Leveling Down

Multiplayer in Gears of War 2 may be underwhelming, but the single player is an excellent ride from start to finish.

I’ll come right out and say it: I’m not the biggest fan of either the Halo or the Gears of War series. While I don’t like the “empty your entire clip into the guy before he dies” style combat of Halo, I can understand why the Halo series is popular: Bungie has put a lot of care and effort into Halo 3’s multiplayer so it’s no wonder the game is at the top of the Live charts even today. What I still don’t quite get is how Gears of War 1 and 2 are so popular from a multiplayer standpoint. The gameplay is relatively elementary, movement of the characters is too sluggish, and the games generally don’t play well in an adversarial way. Yet the kids love it. Is it the gore? I almost feel like Gears of War online is this generation’s Mortal Kombat – a versus game that is poorly designed yet elicits enough gruesome shock value to be entertaining. Why then, does a more refined and better designed multiplayer offering from Epic, Unreal Tournament III, have only a fraction of the fans?

I have a lot of problems with Gears of War 2’s multiplayer, but I did fully enjoy the single player and Horde modes. Apparently I’m not alone on this either, as several fans are fuming that Epic actually recently released a $10 map pack when they haven’t even fixed all of the problems in the multiplayer yet.

Good
- Excellent presentation
- Interesting and varied campaign
- Horde mode is a lot of fun for co-op

Bad
- Lack of epic boss fights like in the first game
- Multiplayer gameplay mechanics are broken
- Matchmaking is broken

Intro
Gears of War 2 was an expected release after the first one went on to sell over 5 million copies and remained in the top 10 played games on Xbox Live since its release. It appears that Microsoft has decided to stagger the releases of Halo and Gears of War on the system, so that each year one or the other is released: Gears of War 1 in 2006, Halo 3 in 2007, Gears of War 2 in 2008, Halo 3: Recon in 2009, and Gears of War 3 in 2010. Seems like a winning strategy.

Gears of War 2 was released on November 7, 2008 and sold over 2 million copies in its opening weekend, netting over $120 million in sales. The game released with two editions: a standard edition and a limited edition containing a code for a gold Lancer in multiplayer (among other things). The gold Lancer did not have any additional benefits in-game except “bling”. Gamestop also offered gold Hammerburst codes to those who pre-ordered the game and went to pick it up at midnight release.

The used gaming industry seems to be the bane of many development studios, as profits from used game sells do not go to the developers at all, but rather, the stores. The current trend seems to be developers releasing additional downloadable content, which prolongs the life of the game since you can play new stuff at an additional price as long as you hold onto the game. Epic may be following a new trend started by Rock Band 2, and that’s offering downloadable content from the getgo with your new copy of the game. In Gears of War 2’s case, the offering was a free download of five redone Gears of War 1 multiplayer maps for play in Gears of War 2. Obviously if a person were to trade their copy of Gears of War 2 into a store, they wouldn’t give the code for the maps so if someone wanted these maps, they would have to buy a new copy of the game. Whether this deters people from buying used copies of Gears of War 2 is yet to be seen.

Skorge is the closest thing to “the boss” of Gears of War 2. Unfortunately, he’s no General RAAM.

Storyline and Premise
Gears of War 2 takes place six months after the events of Gears of Wars 1. At the end of the first Gears of War, Marcus Fenix and his Delta squad successfully detonate a bomb underground, killing most of the Locust Horde. Apparently it was not all of them, as months later more cities get pulled underground. It is at this point that Marcus Fenix and his best friend Dominic Santiago are dispatched to go underground and stop the Locust Horde. At the same time, Dom discovers that his wife, Maria, has gone missing and vows to find her in their underground mission.

The game is broken up into five chapters with several acts per chapter – just like the first game. The pacing is better though, as there is a lot more variety in the game compared to the first one which was almost always being stuck in a room and trading cover fire against opponents. In Gears of War 2, you’ll find yourself fighting through a hospital, riding a Derrick vehicle, being swallowed by a giant worm, exploring a research facility with scary test subjects, etc. There’s a lot more variety in what to do in the campaign, and it really keeps the game going fresh. While the bosses suffer in difficulty a bit due to the variety in gameplay elements thrown at the player, for the most part I consider its sum to be more engaging than the first Gears of War. There seems to be genuine desire by Epic to break out of the simple duck and cover mechanics that were prevalent throughout all of the first game that made me sleepy.

