Gears of War 2 Review

I'd probably call this a pretty good game. It beats the crap out of the first Gears. But it is funny, the devs knew that the constant cover shooting of Gears 1 was not that interesting so they mixed things up constantly.

You have enemies that summon tickers and can heal fallen soldiers, there are Reavers who get you out of cover, you have different portable cover you can use(my personal favorite being the shield that you can pick up), it has scripted sequences and a number of vehicle sections, as well a section where cover can be can be lowered, as well as Flamethrower Locusts to rush you out. It's almost like they were ashamed of the game being a cover shooter so they tried to stay away from pure cover shooting as much as they could. It's basically everything Uncharted 2 gets praised for but I feel this game actually does it well.

All though flaws with the games are the crazy amounts of staggering animations when getting hit which is supposed to reinforce the cover mechanic but it can be annoying whenever you are of cover and surronding by enemies, and it doesn't help that the friendly AI can still be stupid at times which can make the game frustrating because you are getting screwed over by the AI's stupidity. Some of the scripted sequences can be kind of annoying and sort of hard to tell what to do at first, which is an issue a lot of scripted sequences have. Some random cheap deaths here and there. And the A button being the cover, vault and sprint button is still as annoying as ever before due to accidently doing one action when you meant to do the other.

The story is surpsinginly decent. I enjoyed that Dom's wife's subplot since it added a bit more of a human element to the series. Marcus does more stuff that is more heroic and interesting like killing the worm, and helping those people. And the part where Cole was screaming and insulting the Locust Queen was epic mainly due to him telling her to shut up after the latter's excessive monologuing. Nice to see a popular sequel to a 7th gen franchise actually live up to the hype.