Gears of War 2
Hands-on time with the newest Gears of War proves this episode to be more brutal and generally bad-ass than its forerunner. And we have Epic Games’ guarantee that it’ll last a lot longer this time. So… hooah!
If you ran a mile from the teenage kicks offered in the first Gears of War you’ll catch an express train to avoid the sequel. But those of us who loved the overblown comic violence of Gears, the sheer animal spectacle of it, will want to marry GOW2.
We recently had several hours to get reacquainted with hero Marcus Fenix and his COG (Coalition of Organized Governments) Delta Squad. Among the many outstanding gameplay features we experience first hand, the lasting overall impression was one of magnitude. ‘Gears 2’ does everything bigger.
Starting with your sworn enemy, the Locust, who’ve regrouped after the last pounding they took. There are many new types to contend with, great and small. Most bothersome are the Tickers, knee-high critters encased in explosives that storm your position like a swarm of rats and move so quickly that you’ll need to be quite the marksman to eliminate them before they get too close. On the other end of the scale there are the Flame Boomers, giant Locust toting monster-sized flame throwers. As if the variety that favour rocket launchers weren’t enough! Other Locust foot-soldiers of note are the medieval-style Butcher who carries with him a great big chopper and one whose name escaped us (!) but carried a shield and twirled a hefty mace.
The COG soldiers’ response to all this is very respectable. Not even Butcher and the Boomers can last long against a Gatling gun nicknamed Mulcher for its effects. Where larger targets exist, such as Locust riding Reavers (flying machines), or simply Locusts en masse, you know have a Mortar to rain down cluster bombs. Aiming this thing takes a short while getting used to but is great fun forever after. There’s also the Bore Gun, which you can probably guess at what happens given Gears’ violent rep. Finally, at least for the sake of our demo, there’s the rather tame-sounding Ink Grenade that smothers its targets in deadly poison.
Ranged weapons are common in Gears 2 because locations are generally more expansive and the Locust Horde marches in greater numbers. Within the first few hours of gameplay we spent a noticeable amount of time clinging onto placement guns brat-tat-tat-tatting at scurrying Drones or aiming to take down Reavers, Brumacks, and – Gears fans will love this – numerous huge spider-like Corpsers.
Larger guns have a tendency to overheat, requiring a pressure valve to be manually released every 30 rounds or so. This has strategic gameplay consequences as well as just being a cool hardware design! However the COG soldier’s standard issue weapon of choice remains the Lancer, with its onboard chainsaw, which means you’ll want to get up close to carve yourself some Locust sashimi every now and again. Ah, but successfully getting up close is the thing.
Onto the smartest gameplay addition to Gears of War this year: moveable cover. There were one or two examples of this in the first GOW – using a burned-out car as a shield while shoving it along in one instance. In GOW2 you can grab injured medium-size Locusts to use as ‘hostages’, using their soft bodies to take hits while you take careful aim and move carefree toward cover. Furniture can be kicked over and nudged around to provide soft cover until it gets shredded or torched.
The showcase example of moveable cover, demoed by Epic Games’ creative leader Clifford Bleszinski, is a creature called Rock Worm. This 30-foot long millipede has a protective shell that most weapons won’t even dent. Rock Worms trample anything that gets underfoot… or, err, feet, but if you leave them to get on with their place in the underground ecosystem you can use them as moveable shields. Rock Worms have only one weakness – they can’t resist the huge crimson berries that grow in their caverns. If you want a Rock Worm to scuttle into a more advantageous position, just see if there’s a berry nearby to use as a lure. This could indeed be “hands down the best cover system in the business”, as Cliff proudly states.
‘Act One’ of the new campaign, dubbed Tip of the Spear, holds more action than in the entire of Gears of War, no exaggeration. We survived 80 percent of this before having the controller taken out of our hands by Microsoft PR. Bah. Adding to the drama is that Locust can now sink entire cities using their Emergence Holes, whereas in the original Gears these were limited to just a couple of metres in diameter. You see devastation everywhere as you travel aboard troop carriers the size of two double-decker buses, the theme of ‘destroyed beauty’ now encompasses the wilderness – entire forests have been ravaged – and smaller outpost towns with quaint features such as babbling streams beneath ornate bridges.
Rolling Thunder is an early mission in which the Locust attempts to ambush the COG convoy en route to its next base camp. Locust swarm on the ground and bombard from the skies, ‘Nemacyst’ organic missiles raining down while Drones clamber up to the fuselage of your comrades’ RIG and threaten a pirate style boarding of your own. When the Corpsers emerge from over nearby mountain ridges leading the charge for another wave of Locust Drones Gears of War 2 begins to resemble Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Bruckheimer’s Pirates of the Caribbean rolled into one.
If we have one concern after playing Gears 2, it can only be that we spent so much time firing at distant targets using placement guns, mortars and grenades, we started to miss the precision ‘stop and pop’ gameplay that made the original so gripping. Plenty of opportunity for this in the five-player co-op mode Horde, though – described by Epic’s Bleszinski as Smash TV meets Geometry Wars...
Our Horde exploits were limited to four maps at the GOW2 preview event: River, Security, Avalanche and Day One. The basic premise is 50 waves of Locust assaults taking place on any multiplayer map you wish. Waves get stronger ever tenth time, affecting health, accuracy and damage. Cliff Bleszinski says even he has only survived up to wave 27 – we feel obliged to keep secret our best efforts here! Horde, playable online across Xbox LIVE, is uniquely entertaining because you really start to look out for your fellow soldiers. Strength in number, you see. Whereas standard GOW multiplayer games have boiled down to ground-rolling and shotgun blasting, in Horde the team focus makes it all about combined pressure. Instinctively you’ll use a comrade’s covering fire to leap over walls and close in on preoccupied Butchers, seizing your chance to apprehend a weakened Locust to beat him with bare hands – one of all-new melee attacks that apply to wounded enemies. If you’re the guy that ends up doubled over in pain, the ability to crawl as best you can to safety makes it easier to spot injured comrades in the field, hopefully to heal before they ‘bleed out’.
We only caught a glimpse of the new ultimate bad guy in GOW 2, Skorge, before being escorted from the console. Skorge was tearing into one of our new COG comrades, ‘Dizzy’, pilot of our RIG, as we headed underground in our Grindlifts (metal capsules designed to drill through rock to reach the Locust caverns below). It wasn’t looking too well for the driver. Cliffy B tells us that Skorge is “a scalpel to Raam’s hammer”. General Raam was the rather disappointing Last Boss in the original Gears. Skorge is promised to be more of a handful.
As with the game itself we’re now counting the days until we meet his acquaintance.
