Gears of War 2: Game of the Year Edition
Gears of War 2 is a 2008 military science fiction third-person shooter video game developed by Epic Games and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360. It is the second installment of the Gears of War series, with lead design by Cliff Bleszinski,. The game was officially released in North America, Europe and Australia on November 7, 2008 and was released in Japan on July 30, 2009. The game expands technically on the previous game by using a modified Unreal Engine 3 engine. The development team brought in comic book writer Joshua Ortega to help write the plot for the game. In Gears of War 2, the COG continues its fight against the Locust horde, who are attempting to sink all of the cities on the planet Sera. Sergeant Marcus Fenix leads Delta Squad into the depths of the planet to try to stop the Locust during the assault upon Locust territory. The player controls Fenix in the main mission campaign, with the ability to play cooperatively with a second player controlling Fenix's best friend and fellow Squad member Dominic "Dom" Santiago. The game includes several existing and new multiplayer modes including five-on-five battles between human and Locust forces, and a "Horde" mode that challenges up to five players against waves of Locust forces with ever-increasing strength. New weapons and gameplay mechanics such as "chainsaw duels" and the ability to use downed foes as "meatshields" were added to the game. On its release weekend, Gears of War 2 sold over two million copies, and within two months of release, had sold four million copies. It was the seventh best selling video game of 2009 and received several accolades. The game received similar praise as its predecessor, with the new gameplay and multiplayer modes seen as outstanding additions.
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Gears of war 2 feels like a big expansion to gears of war 1 rather than the next big step-up sequel that most games get but its still a great game that improves in some areas.
Gameplay: Pretty much exactly like Gears 1, Gears 2 is a 3rd person cover-based shooter action game with some semi horror elements. Gears 2 plays almost identically to 1 with only some variations and changes in some weapons and the way guns work. The controls, combat and Ai is all almost the exact same with a few improvements like being able to get revived by Ai when you get downed on solo, and the campaign is still 2 player co-op. You can now have chainsaw duels with enemies and in Pvp. If you are downed, you can crawl away and now can use enemies as shields. A lot of movement and handling has vastly improved, and grenades can now stick to walls. The multiplayer has a cool horde mode but from what I remember Gears 2 had very laggy server problems making multiplayer almost unplayable or at least for me and my connection was fine on other games at the time. This all might sound like a lot of changes, but it didn’t feel like 2 was massively different from Gears 1, hell even the main menu was the exact same. I will say I did run into a few glitches on my return to this game including a game breaking one where every time I try to restart the game it crashes so I basically can’t play Gears 2 at all currently. Not sure if this is a backwards compatibility problem or what. This game needs a remaster asap Microsoft!
Graphics, Voice Acting & Music: Graphically this game doesn’t take any huge leaps to look better but I would say they made the game significantly more colorful in the environments, same can be said about the voice acting its all about the same in this game, though there are some much more emotional and tense moments in this one with better character development and story threads. The music is also about the same as the first one with similar themes and ambience but nothing too crazy or memorable.
Story/ no spoilers: The story of Gears 2 follows like 6 months or so after the events of 1 and follows Marcus and his squad as they push back on the front as they fight Locus enemies and face a new threat after defeating RAAM in Gears 1. The new enemy Skorge, is a predator looking Locus with a Darth Maul double chainsaw staff, he is intimidating but not as scary as RAAM to me and his boss fights are kinda lame. The vast majority of this game is about the COG forces pushing into the Hollow which is like the underground caverns the Locus come from. I do think the story is a lot more fun and overall, better in this game along with a lot of the level designs and overall, this was a good sequel to the first game but not a great one. There are a couple DLC chapters for this game that fit into the story as extra chapters in between missions, and I did play them some years later. They were okay but not amazing, I remember one of them you get to dress as Locus enemies to sneak into a palace and that was kinda fun but aside from that they weren’t crazy memorable and are probably only there for hardcore fans.
8/10