By Staff
He pulls out a picture of Dom and his wife, taken in happier times before the Locust ravaged the planet and the two were separated. “I keep it in my wallet,” says Bleszinski.
“One of the problems with videogamers is that they don’t take the videogame worlds very seriously,” says design director Cliff Bleszinski. “It’s just like wink-wink, hey, it’s a videogame – whatever, right?”
We’ve obviously got confused: we thought this was exactly the right response to Gears Of War’s happily non-cerebral plot with its lunkheaded smack-talk, slavering monsters and supersized weaponry. And, unlike Bleszinski, we didn’t think this was a problem at all – we thought it was funny. Bleszinski has news for us. He pulls out a mock-up photograph that will apparently ship with the special edition of the game – a picture of secondary character Dominic Santiago and his wife, taken in happier times before the Locust ravaged the planet of Sera and the two were separated. “I keep it in my wallet,” says Bleszinski.
Epic Games wants you to care about its story. Gears 2 attempts to take a more sombre tone than the first game, inviting gamers to become emotionally involved with the walking boiled hams who make up the cast of space marines. This effort is certainly noticeable during our playthrough of the first act – the gunplay stopping and starting for expositionary cutscenes, prerendered and otherwise. This time around, however, such interruptions can be easily skipped – even the moments when you are reduced to a forced walk, a finger on your earpiece as you communicate with Control.
“If you really can’t deal with 30 seconds of dialogue,” says Bleszinski, “if it’s really that agonising for you, you can just hit the back button and Marcus will be like, ‘Enough!’ and you just keep going.”
And you really do keep going; if the game dares to pause to set the scene then it is a momentary stutter in an otherwise breakneck ride. It turns out that Bleszinski’s promise of Gears 2 being “bigger and more badass” is not just puff, the first act propelling the player through a series of gargantuan set-pieces to dwarf even the largest of those in the previous game. After reacquainting the player with the game’s stalwart cover-heavy gunplay, Gears 2 sees Marcus and Dom take the fight to the Locust – guarding a series of lumbering, caterpillar-tracked derricks as they make their way into the snow-bound countryside to where they hope to drill down into the enemy hive. As the Nemacyst spiral out of the sky to explode in the Alpine scenery, the caravan is assaulted by swarms of enemies, their variety much greater than that of the first game, giving a real sense of a vast marauding war machine.
Upstaging the first game’s grander moments a number of the towering beasts that were its major threats find themselves greasing the tracks of the giant derricks. But the Locust Horde has more Brumaks and Corpsers to spare, and soon the COG caravan’s numbers dwindle – a mighty attack force reduced to a few, increasingly beleaguered vehicles. One sequence sees a hijacked derrick swing up alongside your own, lurching back and forth as its gruesome, piratical crew exchange shots with your own.
As exciting and visually arresting as this is, however, there is a nagging concern that Epic may have gone for spectacle to the detriment of interactivity. While one player mounts the derrick’s mounted gun, cutting down Brumaks and shredding the decks of hijacked vehicles, his co-op partner is left with little to do except to stave off the occasional boarding attempt. Odd though this is, the moment of disorienting obsolescence whizzes by, and soon you find yourselves barrelling through the tight, snow-sprinkled streets of a deserted township, taking out mortar positions to ensure the safe passage of your derrick, before plunging down through Sera’s topsoil into act two.
Even if, with some of the larger set pieces, Gears 2 manages to look more interesting than it is to play, you are never given a chance to forget just how sturdy a shooter this is. Interspersing the showboating is a welcome number of down-and-dirty gun battles, each of which exploits the environment to keep you moving and wary of being flanked. Epic’s supreme competency here is made particularly evident in the multiplayer co-op mode, Horde, which sees players fight off wave upon wave of enemies. It’s a fraught affair, always keeping the five players exposed to attack from more angles than they can effectively cover. As the waves move into double figures, you fend off ever more lethal foes: heavily armoured Boomers wielding chainguns, flamers and flails; vicious scampering Sirens, who have a nasty propensity for coming back from the dead; scuttling living explosives called Tickers and mounted Locust riding grotesque, reptilian dog-pigs. Under increased pressure, it becomes hard to keep the squad together, particularly since ammunition and weapons tend to respawn in the least defensible areas.
With an improved matchmaking and community system, the multiplayer component of Gears will hopefully finally achieve the longevity it deserves. It’s difficult to say on the merits of the first act whether the single-player campaign will have the same persisting allure once the thrill of its spectacle becomes old. Nonetheless, if it manages to maintain the frantic pace of its opening, then Gears 2 will deliver a riot of bombastic visuals and delicious sci-fi tosh, enriched as ever by its staples of co-op and cover. The plot may be more po-faced, but like many inadvertent gems of the B-movie genre, it’s difficult not to greet it with a big, childish grin.
