tap of the button and you're in safety. Moving left and right along the wall, blindfiring (shooting out of the cover without peeking yourself out) and of course stepping or jumping out is all handled quickly, smoothly, and doesn't hinder the player whatsoever. The other glorious part, is that, usually no matter what you do when you take cover there's always a toe or hair sticking out even to people directly on the other side. This makes most games' cover useless but Gears remedies this by giving you a smaller hitbox that can only be nabbed at by being a lot more open to your attacker. While it's strange sometimes to watch bullets going through your shoulder and not hurting you, it's a damn blessing and actually makes this system worth something.
Otherwise, this game has also somehow managed to refine the old act of shooting people. You can shoot in two different ways. One is by aiming with one button, causing a reticul
e to come up on the screen, and then shooting with the other. This mode is accurate, zooms in slightly, but you walk slowly while using it. The other way is firing from the hip. Done simply by shooting without aiming. There's no aiming sight, and the gun becomes much more inaccurate, but this method is useful for quickly whipping around to shoot, jog-strafing while keeping your enemy under cover with a bullet-rain, and you can also perform this while in cover. Firing out of cover much less accurately, but keeping your head behind the wall, called Blindfiring. Pretty self explanatory. Either aim and shoot slow and straight, or, jog and fire wildly and fast. Your choice. Different strokes for different situations.And finally, the movement of your character is also done well enough. If anything, the movement might be what suffers in a couple questionable areas, but it still works great. The left analog stick will move and strafe your character in all four directions, and the right makes him turn side to side, or look up and down. He can walk, jog, and if you hold down the A button, he will go into Roadie Run. This causes him to crouch, and run forward at high speed. He's a little harder to steer like this but by combining the Roadie Run with other well-practiced movements, he can flow seamlessly across the battlefield. Unfortunately the Roadie Run camera also starts shaking spastically, which I could have lived without but it isn't a huge deal. Finally for movement is the dodgeroll. It's a little big questionable how it actually works. I just mash the A button two or three times to get my Gear soldier to dive roll in whatever direction I press. He can dive forward, backward, left or right and all directions are fast, and you can even turn the camera while rolling to face a specific direction when you stand, even if he sometimes fails to roll where you'd like, preffering to dive somewhere more dangerous.
Now that we've covered how you move, let's cover your armory. You have four slots to hold four weapons, each of which is accessible by the D-Pad. The Up slot is your grenades. These range from Smoke, to Frag, to a poisonous gas cloud Ink grenade. Each of these can he carefully aimed, hip-thrown, or if you're feeling fancy enough, you can press B to tag the grenade onto a wall, turning it into a proximity mine. (Even fancier is the ability to tag it right onto an opponent. Haahaha.) In your Down slot your pistol. There is three of these in the game, ranging from a basic fast-fire okay damage gun, to a slow, powerful magnum revolver, and to a burst-fire SMG. You may only hold one type of pistol, or grenade at a time. Finally, in your left or right slots, you can hold two of many types of weapons in the game, and here's where the real mean guns come in.
For the most part, you have quite a few basic. A burst rifle, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, there's even a deadlier version of a grenade launcher. But the game has some wicked choices within it too, the most popularly known being the Lancer machine gun. What makes it special is it's melee attack. When you hold B, the gun will lift up, and start revving it's chainsaw. Yes, chainsaw. Quite a few mechanics are packed into the chainsaw fun alone. While holding up the chainsaw, you move just a slight bit slower while trying to close in on your enemy. Should you get close enough to them, they're sucked into an instant-kill that saws them right in half. It may sound cheap, but it's hard to pull off because if someone shoots you, your saw will go back down, and you won't be able to use it for a couple more seconds. Each time you attempt to in this timeframe, your character will simply jump back a little. So the chainsaw needs to be used at the right time, at the right place. And finally into the chainsaws, if your opponent is facing you, and they as well have a Lancer, (they don't need to be revving for this) you'll enter a chainsaw duel. Both saws will collide in the air, and whoever mashes the B button the most pushes the other person back and saws them right down the middle. It's very rare for those duels to happen but when they do, and you win, it's the most satisfying feeling you usually get out of the game. Oh boy is it satisfying.
