Gears of War 2

Vocal detractors of Gears of War dismiss wholesale its alleged simple gameplay, its setting and presentation masking this all too obvious flaw. Its popularity is underserved, it’s the quintessential stupid hot chick, a reflection of easily duped and shallow gamers, they say. There’s some truth in this: Gears wouldn’t have the same impact without its top-notch presentation.

That said, one has to keep in mind that Gears of War and Gears of War 2 are action third-person shooters, and a shooter is what it is: mow down countless foes, wave after wave, in increasingly escalating scenarios until you remain victorious, the one-man saviour of [insert name here]. You’re either in or you’re out, it’s your cup of tea or not.

Personal preferences aside, I come to the defense of Gears of War with the argument that it can be appreciated for a deeper experience than most give it credit for. (Given its reception commercially and critically, however, it hardly needs my help.) The Gears of War formula has done, and is repeated now with Gears 2, a service to all shooters with very solid fundamentals based upon a deceptively complex cover system, offering up something more robust than just pointing and shooting.

Gears of War 2’s gameplay doesn’t reinvent the wheel. You will be forced to take cover in a myriad of ways against relentless and aggressive foes; should you decide to run and gun, you’ll be dead and buried. Here, as before, you’re able take cover behind low walls, high walls, fallen debris, corners, cars, and whatever else happens to be in the way. While in cover you can leap out of it, hurdle your cover to advance to another position, swat turn to an adjacent cover position, blind fire or stick your head out for more accurate fire.

In a way, the cover system provides elements of a thinking man’s game. While “get behind cover, don’t get shot” is a simple reality, there’s more to this simple premise. You’ll often find yourself in scenes with multiple cover points strewn about the field of play, each with a strategic advantage relevant to what’s happening. You’re going to have to move often to avoid being overrun and flanked. Vaulting into and out of cover quickly and with precision requires a mastery over the cover system’s intricacies, and a constant awareness of your surroundings, what options you have, and how the enemy is advancing.

Getting too comfortable in cover is not very wise, and not a luxury you can afford often. This was the case in the original, and Gears 2 introduces new foes that frequently reinforce this, what with their tendency to push you around and out of cover, forcing you to quickly reevaluate your position or die.

The slippery and lithe Kantas stalk the battlefield and summon Tickers. Tickers – small, mole-like suicide bombers – move with frightening speed and call out with their incessant and rapid clucking and clicking; the sound immediately induces panic. The flying mounts of the first game, Reavers, now land on your position and attempt to stomp the life out of you. Bloodmounts charge you position and vault over cover to strike with near instant death-dealing blows. These muscular, horrific, bulldog-like creatures soak up bullets like sponges to water and come equipped with a Locust rider and mounted gun – you will come to hate them.

Taken together, the enemy forces you to stay alert, evaluate, prioritize, and react quickly using your environment to your advantage, because they will viciously take the fight to you. And these aforementioned units are but a glimpse into the Locust hordes; all but the Berserker return in Gears 2, and they return in full force.

Each enemy in Gears 2 has such distinct personality, tactics, and weapons, that the cast feels, oddly enough, something more akin to the cast of a Mario game than it does another visceral shooter. The Drone is a Mushroom, the Theron Guard is a Koopa, the Boomer is a Hammer Bros., and the Brumak is a Bowser. Matching these various enemies into groupings for any particular scenario must have been both a challenge and a pleasure.

The resulting action forces you to evaluate not just your position but your enemy as well. How you take them out is just as important as how you protect yourself; that said, the two go hand in hand. As a Drone drops mortars on you from above, you may have to contend with any combination of Kantas and Tickers, other Drones, Boomers, Grinders, snipers, Bloodmounts, what have you. A Gears 2 achievement says it best: “Variety is the spice of death”.

Variety, indeed, is a theme oft repeated in Gears 2.

The cover system has also seen the requisite introduction of new elements. Most notable of these new cover options are of the moveable variety, such as the ability to grab enemies you’ve downed to use them as “meat shields”. The more incoming fire your meat shield absorbs, the more chewed up its body becomes until they’ve completely disintegrated. Or you can simply snap its neck at any time. It’s a great option for combat if only for the reason that it’s brutally sadistic, fitting perfectly with the gory nature of the game.

