Gears of War 2 Review (Xbox 360)

The original Gears of War arrived to universal acclaim in 2006, including our Game of the Year award, for it's gritty look and feel, beautifully tuned gameplay mechanics and ridiculously addictive multiplayer game. Two years later (to the day) Epic's beast is back - and it's badder than ever. Read on for our full review.

The Lightmass bomb deployed at the end of the first game didn't do the job the COG had hoped. (Lucky, because we get to play this sequel and the inevitable third game in 2010.) The Locust are sinking cities left right and center, and the humans still holed up in Jacinto, the last great city of Sera, have only one choice - attack. Luckily, the Gears of the first game are joined by some new characters - Carmine's younger brother Benjamin, the Maori-influenced Tai Kaliso, and the one-dimensional yet endearing Dizzy.

Much like the original, you can quickly navigate a training course to get you up to speed on the game mechanics, or just dive in. A "Casual" difficulty level is available, and it's perfectly tuned for someone who hasn't played a shooter before - indeed, I watched someone who had never used an Xbox 360 controller smash through the first level without dying once.

Gears of War 2 still feels like the first game, so much so that you might not realize how technically superior this iteration is until you pop the Gears of War disc back in your Xbox 360. The scale, variety, eye candy...indeed, just about everything has been expanded, tuned, and perfected.

We all love to complain about the endless dark corridors that some shooters rely on for their environments - so I'm glad to say that Epic has pulled off the antithesis of this incredibly well. The settings themselves might strike some as cliche - but they're always full of jaw-dropping, well-lit and colorful imagery.

The campaign will last somewhere between 10 and 15 hours depending on your skill level and whether or not you have a friend helping out as Dom. You'll run into new, bigger and badder enemies, including showdowns with the massive Brumak, and fight several times more on-screen Locust at once than you would have imagined possible in 2006.

Surprisingly, Epic have managed to add a number of weapons to the game without them feeling like an afterthought, or paling in comparison to the undeniably awesome carry-overs from the original game. There's the Boltok, a semi-automatic pistol that fires bursts of five rounds, "Ink" (read: poison gas) grenades that are thankfully effective against the Locust you've stolen them from, and three heavy weapons that you can carry in addition to the rest of your arsenal, but hinder your speed greatly - a flame-thrower, a chain-gun and a mortar.

Multiplayer

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