I wasn’t initially going to pick up Gears of War 2 for XBOX 360 — although I enjoyed the original game, I was generally underwhelmed by its repetitive and predictable gameplay. But with reviews for Resistance 2 on PS3 on the underwhelming side and a strong distrust of developer Treyarch who made this year’s odd-numbered Call of Duty: World at War, I was left with Gears 2 as my last best option for a fall shooter.  

And I have to say, I’m glad I picked it.  Gears 2 is a great improvement over the original, and offers up some expansive battles, large scale monsters, and even a platforming level to balance out the methodical and tactical “stop-and-pop” style of gameplay.  The story actually uses the interesting backstory that was all but neglected in the original (save for some mentions in the art book that came with the special edition).  We’re now getting an idea of who the Locusts are, and why they’re at war with the humans.

In terms of storytelling, they’ve taken a page from the Metal Gear Solid 4 playbook and added in some cinematic cut scenes — none of them clock at more than a minute, but they work a lot better in engaging the player with the story and world of Gears than the original did.  There’s one in particularly featuring a fight between two new characters and a new boss monster that was pretty awesome, and reminded me of an abbreviated version of the grand Raiden vs. Gecko cutscene in Metal Gear.

Online, Gears 2 is as much of a cesspool as the original.  I’ve played in two ranked multiplayer matches thus far, and besides getting my ass handed to me, I also had to suffer through the usual abuse from the teenagers and unemployed twenty-something boys who inhabit XBOX Live.  It’s too bad that they didn’t include the varied and useful mute options that came with Halo 3, as I don’t enjoy having a boy 15 years my junior inviting me to personally suck on his balls.  I suspect if we met in real life, that was an invitation I would not have received.  Still, Gears has a party system borrowed from Halo and Call of Duty that allows you to team up with a group of four other friends to bounce from game to game without worrying about servers like you do on PC.  This is a big improvement over the original, which took a stripped-down PC approach featuring server lists — with Gears 2 you can count on playing with a different group of abusive teens every round, rather than suffering through endless rounds of abuse from the same group of kids.

Still, Epic smartly included a private botmatch feature where you can substitute AI bots for human players on any adversarial multiplayer game mode in Gears 2.  Now I can enjoy Gears in peace in the company of non-sentient opponents.  What’s better is that you and your friends can cooperatively take on said non-sentient opponents together and you can even earn the achievements previously exclusive to the online rump-raping hordes.

Besides offering campaign coop (now an essential feature of any first or third person shooter) which allows you to play through the single player game with a friend in the role of hero Marcus Fenix’s best buddy and bromance crush, Dominic Santiago, Gears 2 also has adapted Rainbow Six’s popular but underwhelming Terrorist Hunt coop mode into the Gears universe.  Called “Horde,” you and a team of up to five players are tasked with fighting 50 waves of increasingly challenging Locusts on the game’s multiplayer maps.  Unlike Terrorist Hunt in Rainbow Six, though, the AI bots in Horde are just as smart as their single player counterparts, and teamwork and communication is essential if you and your friends are going to survive.  Saturday night, a group of us played through 18 waves and had a blast.  Horde mode is possibly the most compelling reason to play Gears of War 2, but don’t even try it by yourself.  You’ll get crushed in seconds.  Fans of World of Warcraft raids will understand how addictive this type of game can be.

All and all, Gears of War 2 is a great package and well worth your money.  I suppose someday I’ll get back to Fallout 3, but for now, I’m having a blast.