There's a couple other fantastic guns lying around as well. Specifically, the Torque Bow. It has no scope, but it's a charge-up weapon that, once fully charged, will stick it's bow right into an enemy and explode, usually guaranteeing a one-hit kill. It's hard to use but if you're even luckier, you can fully charge it to go through one enemy's head and hit another one. Or blow up two at the same time. Etc. Then there's the heavy weapons. There is two of these, and they can't be held in your inventory. You pick them up, and they're often slow and cumbersome to use. These consist of the Mortar or Mulcher. The first is a high-lobbing airstrike style bomb which you can use to sweep out enemies behind cover, or support your troops. The second is an absolutely devastating gatling gun that you either walk with while firing, place on the ground or place onto cover to shoot. Slow to use, but will bring someone into pieces within seconds of concentrated fire.Almost all of these weapons can be reloaded, and even there comes in a cute little twist. When you reload, a tiny bar shows up in place of your clip counter, and shows a little sweet spot while a line glides along it. If you press the reload button again as soon as that line hits the sweet spot, (think of the power meter in golfing games) you'll reload much faster, and your new ammo will get a temporary damage boost called an Active Reload. This makes this one of the only games where you don't specifically want to be fully loaded all the time. If you know where the enemy is, you can leave a few shells out of your gun until you're ready to "Active Reload" and bring them down. However, if you miss the sweet spot, your gun will jam, causing your reload to be significantly slowed down by a few more seconds which can mean the difference between living or dying, so be careful.
Finally, I just wanna quickly touch on the health system. You have no actual health bar. Rather, as you're shot and damaged, a red skull with slowly start fading in on the center of the screen. If you can get behind cover and wait long enough, the skull will go away and you're free to fight again. Yes, regenerating health. Oh well, it's the new thing I guess. If it lights up all the way however, well, read below.
Whether you be burning, smacking, shooting or exploding your enemies, if they don't die right away they'll be crawling on the floor slowly after you damage them enough. If you happen to be the one brought down to your hands and knees, you have only a limited time to crawl back to a partner and have them revive you, before you either get killed by an enemy or simply bleed to death. If your enemy is the one you've sent crawling however, now you get your opportunity to rub it in with Executions. If you didn't kill them right away you can walk up and finish them off with many a satisfying kill. Chainsawing them, curb-stomping them, and of course my personal favourite, kicking them over onto their backside and punching the hell out of their face. Some weapons even come with their own unique executions. This is also an opportunity for strategy. You can use a crawling enemy to draw other enemies to you, or you can pick him up and use him as a meatshield, allowing you to tank the battlefield for a little bit till your shield is expired from being too riddled with bullets. But if you can't get close to finish the kill, you can always just keep firing bullets into him from afar till he's dead. That works too.
So, generally that's the gameplay covered. But for a mainstream game, it's probably gotta look and sound good right? Well, first let's tackle the looks. Let's just say that the environments do look like they're textured, the characters animate fluidly, and it's all still pretty pleasing. But it does have one big, g
laring issue with it's art design. Brown. I understand that it's going for a barren wasteland war mood, but there's times where what was on screen was quite literally just different shades of brown that I was surprised I could see through. Hell, it was hard finding pictures for this review that didn't look like a mess! It's an amazement that we've come far enough to display trillions of colors on-screen at the same time and yet developers choose to pick the three blandest colors and stick with them. I guess it looks nice, you just gotta see what brown can do for you.Otherwise I can tackle sound. I'd have to give the musical score here a definite plus. During combat in the campaign, intense mood-setting and sometimes even epic choruses of a soundtrack will echo the intensity and stakes of your combat. The sound in game also seems to have some time put into it. Almost every gun sounds hard, and fun to use. You also get great feedback hearing your enemy groan in pain, and hearing the bullets splatter into their flesh. Even the characters talk believably, and are fun to listen to when they get angry. Unfortunately, the characters are a little blandly voiced, mostly shown by their in-combat quotes seem to all be the same. I've heard the same line spouted from about five different mouths here. To make blandness worse, the huge downside of the sound is that like a lot of games these days the multiplayer lacks any music to be mentioned. I have my own tunes to play, but that's hardly an excuse. Give the job to a couple of nerds with music programs, chances are they'll fix something up to go with your levels nicely. But no, the multiplayer comes, unsurprisingly with no music to speak of. Oh well. Unreal Tournament soundtracks go real well here anyway.
Before I sink into multiplayer which I've now mentioned a few times, I can quickly sum up the campaign. It's a rather well-done campaign. Linear for sure, but it will reward your exploration with ammo, or maybe even a collectible text-file that you can read, 40 something of which are scattered across the full campaign. Between walking, searching and preparing is your combat. Mostly it consists of good ol' cover fights that you can handle a couple ways. Usually the battlefield is swayed just right into your favor anyway, allowing you to get the high ground on enemies, or arm yourself with a giant gatling turret for a storm of them to come through a door. There's even a couple vehicle sections, and some monstrous bosses and whatnots to fight. The Locust come in many different sizes. From human, to bastardly-small, and really really big. Hell, there's even a giant dinosaur looking thing armed with gatling guns and missile launchers. It's not an amazing campaign, but you might play it a couple times, and you'll enjoy your first time through going from cities, to underground, to mountains to what have you.
