An appointment with death

The skinny: At the conclusion of Gears 1, Marcus Fenix and the rest of Delta squad launched a weapon crippling the Locust invasion. While they’ve been busy licking their wounds, humanity decides to take the fight to them, STRAIGHT INTO HELL (cue wailing guitar riff).

Review: Game lead Cliff Bleszinski promised this sequel would be more gears more badass. Pleasantly that wasn’t just pre-sales hype and Gears 2 delivered on almost every talking point.

The story is still clunky with stilted acting, but a lot more attention has been put into it. But seriously, we’re not here for the story. We want to murder shit up real nice, which is exactly what you get to do. They’ve added a few new heavy weapons like the lovely mortar. The revamped vehicle sections no longer make me want to chainsaw my controller. Controls feel great and every frag still gives me that gleeful delight when I ruin a meatbag with a torque bow to the face.

They’ve added some great new game types which gives GOW2 incredibly long legs on xbox live. But my favorite and most played is Horde. Basically your team bunkers down in a defensible position while progressively harder waves of Locusts are thrown at you.

My only gripe is that the matchmaking is still wonky. It’s faster, but that’s  like saying girls are faster with their hair than make up. They just implemented the truskill ranking, but more often than not the assigned teams are egregiously lopsided.

Wrap up: If you loved GOW1, this is a no brainer. For the uninitiate, this is still the best looking game on the 360 and it plays just as good or better than any other 3rd person shooter.

Entertainment rating: 5