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Gears of War 2: First Impressions

It’s finally here, Gears of War 2, and yes it is bigger and badder as Cliff Blezenski said in most interviews leading up the release this morning.  Couple of friends and I went to midnight launch down at Best Buy and got home around 12:30 am and played till around 5 am. Currently at work with heavy amounts of coffee to keep me awake!

Anyways I did not do the campaign yet as I want to play co-op so my friends and I fired up multiplayer. Started off with Warzone, same as last time kill the other team anyway you can. Funny thing for me was that since I played the PC version of Gears 1 a lot the past few weeks ( did insane co-op with a buddy) the controls on console felt wonky and sluggish. Then after a few rounds of me getting my ass handed to me via various executions I finally got back in the groove of using my gamepad and was roadie running and taking cover with ease.

From Warzone we went on to the new game modes,  I think we tried Submission next, which is pretty much like CTF, but instead of two flags there is one, and it’s not a flag. It’s stranded civilian armed with a shotgun running around the level. The objective bring the civilian to his knees, grab him as a meat shield and take him to another spot on the map to capture a point! This game mode was pure mayhem!

Up next was King of the Hill, which is pretty much like Annex but better! Instead of running from point to point and capping it, King of Hill requires both teams to head to one point and the only way to score is if a team member stays on point for the duration of time, which is much better and requires more tactics than Annex where one team can capture a point then move on to spawn camp! As an added twist in this game mode, any team defending can not respawn if they own a point, but offense team can keep respawnning, but once they capture the point and get on defense they can’t respawn! This mechanic really changes dynamics of the battelfeild from second to second!

Next up was Guardian, which is pretty much a better verision of Assassination from Gears 1 where each team has a leader. The difference was that here the leader keeps the team alive and allows respawnning, if the leader is out the team has to play it safe cause there is no coming back if you are down! After Guardian we fired up Wingman, 5 teams of 2 running rampant around the levels! This was great and really enforced team work and tactics.

As the morning crept in around 3 am people from our group started to leave to go sleep so as soon as the group got down to four us left we fired up the co-op mode Horde. This game mode is pretty much a gaunlet pitting you against waves and waves of harder locust AI. Sounds easy but it’s not, the AI are really aggerssive and on higher levels no area is safe as Locust are coming out of the wood work with their best. In this mode two things freaked me out, the new Boomer variations all armored up with gaint maces and shileds and tickers. Tickers are worse than wretches and lambent wretches combined. These little buggers are small and fast, and have one motive to go kamakazi on your ass by finding you and blowing themselves up!

After a couple of rounds of Horde, the last few of us still up went back to Warzone with bots and played the maps that we did not see yet. A note about the bots, they are pretty good, not the best but offer up a good fight and are good teammates helping you up when you are down.

So all in all Gears 2 is awesome, and a quick note about the MP level design, it’s fantastic! The layouts are great, visuals are top notch and designs are bigger than Gears 1 with more z-axis gameplay in some maps. Additonally there are more gimmick maps this time like Avalanche which has a massive avalanche as an enviornmental hazard, Hail which offers up a dynamic storm if caught in is a slow death by mass ammounts of hail pellets, and Security which has scripted events putting up laser beams changing the flow of the level by locking and unlocking different paths.

Now all I want to do is finish my my work as fast as I can and get back home and fire up some more Gears 2! Whenever I get to the campaign I’ll offer up my intial impressions as well as final once I beat the game, but just from the polish and presentation in multiplayer I am sure the campaign is going to be kick ass!

Cheers!