So finally, I'm gonna bite into the big fat multiplayer fish. None of the actual controls here have changed, but the fact you're fighting human players who have the same power as you definitely will change your strategy. Each game mode consists of up to 10 players total, five for each team Human and Locust. For both teams, you can also pick your character you wish to use, well over the amount required for everyone to have a unique character. You cannot use the various campaign monsters on the Locust team here, both sides are exactly the same with a man, and a gun and two legs. For these you have about ten levels to fight in, most of which are symmetrically designed, and you have the game modes as follows.
Warzone, is a spin on Team Deathmatch. Each team must simply eliminate the other, and every player gets one life. This means that, if you die, that's it until one of the teams is completely wiped out and the next round starts. The winner is chosen by whoever reaches 5 round wins first. This number can be changed in Custom Matches.
Execution. This is the same as Warzone, but crawling enemies rules are changed a bit, if someone isn't killed instantly they'll be crawling on the ground. In this state, they can only be killed by someone getting close enough to perform a special execution on them. You MUST be close to them to finish the kill, and if you don't they'll revive themselves at the end of their bleedout time and be ready to come hailing back at you. Luckily, they can only go down three times before simply dying so it doesn't become endless shooting.
Guardian. This mode picks up the stakes and strategy. One player on each team is chosen as the leader. As long as this person is alive, the team may respawn and respawn as many times as possible to continue protecting the leader and assaulting the other. Once the leader dies however, every team member is instantly on their last life. So the objective is to kill the leader by any means neccessary, and then finish sweeping the team. Next round, the leader is chosen randomly.
Wingman. This mode is a multi-team based mode. Two people are on each team, with a total of five teams, made up of ten players. This mode follows Execution rules for the killing, but your score is actually decided by how many people you kill, rather than how many matches are survived. I actually didn't like this choice, as it forced you to go out guns blazing and brick your quiet, sneaky ninja tactics, but it's still fun nonetheless. It's also the only mode where you can watch a human curb-stomp another human.
Submission. A spin on Capture the Flag. One random NPC with a shotgun is spawned somewhere in the map. Both teams must attempt to shoot him down to his knees (he cannot die) take him for a meatshield (he doesn't block any bullets) and bring him to a designated area. If someone can hold their Meatflag in the specific area for a certain amount of time, they earn their team a capture. This mode is considered one of the more chaotic, as it can be over in seconds, or one round can go on for minutes. Personally, between me and my friends we're a little dissapointed that an optional eleventh player isn't allowed to play as the Meatflag. It would be impossible to win, but it's also impossible for the Meatflag to die so it's be fun holding yourself off against ten people trying to kidnap you. But it isn't there, and it's a small idea I wish had made it into development.
King of The Hill. This is about the only classic mode that hasn't had a spin put onto it. Simply put, a random weapon spawn on the map is chosen as the Hill location, and teams will be fighting eachother to gain total control of this hill. As long as you hold the hill, it will continue giving you a steady flow of points. Once a team reaches the point limit, or once time runs out, the team who has gained the most points from said hill receives a round point. Usually this goes to 2 round wins, changeable in a Custom match.
Annex. Oops! King of the Hill does have a cute spin! Annex is different from King of the Hill in that the Hill actually moves. Once the hill is drained of all it's points, it will dissapear, and another random weapon spawn will be chosen as the new location. Whichever team reaches the point limit first, wins a round. It's fun to have both teams viciously fighting eachother just to gain control of the hill and suck away it's one remaining point.
Through all of these matches, you will gain experience based on how well you do. All the way from level 1, to level 100, it's somewhat satisfying to level up, but I'm not sure
why. You don't actually get anything for leveling up except a shiny new medal. Some new character unlocks or something would have been nice, but there's absolutely no rewards for leveling up except achievements. I reached level 100 because I'm an achievement whore, and you don't even get the higher level achievements unless you have specific DLC, which is simply put, a stupid stupid move. There's no excuse for it.As well as speaking of DLC, I'd also like to point out the Social Xbox Live playlist. The Social playlist will always be in your multiplayer menu, constantly. Even if you don't have the map packs. The problem is, if you don't have all the maps you are not allowed to play on Social. It's a tease, mean, and strange move that probably angers anyone with just vanilla Gears. More and more games tease you with DLC you can't select, and it's getting on my nerves.
But regardless, the multiplayer is competent, somewhat fresh, and if you have no access to online, thank god the game allows you to play fully with bots, allowing you to play offline, create funky custom matches or simply practice new moves or refine old one. Unfortunately with the bots, they're bumright dumb. They work... okay. For the most part they move, shoot, use a reasonable weapon for the situation, they work okay. But occasionally they'll perform the stupidest moves. Usually this means they'll take cover on a wall that's right out in the open, and then not react whatsoever when someone is busy shooting them. It also takes bots ages to kill eachother off, so watching them fight is like watching an exercise in motor-skills retraining. Though I'd rather have them dumb, than not at all. However, besides their intelligence, the bots also have the ability to do physically impossible things. This includes roadie running with a heavy weapon (their character model spazzes out pretty humorously) shooting bullets sideways out of the barrel, looking one way with their camera the other way, or just recently, a campaign enemy fired its mortar backwards, causing me to unexpectedly blow up when I flanked him from behind. I really wonder what causes some of these but they're funny to watch anyway.
