Ranting Kenya

I haven’t read any reviews of Gears of War 2, but I have listened to a few podcasts that talked about it quickly. Hopefully my thoughts will be unique. I haven’t played it online yet, haven’t played co-op yet, and I haven’t finished it yet.

And I will start with a common theme among what I’ve heard. It is the same as the original, just better. More enemies, more executions, bigger levels, better visuals etc. It is the same game. If you liked the first, you’ll like the second.

To me the story is better, not great. I’m not really playing Gears for the story anyway, so the improvements are fine. There are sections in the game where I’m quite interested in what’s going on in the story arc. It doesn’t change how you play the game (if you could skip the cutscenes, it wouldn’t change anything about how you play, just take cover and shoot stuff). There was one particular section that was quite creepy and really interesting, but I haven’t seen or done anything along those lines since. I’m unsure if that part of the story will be completed in this game. I’m going to assume there’ll be a Gears 3 since it’s a successful franchise (I’d bet as a launch game on the NEXT xbox console).

The texture poping that was quite prevalent in the original is still there, but rather than sudden changes from no texture to full texture, there’s a subtle fade effect so it doesn’t catch your eye unless your looking right at it.

They have added some interesting things so far. One particular scene that I thought was interesting was a section where you and Dom must carry something together while fighting. I felt that section was something new and fun I hadn’t seen in other games before.

The boss battles have been quite fun. And there’s certainly no shortage of new bosses. Nor is there a shortage of new enemies. One thing I’ve noticed, and I could be completely wrong since I haven’t played the original at all in probably a year, is the difficulty of the enemies feels different to me. The normal guys (the drones and grenadiers, the ones that you’ll kill millions of) seem to be harder to kill than previous incarnation. This is good. The enemies from the last game were textbook bullet sponges. The fresh units still take a lot of bullets to kill, but they seem harder to hit. Plus, many times they’ll just go down, and one of their teammates will revive them. Conversely, the tougher enemies like the Boomers, seem quite easy to take out this time around. Maybe it’s because I’ve learned how to attack them properly, but even some of the new similar style enemies seem to be easy to take down as well (save the Bloodhounds, those things require your attention).

Another good example of expecting a bigger problem than you’ll actually have is the section where you fight 3 corpsers at the same time. I died a couple times quickly, but once I did what I was supposed to do, I killed all three in 5 seconds. Victory there was just too easy, especially with the setup that section receives.

Which reminds me of the one scene in the original where you face the Brumak (I didn’t play the pc version). I can’t tell you of how many Brumaks I’ve dispatched already. Four or five by now I think. That just seems weird.

Now I realize it really sounds like I’m complaining about the game, but I’m really not. I’m really enjoying it. And I’ll be playing it a lot the next couple days. Then I’ll start to dig into the multiplayer, which I hear is awesome. We’ll see if it can pull me away from Call of Duty 4′s online multiplayer.

Update
I’ve beaten the whole game now. For those of you that would complain about the final boss battle, I think you’re thinking about it wrong. It’s not a boss battle, it’s an interactive cut-scene. That being said, I felt a little underwhelmed myself.

Therefore, go play Horde mode with 4 friends. That is pure sweetness.