Also quite welcome to the sequel is the ability to have three different save files. This allows the player to separate his co-op and single player missions. Graphics are still top notch, and the music is one of the best soundtracks I have heard in a while for a video game. It gives the game quite the epic feel.

The Boomshield in Gears of War 2 is like the shield in many other shooter games: increasing defense at the sacrifice of firepower and mobility.

Gameplay Mechanics
Combat
The combat system in Gears of War 2 is nearly exactly like that of its predecessor: ducking behind cover and shooting at enemies throughout each level. The hallmarks of Gears of War combat are the Active Reload and Lancer assault rifle. The Active Reload system revolves around the player hitting the reload button at the right time as a meter fills. Hit it correctly, and the gun will not only reload quicker, but get a damage boost. If the player messes up, the reloading takes longer, forcing the player to wait until he can fire again. The Lancer assault rifle is the primary weapon that the main characters in the game use: an assault rifle with a mounted chainsaw in front that needs to be revved before cutting into an opponent’s flesh. It’s obviously ridiculous, but it works fine from a gameplay standpoint and manages to be entertaining as well.

Additions with the sequel
The most notable new addition to the game is the use of shields – both in the traditional sense and with hostages. Some enemies in the game carry shields, and once you kill them, you will be able to carry them yourself. Using them allows you to move without taking damage, but you are regulated to only your handgun. The shield can also be driven into the ground, giving you a spot for cover that you can prop up behind to fire your rifle. Hostages are a new concept as well in Gears of War 2. By doing enough damage to an enemy, he will be “downed” but not dead. At that point, you can either finish him off, or pick him up and use him as a shield until he has absorbed enough damage that he blows apart.

Also new to Gears of War 2 is the ability to wall stick any grenade. Wall sticking grenades can be performed by simply equipping any grenade type and placing it on a wall. If an enemy goes anywhere near it, it will beep and explode immediately, kill the enemy and anyone else in the area.

Finally, Gears of War 2 also introduces several different vehicles to ride – some even of Locust origin. While some of the vehicles may have been annoying to ride from time to time, they were enjoyable for the most part and certainly better than the vehicle driving in Gears of War. Riding a Brumak really makes you feel like Godzilla – it was a lot of fun.

Weapons
Gears of War 2 adds a few new weapons to the assortment of the first game:

1. Gorgon Pistol – a handgun that does heavy damage with burst fire.
2. Ink Grenade – wwen thrown, the ink grenade ejects forth a cloud of smoke that damages any players in the area over time until they die.
3. Mortar – a two handed weapon that allows the user to attack enemies by bombarding them from above rather than head-on.
4. Mulcher – a devasting chaingun that takes two hands to use. Accuracy is increased when mounted over something.
5. Scorcher – a flamethrower that works well for melee based enemies.

The previous weapons return as well:

1. Boomshot – rocket launcher
2. Frag Grenade – self explanatory
3. Shotgun – self explanatory
4. Hammerburst Assault Rifle – modified version of standard Locust issue Assault Rifle in Gears of War 1. This new version has a larger clip, better stopping power, and a sight.
5. Hammer of Dawn – A special C.O.G. weapon that when used outdoors, calls down a massive energy particle weapon from an accompanying sattelite, making short work of anything it touches.
6. Lancer Assault Rifle – the standard C.O.G. weapon that is mounted with a chainsaw bayonet.
7. Longshot – the sniper rifle in the game
8. Snub Pistol – the standard C.O.G. 12 round pistol
9. Torque Bow – explosive arrows wielded by the Theron guards
10. Boltok Pistol – the standard Locust 6 round magnum

In Gears of War 2, if two players try to chainsaw each other, who ever button mashes fastest will get the kill.

Multiplayer
Like Call of Duty: World at War, Gears of War 2 also introduces a few new modes to its online play while preserving favorites from its predecessor.

Co-op
The 2-player drop in/drop out co-op feature in the campaign is retained in this sequel, but sadly, a four player campaign co-op affair was not present. However, one major enhancement was made to the co-op that I hope carries over to other games: adjustable player specific difficulties for co-op. This means that when two players play co-op together, one can choose Casual difficulty and one can choose Insane difficulty. This makes it so the Casual difficulty player deals more damage and takes less, while the Insane difficulty player has the opposite true.