Finally, there's Horde mode. I left this till the bottom of the list because it can be a single, or Co-op experience. Up to five players play as the human cog army. You will find yourself battling wave, after wave of campaign-style computer controlled enemies in an effort to live as far as you physically can, all the way up to Wave 50 in whatever multiplayer map you choose. They're all compatible. Sadly you can't have AI partners, but if you feel like being a badass, you can go it alone and see how long your single ass can go (which often isn't long) or team up with a few friends or some randoms in ranked matches, and see how far you go with backup. Using cover-deployable metal shields you can make ghetto-style bases, and hopefully everyone will cooperate together. The downside is that after Wave 10, it'll repeat the same enemies for every ten waves, each time just boosting their stats. For example, there will be sires on waves 6, 16, 26, 36, and 46 upwards. It's a livable problem, but it sure looks lazy. Still, it does give you a few waves every time it loops to get prepared for the tougher waves past the 5, 15, 25, etc marks. The other dissapointment is that none of the monumental enemies from campaign are brought here. It's understandable that they couldn't squish in, but I still would have loved to see one of those giant dinosaurs with guns slapped in there to mess with me. Oh well. Horde mode is at it's heart, a deadly Survival Mode which I believe every game with fun combat needs.
And to close this review, I'd like to finally attack the game community and some of it's networking faults. The community is not something I can blame the game for though, so the negatives here about people are not the game's fault. It's the people who play it, so technically this section is null and void, but hey it's gotta be said. The good thing about the community is that it's actually one of the few online games that's almost empty of five year olds. I rarely hear a squealing voice or whiney baby. But the people that are there do say annoying things. Constantly throwing out slanderous sexual insults, and the ever-so-common "omg host advantage" that makes me want to rip my ears out. It's obvious that hosts of a match have a slight advantage. It's just science. But blaming your entire loss on it is a poor practice that makes you look a schlub.
In combat, it's hardly ever consistent either. There's times where I've done so suspiciously well that I actually feel bad for the person on the other side of my badassness. Then there's the times where we have a well-fought even match and despite who wins I walk out feeling satisfied about a good match. But the ones that get under my skin are the ones I'd like to call "shotgun rushers". This usually consists of three, or the whole team of players that literally dash across the battlefield and simply close the distance to blow everyone away with shotguns. I'd like to believe I can try and combat this technique, but I swear even when I have my shotgun inside their stomach and I fire, they hardly flinch, and usually when you get one shotgun rushing team you're bound to encounter a few in a row. I'll be honest, I sometimes quit out of rage. A bot will replace me anyway so it's all good right?
As a quick piece of networking issues as well, the games level system seems to be broken for some people. I've had friends that have been reset down level one, apparentely multiple times. It's never happened for me, but I'd watch out. Another irritating thing is that when you are connected to Live, the game has to go into updating mode for almost every menu. You can't select menu items while it's doing this. I don't know why it feels the need to go into Updating processes every time I start it up or return to the menu, but there's the occasional times where I guess the servers shit themselves and it stays in Updating process for ever, making me shut it off. Certainly something I would have lived without rather.
That brings me into my final negative for this review. The shotguns. From what I hear, they've been nerfed many times throughout Gears 2's life and they're still a little overpowered. Why use any other gun at all when the shotgun is an up-close instant kill, and can down someone in two shots from halfway across the battlefield? The shotgun is also pretty inconsistent as well. Whereas I'll be taking cover on a barrier and someone is covering on the other side, I'll fire a shell directly into their head and they won't move a muscle, but then they duck out of cover, and blow me into bits in one blow. There's many variations of this damage inconsistency, but they're all anger inducing, no doubt. However they seem to be limited to the shotgun, so that's not a global problem, even if the shotguns make up a large portion of play.
FINAL SAY:
Despite ending the review on a sore note, Gears of War 2 is what I would call a great game that actually stands out from the rest of the shooter crowd. Except of course for the big use of brown colors. With of course it's slew of problems (the gamer community being the worst but I can't blame them) it's still fun to play, kick some ass, it's a bit unique and most importantly, it's made even more fun if you grab a few friends and go online or decide to blow eachother to bits and pieces. If you want a competitive game with guns that's actually different than the mindless masses try checking this out. It's cinematic, complex gameplay may be your fancy!
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