Gears of War 2 didn't wow me as much in 2011 as Gears of War did
in 2006. Part of that is just the time difference - I've played a lot of
shooters in that period, and most games don't benefit from waiting
until a couple years after release to check them out. I do think it's
still a slightly less impressive game than the original though. It's a
sequel that doesn't do a whole lot new - its cover mechanics are still
among the best in the business, but they're not exactly fresh; its
mantra of being bigger and more badass doesn't result in combat
situations that are necessarily more interesting; and in a world where
plenty of games combine third person shooting with other fun elements,
games that are nothing but third person shooting the entire time don't
stand out as much. It's still a really solid shooter - the graphics
still look great two and a half years later, the fundamentals of the
gameplay are as good as anybody's, and there are a few surprising ideas
sprinkled around. It just didn't strike me as a great game the same way
the first Gears did - the first game set the tone for action games for
the whole generation, while the second is... just the second one.
I've had people tell me Gears is really meant to be played co-op, and
perhaps I am doing the game a small disservice by only playing it by
myself. But that's how I play most games, and I believe that if one
actually needs to be played with a friend to be awesome, then it's not
really awesome - almost everything is better if you're doing it with
friends, so it's not actually to a game's credit that it has working
co-op. I played Gears 1 by myself too, so it's not like that was the
factor that caused me to find the game slightly disappointing. Nothing
was really missing at all, it's just that the things they added weren't
enough to maintain the same thrill throughout the length of the
campaign. Large set pieces like riding a huge platform on wheels through
a forest look neat but don't quite result in especially memorable
action, and too much of the game is spent in environments I found fairly
dull - underground caverns that have a lot of technically impressive
art in them, but are a bit boring stylistically and end in formulaic
boss fights. I enjoyed the game more when I was battling through a
war-torn city near the end, and wish there was more of that - I know
some people are bored of shooters that use too many flashy scripted
events to shake up the action, but it usually at least distracts you
from fighting through a lot of similar battles over and over.
Few of the new weapons made a real impact, and I mostly ended up using
what I was familiar with. In some ways, the Lancer is actually too good
of a weapon. It's reasonably accurate, it holds a lot of ammo, and it
has the best melee ability in the game - there's no reason to ever not
have one, so you're limited to fewer slots for experimentation. It's the
gun I used for a significant majority of both games, and I don't expect
that to change in the third - if they made it wilder or took away the
chainsaw to compensate, fans would throw a fit. Additions to the things
you can do in combat didn't quite pay off. For example, the idea of
being able to pick up a wounded enemy and use him as a shield sounds
neat, but it rarely comes up in actual gameplay, because you spend most
of your time ducking behind a wall across that battlefield from most of
your enemies, and I suspect opportunities for that kind of up-close
scuffle are even more rare on harder difficulty levels, where a couple
seconds out of cover are likely to get you torn to shreds. This even has
an additional negative effect on the game - downed enemies can now
crawl around looking for help like your buddies can, which results in
them either being revived and dragging out fights, or being hidden out
of sight when everyone else is dead, preventing the game from playing
the sound that indicates you've cleared the room of enemies, making you
unsure of what's happening for a little while. The fact that you
yourself can now be revived as long as your friends are still walking
mitigates it somewhat, but it's still an annoyance.
Another example of a somewhat superfluous feature is the addition of
certain areas where the cover can be raised or lowered out of the ground
by switches, and you have to make sure you're protected and your
enemies aren't during fights. It's kind of a cool idea, but it doesn't
result in many actual battles of much strategic significance, and it
sort of just makes you wonder why the Locust thought it would be cool to
fill their city with switches that raise and lower chest-high metal
walls with no real purpose. That's not even the only new cover gimmick -
for some reason Epic seemed to feel the need to experiment with that
stuff, but just give me a few sandbags or crumbled columns to lean
against and I won't complain. On the positive side, I did enjoy the
increased variety in the "vehicle" sections, and the game gets stronger
as it goes on. I was kind of surprised by how late some of the stuff
they showed before the game's release ended up being in the final
campaign, but luckily that didn't cause it to lose too much impact. I
enjoyed it when the tone departed a bit from the dude bro action
somewhere in the middle, and again, it's hard to overstate how nice the
game looks.
Story-wise, it's... well, it's Gears. John DiMaggio plays a gruff-voiced
badass in charge of a group of badasses who don't take no shit and
refuse to wear helmets, because they obscure your vision more than they
expose your brain to getting bullets shot into it. It's a mostly cheesy
conglomeration of action, war, and science fiction tropes that works
well enough to keep things going without ever being especially memorable
or profound. Dom's still kind of a wiener, although now he has a
shoehorned in subplot where he's searching for his wife that makes his
wienerness stand out more. Cole's still over the top, and Baird is still
the secretly likable one. There are a couple new guys, although they
don't end up getting much to do. The queen of the Locust Horde still
seems out of place in this setting, and while the climax and conclusion
of the story seemed better formed this time, it also ended kind of
abruptly in the game itself. They clearly put more effort into the back
story with some tangents that seem like they could come up again and
hidden notes scattered everywhere, though honestly I didn't feel
compelled to track that stuff down or even read it when I found it.
Being that this is the era of trilogies, the third game is supposed to
bring this grand arc to a close later this year, and while I don't
really care what happens to any of these people, I imagine I'll end up
playing it at some point. The Gears of War series is not exactly one I
have a real affection for, but it's hard to say they're not competent,
well-made games.
