Friday after work I picked up Gears of War 2 for the Xbox 360. I enjoyed the first Gears of War game mainly for it’s single player campaign. The multiplayer portion of the game was plagued with connectivity problems when played online as well as glitches in how the weapons worked. After playing through the campaign of Gears 2 and some multiplayer matches, I was very pleased with my purchase and look forward to many hours of enjoyment. To appease those gamers who want a score applied to this review, I’d have to give it a 9 out of 10.

Campaign
Just as in the original Gears of War, the campaign is available both in single player and cooperative modes. I played the campaign in single player mode for Act 1 and cooperative mode for Acts 2-5. The campaign is a bit longer in the sequel than in Gears 1. It took me roughly 14 hours to complete the game on Hardcore difficulty. The storyline is just as riveting in Gears 2 as it was in the original. The story focuses on the COG’s efforts to destroy the Locust infestation as well as helping your squad mate, Dom, find his wife who was separated from him when the Locusts first attacked.
In the original game, one of your squad mates, Anthony Carmine, got killed in a rather inopportune way–getting sniped in the head while his gun was jammed. In Gears 2 you get to have Anthony’s brother, Ben Carmine join your squad. The dialogue indicates Ben is just as green as his brother was, yet in actual gameplay Carmine is one really brave soldier, always rushing into enemy forces with just his sniper rifle in hand and coming out unscathed. I don’t doubt we’ll see another of the four Carmine brothers in Gears 3.
Gears of War 2 didn’t let up when it comes to showing blood and gore. The original Gears of War was probably the bloodiest game I’d ever played. Gears 2 easily out does that. In fact, Gears 2 has probably the bloodiest and most gory scene I’ve ever seen in a video game or movie. Warning: very bloody.

The game also has quite a bit of strong language as well. Epic Games got one thing right though. They knew they were making a game that if it was a movie would easily be rated R, but they put into the game the option to turn off the gore and to filter the strong language. This allows gamers who want to play this game with their family present to tone things down a bit. Overall, I think that decision to include filters will increase sales for the game and allow a lot more people to enjoy it.
There are still small items to pickup throughout the storyline as there were in Gears 1. This time however, they’re not just the COG tags of fallen soldiers. This time, they’re actually small Collectibles like newspaper clippings or paper reports that give you more information about what’s going on and add to the storyline experience.
Just as in Gears 1 there is a slight cliffhanger ending to the storyline. The developers, after all, did plan for this series to be a trilogy. While there is a tremendous victory in the end for the COG forces, the cliffhanger at the end of the game credits makes you question if what happened may or may not have been the best choice for the people of Sera.

Game Settings
A new great feature of cooperative campaign gameplay is that the difficulty settings for the game can be player specific. That means you can have one really skilled player playing on Insane difficulty and another playing on Casual.
Unlike other games where developers overlooked a large demographic, this game actually has a fairly decent set of left-handed control options. The settings allow gamers to have default, legacy, left-handed default, or left-handed legacy thumb stick controls. Another first that I’ve seen in a video game, is that this game also allows you to have left handed triggers (i.e. left trigger shoots primary weapon). You can also invert either your X or Y-axis (or both). There’s even an alternate button control scheme that has the actions for each button in a slightly different layout.
As mentioned earlier there are settings options to turn off the gore and language for gamers that prefer not to have that. For multiplayer games, players have the option of setting their default player model to use, both for COG and Locust forces.

Developers also put in a great information section of the game called the War Journal. Here you can find multiplayer leaderboards, both public and private (friends only). There’s also a list of Collectibles showing how many you’ve found and on which levels you found them. Gears 2 also has probably the best display for in game achievements. It lists each achievement with a description of how to earn it, along with a progress indicator for how close you are to getting it. Even during actual gameplay, a progress notification pops up in the bottom corner of your screen when you do something that brings you closer to getting an achievement. This comes in very handy for those achievement hunters out there trying to get them all.

Multiplayer
The game has a great tutorial mode to familiarize players with the different game modes for Gears of War 2 multiplayer. There are five steps to go through, not hard at all. You even get an achievement for completing the tutorial mode.
There’s a new multiplayer mode in Gears 2 that wasn’t in the original–Horde. This consists of up to five players playing on the same team against wave after wave of Locust hordes. I had the opportunity to play this mode earlier today with four of my friends starting at wave #1. It goes up to wave #50. Each wave up to #10 has more enemies than the previous that are in turn harder to kill. After Wave #10 you start over again, but this time the enemies get a boost in health and skills. After the next 10 waves, they get another boost and so on.

Even though we played on Casual mode, by the time we hit wave #50 it was incredibly difficult for all of us to survive the whole wave. Just for kicks when we were done we tried wave #50 on Insane mode. We lasted a grand total of 47 seconds before we were all dead.