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What’s the difference between Epic and an Epic Fail?

When you are creating a sequel to the game that pretty much propelled the sales of the Xbox 360 — you’d better damn make sure you don’t make a flop, because the bar is set so high that even the slightest fails will be accounted for.

Gears of War 2 is something in-between. Yes, the game is epic — and only few games per year actually have me hooked up so tight that I beat them in one sitting. But at the same time, after beating the single player campaign I feel totally empty inside.

First of all, the game will take an average player under 12 hours to beat. Yes, this is longer than the 6-8 hours of the first game, but still. We live in a time of 20+ hour games with lots of replay value. Fortunately though there are 4 difficulty settings.

Be warned, I’m going to spoiler the crap out of this game because I’m totally disappointed in the story.

Now, the game begins with a lenghty Metal Gear-syndrome and picks up after the events of the first game. Markus gets a newbie on his squad and let’s kill some locust. You kill Locust. Then some more Locust. Then some locust outside, then in a hospital, and more and more and more. The whole plot is that Humanity FINALLY wants to dig down to the Locust stronghold underground and hit them where it hurts most.

So the second mission is the driving sequence where you’re on a platform fighting off mortars, reevers and so on. Your platform breaks, defend from Locust while it’s being fixed — go to some old town — fight Locust — go through a dark tunnel — Newbie “Why the hell don’t we have any flasghlights?” — fight locust.

The Delta Squad finally gets into the drilling site. And right before being sent underground, Markus and the blond guy see that a Teenage Mutant Ninja Locust — aka Fordge or whatever — is about to kill the asian Thai guy and the Australian platform pilot.

Ok, so now we are underground. First task - search for the newbie Delta Squad member, rescue, kill Locust, kill more Locust. It’s then that the Delta squad sees a HUGE worm crawling around that apperently sinks cities underground by digging enormous tunnels.

Then they stumble upon some odd capsules that hold prisoners. Locust is taking prisoners OMG OMG OMG! It’s then that the African American guy is told that his wife is somewhere underground and he wants to look for her. He and Marcus eventually find her, and the niggah shoots her in the head. Romantic.

They also find Thai on a totally pointless Locust “boat”. Apparently he was being tortured, but nobody explains why. Markus gives him a shotgun and he shoots himself.

In between there is a totally pointless visit to some warehouse where supposedly the Locust keep something important. You blast open a door and get the Rapture feeling. Some lab where “something gone seriously wrong”. You kill everything there — including some mutated Locust-like things and get some jokes from an AI that controls the whole thing. WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THIS? I don’t know.

After that follows a Tank driving sequence. It’s funny because the only way to survive it is to blindly drive to checkpoints, get killed, and respawn at those checkpoints with full health. Repeat 10 times.

You drive up to a hill where the Locust have their base entrance or something. I wasn’t really following, could care less.

From there you enter the Locust underground stronghold where you get eaten by the huge worm. Yay. After some speed races with concrete that the worm eats, and a toxic labirinth sequence, you get to the hearts. Well, 3 hearts. After killing the worm you head on back to kill more Locust. More specifically — the Queen.

You get to see that the Locust is some kind of ancient civilization or whatever. They have temples and stuff underground. I’d love it if it made sense. But they dropped the whole backstory in favor of fights where you step on a button and cover appears. That just doesn’t make any sense at all. If you want a group of Gears storm your palace — then yeah, you should place cover all over the place and also drop your troops in the same battlefield. I’m not talking about some concrete supposedly dropped there, I’m talking about actual cover that comes up and down with the help of leavers and triggers.

This is when you realize that there is something called the Lament. The Lament is what the Locust are fighting internally. And that’s pretty much it. The story reveals that it’s a form of mutation and… yeah, that’s it.

So you get to the queen WHERE YOU FINALLY GET YOUR FIRST BOSS. Oh, and btw, how come their queen is sexy? That also makes no sense. She brags about something regarding Markus’ father, I think they wanted to drop a bunch of plot twisting moment in there, but ultimately failed.

