Gears of War 2

Laggy games but still worth playing
Rating:4 out of 5 stars
Finnally all the DLC contents have been releases and would only be justice to give a review after everything is done. If you are still wondering if you should get this game, then you should get the Game of the year edition. The price of all DLC’s are about [...] and having to pay [...] for the game is awesome. The game itself is good and challanging but playing it with someone else is better. Completing the game in Insane and have your partner play on easy and let him do all the work but still lets you get the insane chevo is even better. Gears 2 is easier than the first and the online is verry laggy. Being able to play 5 vs 5 is better than 4 vs 4 in my opinion but I love Wingman, Submission and the new version of Assassination. The new weapons and the new version of the hammerburst is awesome, more skill required than the lancer. Several changes have been made through popular requests though the Gears 2 website like smoke grenades and shotgun power. 10x easier to find a match online than the first 2 months of the release and different cattagories on the type of matches that you will have to vote: Submission or assassination; exacussion or warzone, annez or king of the hill or just plain old wingman.

A love-hate relationship
Rating:2 out of 5 stars
Just so you know, I have only played this on single player. I don’t play online, and being a relatively new gamer my only experience with Gears 1 was playing through once with my son when he was visiting recently. That said…

There are some things I love about this game. Great graphics, rapid reloads, mostly interesting game play. Unfortunately, there is much to hate as well (at least for me), and those issues make it a lot less fun that it would be otherwise. I’ve played through it on Easy (to get a feel for the game and learn the maps) and Hardcore and am in the middle of Insane now.

- Useless cutscenes. I like cutscenes that develop a story line, but Gears 2 has a lot of short cutscenes that don’t do anything but pull you out of the game experience and disrupt continuity. For example, in one place you’re walking up a ramp onto a ship and halfway up a cutscene kicks it to show you and your team walking up the ramp. Very short, no dialog, and when it ends you’re just on the ship, but feeling disoriented because you just appeared there instantly (the cutscene ends before you actually get on the ship and take your position).

- Another cutscene issue is that right in the middle of fighting bad guys a cutscene will start and finish the battle for me. If I wanted to watch characters fight battles without my input I’d watch a movie. This happens at least three times. Very annoying.

- Pseudo-cutscenes. This is what I call action sequences where I control my character, but nothing I do has any effect on anything and I just have to let the scene play out before there’s any point in doing anything. I timed one of them and it was about 35 seconds long, and you can’t skip these like you can cutscenes. You have to let them play out, and when they precede a challenging part of the game where I have to go through the same scene over and over until I figure out how to overcome a particular challenge, it’s really annoying after a while.

- Several checkpoints are badly placed in my opinion. Reach a checkpoint, walk here, go down stairs, walk a while, turn some corners, walk more, hit a cutscene, and then the action starts. If I die, repeat. Too many checkpoints occur right before a bunch of non-challenging stuff that’s just tedious. And there aren’t enough checkpoints for my tastes. Some of the most challenging parts of the game for me are well past a checkpoint, and the parts before that aren’t that challenging. It gets really old having to fight two or three batches of bad guys, run here, walk there, jump barriers, turn cranks, pick up ammo, blah, blah, blah, only to get killed in the same spot over and over until I figure out the trick to survive that section. I’m actually dealing with one of those sections at the Insane level now.

- Weapons disappear quickly or just aren’t there. In some parts of the game I can kill some bad guys and when I move to where they were their weapons are gone so I can’t get their ammo. If I move past weapons, and try to go back a minute later to get ammo they’ll probably be gone. Sometimes I hit a checkpoint when there are weapons on the ground. I’ll get their ammo or swap weapons, but if I die, when I come back to the checkpoint, the weapons aren’t there. In one case I had a mulcher at a checkpoint, but after I died and came back to that checkpoint, I didn’t have the mulcher. When I come back to a checkpoint, the state of the game should be exactly as it was before.

- My AI teammates do too much sometimes and not enough at others. There are battles, even at the Insane level, where if I just hang back, my teammates will kill most of the enemy, so if I take some time to look for ammo or collectables, for example, by the time I join the action, there may not be much action left.

- Too linear. I’m a big fan of Halo 3, and one of the things I love about it is that there are almost always several completely different ways to accomplish something. You can run-and-gun or you can snipe. Go on foot or in a vehicle. Get in and out of vehicles as you wish. Drive, ride, or run the turret in a warthog. I might drive a wraith for most of an objective one time and not use one at all another time. This adds tremendously to the replayability in single-player mode. Gears 2 has virtually none of that. There’s a little of it, but not much. There’s a section where you’re in a Centaur. You drive a path and shoot bad guys. If you’re a decent shot it’s boring and it seems like an unimaginative way to stretch out the game. At least in Halo 3 I can add a bit of variety when I drive a Scorpion by giving riders interesting weapons so they can help, and I can stop, get out, pick up ammo, and so on. In this I just drive and shoot until I get to a cutscene and I’m out of the Centaur.

Another time I’m riding a reaver and shooting something behind me. Shoot here, shoot there, no real variation or other options, just a test to see how well I can shoot something that’s moving wildly around the screen with a turret…for a long time. Now that I think about it, shoot rapidly moving targets, sometimes while I’m moving too, seems to be a relatively common task in this game.

- Big holes in the story line. You spend an entire level exploring an abandoned research facility formerly run by humans. Vague hints at who ran it and its purpose are given by the AI security system, but mostly it just raises questions that are never answered. Something else happens later in the game that raises questions that aren’t answered. The obvious assumption is that there will be a Gears 3 that answers those questions.

- Bugs. I just downloaded an update, so maybe the bugs I’ve encountered were addressed, but I was transported several feet and couldn’t move a couple of times in one section and I just had to go back to the last checkpoint to recover. There are places where I have to walk off a ledge, but if I don’t position myself exactly right I just stop and don’t go off the edge.

I know these may seem like quibbles to more experienced gamers, but for me the overall effect is to make the game much more frustrating than I think it should be. Give me maximum control over my character. Let me do my own fighting. Let me do my own walking. Don’t make me repeat tedious sequences of actions when I die and come back to a checkpoint.

Overall it’s a very cool game if you’re playing it once and are good enough that you don’t die much. In that case you won’t encounter the issues I’ve listed for the most part. You’ll want to watch all the cutscenes, and pseudo-cutscenes to get the full story and you probably won’t die and get sent back to checkpoints enough to get really frustrated by some of the issues related to them. That’s my son’s situation. He’s an experience gamer who has played Gears 1 a lot, and he likes playing online. So he’s played this on Hardcore with some friends in co-op mode. I don’t think he ever played through it as a single player and not on Insane.

I bought this used and I’ve enjoyed it, but once I finish it on Insane I’ll probably sell it. Definitely not something I’d play multiple times at the same difficulty level.

Rating:5 out of 5 stars
Pros-

-good campaign

-fun multiplayer

-horde mode (survive up to 50 rounds of enemies)

-EXCESEIVE GORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-New maps

-some old maps have returned

-Many new weapons

-new characters

-Cool exucutions (kick your enemies while there down, never gets old)

-golden weapons (unlockable via code)

Cons-

-chainsaws are very annoying, seriously… >:(

-Harder campaign

-lots of glitches

-Can sometimes lag a lot

Overall good buy GET IT!!!

Gears of War 2
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This game was terrific. Being coop my husband and i played together and we loved it. It was hours of fun and competition. It will keep you absorbed from beginning to end. The boss fights are tough but not to touch and you have air battles besides ground battles.

awesome game
Rating:5 out of 5 stars
This is totally awesome game i could play it for hours on end if i could. the graphics are realistic and its just like you are actually there Love it.