Instead of four player co-op in the campaign, Epic decided to try for the next best thing: Horde mode. Horde mode is a 5-player co-op (or solo) affair where you can choose any of the adversarial multiplayer maps and your objective is to survive 50 waves of enemies.

It is wonderfully accomplished and I would even argue that it’s better than having 4-player co-op in the campaign. At least in Horde mode, you and your friends are constantly being assaulted by wave after wave of enemies, whereas if you were all playing the campaign together, you’d be doing a lot of running, vehicle driving, and cutscene watching. It is not unlike the Terrorist Hunt mode in the Rainbow Six Vegas games. Horde mode does a great job of sticking to the game’s unique combat system. The Horde mode also allows you to continue off on the last wave that you die on. For example, if you died on Wave 13, you could restart there any time after that since it gets unlocked for your profile so you don’t ever have to start from scratch.

Hopefully Gears of War 3 preserves or enhances this mode, as it’s the most fun multiplayer component of the game.

Adversarial
Besides the new addition of bots for offline and online multiplayer adversarial modes, Gears of War 2 adds a couple more adversarial modes:

Wingman – Five teams of two compete in team deathmatch style play with execution rules (no respawning) in effect for each round.

Submission – CTF game with one flag and the flag itself is a person that shoots back. He needs to be attacked enough before he is able to be carried back to a randomly designated spot on the map by your team.

The remaining modes are present as well from the previous game:

1. Warzone – Team deathmatch with no respawns
2. Execution – Similar to Warzone but players can only be killed with finishers or one-shot kills.
3. Annex – Sort of like the Headquarters mode in recent Call of Duty games, Annex has a randomly spawning ring that awards a fixed number of points over time to the team that holds it. Once the points are depleted, the circle spawns somewhere else on the map.
4. Guardian – similar to Rainbow Six Vegas 2’s Assassination mode. In this team based game each side has a team leader that when killed, prevents any more respawns from occuring for the other team. So it’s pretty much team deathmatch with the goal to kill the other team’s leader so the players don’t respawn.
5. King of the Hill – like the Headquarters mode in recent Call of Duty games, both teams try to hold a designated location on the map to score points. The team holding the location does not respawn but the other team does.

While it may look like Gears of War 2 has several adversarial offerings that could prove to be entertaining, the core gameplay concepts in the game just don’t carry well to the multiplayer modes, ruining the design of the multiplayer game. In the campaign, the weapon most used is the Lancer, but nearly nobody uses the Lancer online except for its chainsaw. The shotgun was always a problem in the first one’s multiplayer, and it’s still constantly used in the second one. In fact, most games seem to degenerate to all of the players running/rolling at each other and then either trying to chainsaw or shotgun for the one-hit kill. It reminds me of the mess you’d see when you watch a group of young kids trying to play organized soccer, but instead every single player on both teams just surrounds the ball and a huge clump of kids travel along with it. There’s no semblance of firefights or duck and cover mechanics that the campaign emphasizes.

What also makes things significantly worse for advesarial play is the implementation of grenade sticks to walls (new to Gears of War 2). Now any time a player comes across a couple of grenades (which respawn far too quickly), they just plant them somewhere, turns around, and finds another path towards the enemy. If the enemy tries to circle around and flank them, that planted grenade is a guaranteed one hit kill. There’s no way to see it coming, especially if it’s planted behind a wall so you can’t even see the grenade itself when you’re walking down the hall. There’s no “Bomb Squad”-style Call of Duty Perk that alerts you to these planted grenades. Basically, every match has players planting grenades where they spawn, and then rushing at each other in the middle with shotguns or chainsaws. Why trade fire when you can just get up close for the one hit kill? There’s a myriad of design problems with the adversarial multiplayer, and while I wasn’t enjoying them enough to play them as religiously as Gears of War fanatics, I picked up the glaring faults in the multiplayer design pretty early on and decided I no longer wanted to be a part of it.