But the defensive additions feel inconsequential compared to the additions to your offensive repertoire. The biggest surprise of Gears 2 is just how much more improved the weapons are from Gears 1, but not because the weapons in the original weren’t satisfying. Quite the opposite actually, and that’s where the surprise is: the weapons didn’t need any improving.

Every single weapon in Gears 2 is a visceral pleasure of the highest order. Even the routine Lancer assault rifle has been tuned and its sound reworked such that it feels new all over again, and packs a bigger punch. The same can be said of the Locust Hammerburst assault rifle which pounds its targets with infrequent but massively powerful rounds, each exploding like a high-pitched cannon blast. Even the standard pistol has been rendered effective and feels incredible. It is pretty remarkable that these otherwise mundane weapons were given such attention.

Frankly, with the returning weapons given new life in this manner, it was hardly necessary to include new weapons, but new weapons they certainly included. Taking a page from Halo 3, you’re able to carry heavier weaponry slung beneath your arm. The mini-gun-like mulcher and mortar launcher are two such weapons, the heft of which prevent you from moving quickly and must be deployed and stationary in order to use effectively.

Despite the requisite trade-off in mobility, their effectiveness is brutally satisfying. The mulcher plows through Locust like wet paper, and is especially appreciated in the presence of tougher opponents such as Bloodmounts. The mortar launcher sends a projectile up, but comes down in a carpet bombing of many. It takes timing and anticipation, but if you’ve nailed the landing the ground will be showered in gibs.

Of course, any review wouldn’t be complete without mention of the scorcher, Gears 2’s equivalent of a flame thrower. The scorcher is, perhaps, the most satisfying of all weapons in Gears 2: enemies light up like Christmas trees, screaming and smoking until they’ve succumbed. Were it not for its limited reach, it would easily be the go to weapon for most players.

This increased variety does come at some cost, however: with more options at play, you’ll see certain weapons less frequently in action, and some hardly at all. The Hammer of Dawn, for instance, is barely present in Gears 2, which is a shame considering its beautiful new treatment.

As you may have gathered, the action in Gears 2 is just as gory as the original. Locust spurt geysers of crimson with every bullet and fall to messy pieces when exploded or chainsawed in two. New options such as a reverse chainsaw attack and context sensitive execution moves round out the over-the-top violence nicely. That said, if there can be such a thing as restraint in this context, Epic actually abstained from increasing the gore; there are simply more options to make it happen. The effort and balance is appreciated, as Gears tends to flirt with the edge of ridiculousness often enough.

The context in which all of this action takes place is very familiar. The overarching thrust of the narrative that’s of any importance is as simple as the first: Marcus Fenix and the COG soldiers are back to fighting the Locust yet again, except this time they’re going underground in person in a last ditch effort to wipe out the Locust where they live. There are attempts here to expand upon the plot, and they certainly do so. However, they haven’t answered a single solitary question raised in the first game, and only offer more intrigue instead. In practice, I didn’t find this lack of directness very disappointing or confusing; a little intrigue goes a long way, after all.

But there is a very disappointing major sub-plot, the only one that actually does get resolved, one meant to inject some genuine emotion. Dom’s search for his wife is treated with such overblown, ham-fisted bluntness that, in hindsight, the game would have been better without it altogether. The climatic resolution is so forcibly overdramatic and utterly nonsensical that most will stare at the screen quizzically until they’ve managed to reconcile what actually happened. It is so embarrassingly awkward and poorly handled that it not only knocks the game down a peg or two, it actually calls into question the competency of the developers in this regard.

Putting this aside, Gears 2 otherwise has great atmosphere. Perfectly cast voice-acting elevates the proceedings as a whole, albeit the hyper-masculine one-liners are a bit much at times. The pounding orchestral score and sound work in general lend everything a heightened, epic and frenetic pace when need be, and a sullen and eerie pace during breaks in the combat.

The settings of Gears 2 are also brilliantly realized with a more robust Unreal Engine III running behind the scenes. Lighting in particular and other atmospheric effects have seen considerable improvements, with texture work as good as, if not better than the original game. It is a stunning looking game, no doubt, but it must be said that the impact isn’t as great as the first which should come as a surprise to no one.

Regardless of the now routine technical feats accomplished by Epic, it’s what they’ve done with their custom built engine that’s most impressive. After a rather mundane opening sequence far too reminiscent of Gears 1, Gears 2 steers directly towards the fantastic and into places you simply would have never contemplated. Gears 1 was best when it flexed its imagination, and in Gears 2 the imagination is set ablaze.