And this is when you get to fight that Chainsawing Ninja Forge. The fight itself is just meh. You cut his chainsaw in half, he jumps around and cuts down chandileers at you, then shoots a bit, then comes at you again just so you can cut him by tapping the B button.

He gets onto a pimped out reever and leaves. The queen also left.

HEY, let’s ride some reevers!

This is the second vehicles sequence. Basically first you fight off some Krumers while escaping the base, then there is a looong flying bit where you sit faced back and fight off the Locust Ninja on his pimped out reever.

You get to the surface where you fight other reevers and finish off the pimped out one.

By this time you already know that the Queen wants the Locust to come out to the surface and then sink the final city of the Humans. The names are messed up, so I won’t bother recalling the city.

You get there, the city is under attack. Yay, fight off more Locust. Oh, and the Delta squad is ordered to sink it before the Locust emerge to the surface.

Fight Locust, More Locust, and Mooore Locust.

Then you get under the city, get onto a Krumer and start killing off everything that moves. You destroy the 3 structures that support the city while walking in some glowing goo.

ENTER THE MONSTER YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR.

So after the chopped picks you up from the Krumer, it (the animation is all CG) transforms into a HUGE EPIC MONSTER OMG HOLY CRAP. This is when you are told that “hey, btw, we kinda lost the bomb that was supposed to sink the city… you’re ok with it right?” Markus takes the Hammer of Dawn and points it at the monster, it explodes.

I have to say that while the CG animation was amazing, when you get into gameplay — YOU CANNOT see the whole monster. You see only bits of it. Total disappointment.

So, the city is flooded, screw the backstory of Locust and Lament, the Queen does a supposedly Metal Gear-like monologue that makes absolutely no sense at all… and that’s it.

The story is very disappointing with too many lose ends, and it tends to take itself too seriously. There is a fair bit of humor involved:
- What’s that?
- I don’t care, just shoot the damn thing!

But the writing got seriously degraded from the first Gears. The total bad-ass attitude was dropped, instead they tried to develop the characters, but as I said, epicly failed.

The Gameplay.

The gameplay is the same as in the previous game. Only thing added is the human shield part which I find useless and minor things here and there.

The only useful thing about the gameplay innovations is the fact that your cover actually gets destroyed. Pieces of concrete fall off, exposing your body parts. That’s cool.

But other than that, the Inside-Huge-Worm part was very well done, there was some Resident Evil 4-style fishing involved, and that’s it. The rest is just Gears of War 1.5.

You do get a glitchy flamethrower though! And a mortar.

The Presentation.

The graphics are Gears of War add some shading/lighting effects that you will never notice and that’s it.

The facial animation is the same as in the previous part - stiff, non-emotional and overall bad. The game looks good with the fighting sequences, but the way-too-often slowdowns, pop-ins, glitches with physics and other issues ruin the picture. There was this part where Wind was applied as part of physics. I killed a guy in a robe, and you could see the wind blowing and the robe reacting to it. The problem was that the robe reacted so well that it dragged the body of the guy off the map.

I guess they were too rushed into releasing this game in November. Bad move. The game just doesn’t feel polished. The first one was a shining marble. This one is an uncut diamond.

Voice acting — as well as the writing — also went down. Not sure, maybe Markus’ voice actor had too many smokes since the first game.

Overall

This _is_ a fantastic game that sucks you in hard. But it could’ve been so much more. They had everything for a perfect sequel — but didn’t have the time to tight things up. The story could’ve been amazing if they gave 2 more hours to it’s development. The glitches could’ve been ironed out and the presentation is something what Gears of War 1 was known for. Here it’s just OK with other amazingly looking games out there.

I haven’t gotten to the multiplayer yet, but from what I see the single player campaign is 85/100.

Tags: gears of war 2, review

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 3:42 am and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.