Even if I did decide I wanted to subject myself to the mess that was adversarial multiplayer in Gears of War 2, I don’t know if I’d even have a choice with the terrible matchmaking in Gears of War 2. I’ve never come across one this bad before – having waited up to about 15 minutes before I got into a match. The way it works is that each player has an online ranking between 1-5 depending on your Trueskill score. Once you form a team between 1-5 players and search for a game, it finds other players to fill your side until you have five players. Then it attempts to find an opposing team of five players that has a similar ranking to start the match. While matchmaking in games like Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty World at War, Shadowrun, and even Battlefield: Bad Company were quite seamless, Gears of War 2 is the worst ever. Each of those other games can find a match for you in under a minute, while Gears of War 2 takes several minutes, with some claiming they have waited 45 minutes. How is this even possible for a game that sold several million copies already? Something is totally off in the matchmaking code.

Gears of War 2’s attention to detail makes it one of the best looking games on the 360.

Achievement System
As a whole, the Achievements in Gears of War 2 are better designed than the first one. Gone are all of the “kill x number of human opponents in a ranked match with this weapon” type Achievement. Instead, there are only a few multiplayer Achievements that can actually be gotten through normal online play. With time, any devoted online fan can probably get everything. It’s pretty ridiculous that the first one had an Achievement for hosting 50 ranked matches – who wouldn’t have wanted to host and have the lag-free advantage?

Still, the rest of the Achievements are definitely a step up – most of the Achievements in the first one just revolved around beating each Chapter on a particular difficulty level. While there’s still collection related Achievements, I like that this time around each collection item actually has some lore information about the game, giving the storyline a little more depth. Gears of War 2 also informs you how many collectibles remain in every level, a welcome feature that seems to be included in more games these days with collection Achievements. Gears of War 1’s “Seriously” Achievement of 100,000 online kills has now been changed to Seriously 2.0: 100,000 kills of anything in any mode. This means it’s possible to not even play online and still be able to get the Achievement. I also like now that you can get the co-op Achievements by playing as either Marcus or Dom, instead of only as Dom in the first one. And finally, it was a nice touch that a little windows pop up on your screen to show you Achievement progress on a particular Achievement that you are working on.

What did I not like? The co-op Achievement still doesn’t track well. There’s one for completing every chapter in co-op, but rarely will any two people have the time to devote to all chapters in one sitting. If they disconnect after a checkpoint and come back later, it’s not necessarily guaranteed that they will get the Achievement when they go on to finish the game. This is because the Achievement tracks the progress by chapters, not checkpoints. It’s obviously not clear to the players but in order to continue where they left off and still get the Achievement, they would have to start from the beginning of that checkpoint’s chapter.

I also did not like that there’s no Achievement for beating the game on Insane by yourself. This was the same problem as in Gears of War 1, but I guess there is a minor workaround in place: if you beat the game and get the Insane Achievement but have not earned any co-op Achievements, people will know you beat it solo. Obviously, I would have liked to see difficulty Achievements for solo play only (or both solo and co-op play), since you can actually go through a co-op game on Insane with a partner setting his difficulty to Casual and he’d make it easy for you to earn the Insane achievement.

If you’re sad you didn’t get a chance to fight the Brumak in Gears of War 1, you’ll have plenty of opportunities in this one.

Final Thoughts
I enjoyed the single player campaign of Gears of War 2 a lot. While its bosses weren’t exactly the most challenging and a step back from the bosses in Gears of War 1, the overall pace and varied diversions were quite enjoyable. The campaign looks great and sounds great. The Horde mode is addicting and a very welcome addition. The main problem is the complete mess that is the multiplayer.

I would generally give a game like this an A-, but in reality, my final grade for it is a B+. I can’t help but penalize the game for how shoddy the multiplayer design and matchmaking are – especially so because this isn’t even the first game in the series. Epic knew how much the shotgun was abused in the first game, but they didn’t do enough to reduce its use for the second. If they somehow decide to fix the matchmaking so it’s pristine and redesign the mechanics of adversarial matches so it wasn’t such a trainwreck of grenade tags, chainsaws, and shotguns, this game could actually move up to an A- and rival Call of Duty: World at War’s offerings. Even if that game’s multiplayer is not totally balanced, it works – something Gears of War 2 cannot claim. If you’re looking to play something online competitively, don’t go for Gears of War 2. Consider Call of Duty: World at War, or even last year’s Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4. If you just want to enjoy the Gears 2 campaign with a buddy or spend most of your time in Horde mode though this game won’t disappoint. Just avoid the adversarial until Epic decides to stop working on releasing new map-packs and maybe fix their broken multiplayer.