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Gears of War 2-A review
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There are two kinds of war movies. The first is slow burning and character driven. It takes the time to examine the effect warfare actually has on people, and asks questions about whether war is ever justified, or whether we as a species can ever learn to see past cosmetic cultural differences.
The second chooses to dispense with all that namby-pamby soul searching crap and just make with the guns and the fire and the explosions, because apparently rational thought is for sissy little girls. If Gears of War 2 were a movie, it'd definitely fall into the latter category. In Gears, you play as the gruff, manly and egregiously misspelled Marcus Fenix, a soldier from a parallel earth called Sera. Sera is being taken over by subterranean monsters called the Locust, who have invaded and destroyed nearly every human city on the planet. In response, the remains of the world's governments have coalesced into a unified military dictatorship called the C.O.G. At the end of the first Gears of War, the C.O.G. detonated a superweapon that was intended to wipe the Locust out, but it had about as much overall effect as poking an angry shark with a stick. Now the Locust stand poised to wipe out the last remaining humans, and it's your job to keep that from happening.
Now that the setup is covered, lets move on to the gameplay. The Gears of War games are third-person shooters with an emphasis on finding and exploiting cover. In games like the Halo and Doom Series', your character is often superhuman. You can rush out into the open and kill 20 heavily armed aliens without breaking a sweat. In this game, such reckless action will turn you into spastically twitching corpse jelly before you can move two steps. It's much better to stay behind cover, carefully plugging away at your enemies until they drop. The fighting can be fast, intense, and very fun at times, but a few problems with squad A.I. tend to mess things up a bit. There were times when I was badly damaged, and would crawl toward a squadmate to be healed. But when I got over to them I'd die of neglect because it took them too long to notice that I was wearing my spleen on the outside. On one level, one of them was operating a crane, which he would ostensibly have used to swing me across a giant pit. Unfortunately, once I was on said crane, he didn't react at all. I was forced to get on and off maybe 3 or 4 times before the poor thick bastard finally caught on. As annoying as these problems can be, they don't occur often enough to break the game. Gears's greatest strengths and weaknesses lie with it's presentation. The set-piece battles are amazing, and make the whole game feel like one of those big-budget summer popcorn movies. The graphics are great, and the environments are much more varied than they were in the first game. The problem lies with the story. The first Gears of War was highly criticized for having practically no story, so the developers have tried to add a bit more depth to the narrative in this game. The clearest example of this is the subplot involving Marcus's right hand man, Dom Santiago. Dom is searching for his missing wife, and throughout the game, he will take absolutely every opportunity to remind you. While I applaud the developer's effort to add some depth to the characters, the whole thing just feels tacked on and fake. At it's heart, this is a story about meatheads killing slightly uglier meatheads in order to save the world from an alien invasion. The game's iconic weapon is a machine gun with a chainsaw bayonet, for god's sake. One of the most blatantly freudian things to ever come out of a video game. The rest of the game's dialogue mostly consists of juvenile action-hero one liners, and the whole Dom thing just doesn't fit tonally with the rest of the story. That said, this is still a very good game if you just want to turn off your brain for a while and blow stuff up. I'd recommend a rental.
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