This may be the game’s greatest triumph, the confidence in which it weaves into and out of the most epic and unreal scenarios and settings and set-pieces. Having laid a solid foundation in Gears 1, it is clear that Cliffy B. and his team were inspired to let themselves go completely ballistic. (As an aside: I will only refer to his full name after he stops wearing his awful, juvenile T-shirts.) The worlds are dazzling, unique, and full of variety, often opening up to beautifully huge vistas, be they above or underground, or inside… things.

Moreover, along with this genius variety in scenery comes a surprising amount of variety in gameplay. Epic appears to have strived to toss things up as frequently as possible in Gears 2, almost an implicit admission that they needed to break-up the now familiar combat lest it become too repetitive. Whatever their motivation, they’ve succeeded in breaking up the routine by routinely throwing something new at you.

On rails shooters, by way of example, never seem like a great idea on paper. However, there are few of these sequences in Gears 2, and they may be some of the most thrilling parts of the game. Gears 2 also places you in near complete darkness a handful of times, if for no other reason to show off their enhanced lighting effects in the form of a solitary light source to guide you through. The pacing overall in Gears 2 is as polished as it was in the original.

As thrilling as the proceedings tend to be, the game isn’t without its occasional peaks in massive frustration, stopping the game in its tracks from time to time. Despite the apparent hundreds of tweaks made to the cover system, it is still unwieldy during periods of extreme pressure, and performing an unintended maneuver that puts you in extreme danger is common place. Moreover, there is one particular boss battle featuring an incredibly cheap and transparent attempt at making the battle tougher; I won’t say much, but I will say that heat-seeking stone pillars are on their own special level of stupidity. Lastly, your AI teammates will occasionally throw themselves to the wolves requiring they be revived in the middle of direct danger, or they’ll bleed-out and die ending your run – it was times like these I wished for a functional command system like the one in the first game, which they’ve completely done away with here.

Ironically, these frustrations are frequently a precursor to massive levels of satisfaction. There has rarely been a game that has had the ability to evoke such a strong emotional reaction after winning a particularly tough and protracted battle. It’s a combination of hateful enemies, their viciousness, your own brutal weapons and strategies at hand, and the implicit understanding that you can win, that carries you through to often climactic victory.

While the campaign offers its own unique set of pleasurable challenges, the multiplayer offers longevity of the same order.

The competitive multiplayer portion of Gears 2 has been beefed up and fleshed out more thoroughly, features some clever and intuitive ways to join your friends, and even includes a tutorial to acclimate players to the different game modes. There’s even the ability to view matches as a detached observer during matches, allowing you to swing a camera around freely and take pictures of the action; these pictures are automatically scored based on how much action you’ve captured, and can then be uploaded to gearsofwar.com.

Still, the multiplayer is as hardcore as it was in the original game, tougher to manage than other top tier online shooters like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. There’s a steep learning curve to Gears 2 multiplayer – those who have mastered it will wipe the floor red with your bloody, eviscerated remains. Playing with friends in a less hostile environment before going public and into the unforgiving wilds of Xbox LIVE is most ideal.

In fact, almost contrary to the multiplayer’s severely antagonistic nature, Gears 2 tends to support this team-like, cooperative attitude quite well. An objective-based playlist “Territories” features game types concerned less about kills and more about teamwork. Submission (formerly known as “Meat Flag”) is a particularly notable addition, a capture the flag game type where the flag is an actual, shotgun-wielding AI civilian that needs to be shot down first, then grabbed and dragged to the capture point to score. There is, of course, the full campaign online co-op which is as much good fun as it was in the original. Divergent paths in the campaign offer more than a strictly linear affair with two players simply plopped onto the field.

There is also the newest and most talked about mode, Horde. Horde supports five player cooperative gameplay on multiplayer maps, where you and your teammates face off against 50 waves of increasingly aggressive and powerful AI controlled Locust. It’s great fun, offers a great deal of variety, and is especially appealing to those who would rather not get mocked by a 14 year old knob who plays Gears multiplayer eight hours a day and just curb stomped your skull for the umpteenth time.

Getting into Gears of War 2 is practically effortless for those who’ve played the original, and there are likely few who will come to this sequel without some knowledge of its predecessor. In a way, it’s enough to state that it’s as satisfying as the first despite not having quite the same impact. But this would unduly simplify what Epic has accomplished here.