Gears of War 2 Hands-on Preview

Wars of Gears

Gears of War 2 is looking to be an odd kettle of robotic fish so far then and it really is difficult to gauge how we really feel about it.

On the one hand, Gears of War 2 definitely left us feeling a little disappointed and nonplussed. The action is the same as it was before, with little in the way of innovation or enhancements aside from the ability to use mobile cover – which in itself was hit and miss a lot of the time.

The levels we got a chance to play with, which covered much of the first act of the game and ranged from hospitals to huge monster trucks used to drill into the Locust caverns, were definitely cinematic and gritty, but also very predictable.

There was a constant feeling that yes, maybe we should be impressed by the scene we were in – shooting down flying Locust units with a chaingun as our truck tore across a narrow cliff top – but that feeling never really materialised.

Instead, we found ourselves reminded that this was something we had done before in a thousand other games and while Gears of War 2 undoubtedly handled it well, it wasn’t exactly exceptional.


At the same time though it is hard to criticise the game because it does play quite well. It handles fine, though there are still a few problems to be seen when trying to use cover quickly, and if you disregard the fact that the enemies all proactively volunteer to be bullet sponges then the combat proves to be responsive, challenging and visceral.

Again, there are things we like about Gears of War 2 such as the continuing side story about Dom and his search for his wife, which really does make you empathise with him a little. The new collectible system is good too, serving to both enhance the narrative and provide a moving goal for the player.

The multiplayer modes we played on the other hand are a little bit easier to decipher and figure out; they work, they’re just a little bit repetitive. There’s good stuff there, but for it to really work then the levels will need to be a little bit more varied and open than the ones we got to see.


There’s a simple way to look at this and that’s to say that Gears of War 2 is essentially just the same as Gears of War. All the things that made the first game annoying are here too, as are all the things which made Gears good the first time around. Obviously the good still far outweighs the bad, but the brilliance of them is dulled somewhat by the fact that we’ve seen them all before.

In the end, most of the tweaks and additions to the game seem to be mostly minor, in our eyes. This is still Gears of War as we know it, but the real issue seems to be that it’s Gears of War exactly as we knew it before. There’s nothing here that really makes Gears of War 2 stand out enormously.

The first game managed to become successful based on the awesome graphics, solid performance, enjoyable multiplayer and accessible singleplayer. From what we’ve seen, all of that is still there, but it hasn’t matured or truly grown and the result is that this feels much more like Gears of War 1.1 than Gears of War 2.