Gears of War 2: Just Almost There.

I feel that I have to apologize for the lateness of this post. I, unfortunately, had a lapse in judgment and allowed school to get in the way of what's really important. But now I hope to set the schedule straight and post again this Saturday, though what I will be posting about is up in the air. Today, however I have a shiny new game review for you approval or seething scorn.

I was impressed with Gears of War 2. It fell into a happy medium that many sequels miss in that the sequel is so changed from the original that all the things that made the original good are tragically absent (Devil May Cry 2), or they don't change at all and fail to take the chance to improve on a good game (Fable 2). Gear of War 2 keeps the core gameplay much the same. Anyone who has played the original game can pick up the controller and know exactly how to play. In some games, that isn't a good thing, but Gears of War was fun in great part because of how it was played. The duck-and-cover, over-the-shoulder shooting aspect worked really well and has remained untouched as well as the nifty active-reload system. Divisions of good and evil remain pleasantly polarized. The good guys are the humans and the bad guys are the Locust. It's even easier to tell than in the westerns where the good guy always wore a white hat.

Included in the changes however, are new weapons, enemies, and fun things to do with downed enemies, including using them act as a, and I quote: “bullet sponge.” Any one who has played the first game may wonder why no one ever mentions Marcus' mystical ability to close his allies' bullet-wounds by simply picking them up; such an observant player may also think to him/herself that it would be quite convenient if the rest of Delta Squad could emulate this almost magical touch. Well, congratulations: now anyone can revive a downed character, although if you are playing by yourself, you've got about a fifty/fifty chance that a computer-controlled character will bother trying to revive you before you bleed out. In one notable bit of gameplay, I was downed just after killing the last enemy on the field. I crawled pathetically around Dom who was just standing there, not shooting at anyone, for several seconds until I died. Apparently Dom really wanted to be sergent of Delta (God knows why).

The story, likewise is a very good evolution from the original game with some hiccups. It takes place some time after the Light-Mass Bomb went off, but the Locust are not dead and they seem to be attacking more voraciously than ever. In the fist game, everything centered around Delta Squad, and the player never hears about anything else going on in the war. It is very much as if Delta are the only four fucking soldiers fighting the damn war. Gears 2 expands its viewpoint so that the player sees that there is other shit going on, but Delta (through luck and bureaucracy) seem to end up doing all the most important (read: deadly) missions, including staging a four-man raid on the Locust capital city. What is more important, however, is that there is some really good character development going on. Marcus has settled into his position as Delta's sergeant. Dom's quest to find his wife takes a larger role and works its way into the events of the war. Anya becomes more than just a voice that feeds Delta Squad tactical info and there appears to be some subtle sexual tension between she and Marcus. There is also Carmine. This character is never seen without his helmet obscuring his face, which means that he will die. The player may notice that his name is Carmine, which is the same name of the first guy to die in the original Gears. This Carmine is his brother (which makes for some amusing dialog during the tutorial) but really, he's the same fucking person. Carmine appears to be there so that the sadistic people of Epic games can have someone to kill in interesting ways (I counted two instances where I was sure he was dead, but it was the third that got him. He's much tougher than his brother was). Tai, however is included in the game to be one tough son-of-a-bitch to kill until he gets tortured by the Locusts and kills himself. His role in the game is to show the player how fucked-up the Locust torturing techniques are and also so that the player will understand what has been happening to poor Maria.

One thing that was done really well was the use of some concern. Anya actually appears to worry about Marcus' well-being and at one point, Dom asks Marcus to keep looking for Maria if he doesn't make it. This makes sense since everything the do should be fucking suicide. It makes me wonder why that kind of talk wasn't included in the first game.

The voice-acting and dialog is alright. Dom has a few unconvincing “God damn its” toward the beginning, but the fact that John Di Maggio (the voice-actor for Marcus) gargles a nice, big glassfull of rocks before every voicing session works to the character's advantage. Some of the cutscene lines are pretty lame (Couldn't Marcus come up with anything better to say to Dom after he euthanizes his own wife other than “She's in a better place”) but others are damn good (“Well lets go chunk some bullets at them grubs”) Many of the other in-game one-liners are really good. Just about anything Baird says is classic and Cole is... Well, he's Cole.

Any grievances that I have voiced until now are really very minor. The game, overall is very good and I look forward to many playthroughs. What very nearly breaks the game for me, however, is the ending. While the ending cutscene is really good, the actual climactic battle and the setup to it are unacceptable. In the previous game, the player is introduced to the lambent wretches that explode violently when they die. Apparently emulsion fluid (no, I don't know what the fuck that is either) exposure causes living things to either get cancer (or “rust lung”) or to glow in the dark and go boom. So when the bomb they were brining into the Locust Hollow gets destroyed before detonating, the the solution is to detonate a lambent Brumak, which is a big monster to which emulsion exposure acts as the virus from Resident Evil. Let's look at what we have here: the lambent wretches didn't look any different other than they were glowing in the dark, and their explosions were only about the size of their bodies. The lambent grubs seen in one cutscene looked like grubs that glow in the dark. Why would the lambent Brumak's jaws outgrow its mouth and why would it suddenly sprout tentacles? Neither does it make and fucking sense that it's explosion would be so great as to match the Light-Mass Bomb which is the rough equivalent to a nuke. The last part of the game just doesn't make sense and is anti-climactic. Even the gameplay here is lame. The final boss of the last game was Raam, who carried a turret and had a cloud of angry bats to protect him from gunfire. Raam wasn't hard to beat once the player figured out how, but there was still the figuring out how that was the trick. One would think that a giant monster would prove a harder fight than a relatively big guy with a pretty big gun. It isn't. Even on the hardest difficulty all one has to do is point at the lambent brumak and fire. It will then die and explode and the game will be won. There is no real challenge here and it's anti-climactic. Simply put: there is no excuse for the ending of a game that is so good to be this bad.

Gears of War 2 is a really good game. It's fun to play, the dialog is entertaining, and there are some really nice literary things beginning to develop. I would recommend getting it, playing it, enjoying it, and when it gets to that last fight, choke that crap down so you can watch the final cutscene, and don't forget to listen to the message after the final cutscene.

Oh, and the multiplayer is fun too,
-Zac