All 'Geared' up and ready to go

'Gears of War 2' big on action, weak on plot

By: John Bailey

Posted: 11/13/08

Action games are about lots of things. They're about explosions. They're about barked orders and furious last stands. They're about ordinance shrieking by your head and gore-soaked carnage and adrenaline, or whatever adrenaline you can get from a video game. They are not, at all, ever, about the story.

It takes an awfully bad story to ruin an action game. Somehow, "Gears of War 2" comes pretty close. It does almost everything else right - more of the fast-paced, gritty action that made the original great, more motion-blurring roadie runs, more chainsaw kills. The graphics are still wonderfully detailed. The new guns are cool. The online multiplayer is addictive.

The writing and story, meanwhile, are some of the worst seen in a game, and "Gears 2" comes close to the dank pit of mediocrity because of it. A game of this pedigree has no right to sport writing this terrible. It's like watching a Budweiser Clydesdale trip on a thumbtack.

The premise - if you've never played the original "Gears 1" - is something about a war with some nasty pale monster things that want to kill you. Unhappy about this, you try to kill them instead. That's all there really is to it. There's been Internet noise that maybe, in a surprise twist ending (to be revealed in the third game), humanity is really the bad guy, but honestly the entire plot is so limp and vestigial that there's really nothing Epic can do to save it.

And that's what makes the story so frustrating: It's useless, it's irrelevant, nobody cares - and yet they try so hard to make the game emotionally affecting. There's a cast of assorted meatheads who attempt to endear themselves to you with their catchy boisterous camaraderie - but there's nothing "raw" or "real" about characters who scream "Sup, b------?" after exploding a man's head with a sniper rifle. It's just stupid, and it makes me very uninterested in saving this guy's wife. (Yes, you try to rescue Dom's wife at one point. Will something go wrong? "Nooooo!" screams Dom. That's some drama! Powerful! Riveting!)

The game hidden under all this flak is, unsurprisingly, a lot of fun, with all the dashing behind cover and rolling away from gunfire you'd expect.

Unfortunately, once you get past the insane banter and beefcake stupidity (there is literally a cowboy-hatted road warrior who refers to his car's lights as its "titties"), you'll find that the otherwise strong campaign mode is littered with moments that take that fun game and punt it into traffic.

Remember the astoundingly miserable "evil bugs are eating your car" scene in the first game? Apparently, they didn't meet their conniption quota the first time around, so there are plenty more annoying vehicle levels, along with a functional redux of the frustrating avoid-the-dark chapter, a boring, Flood-inspired zombie level and some punishing, pain-in-the-ass bosses.

The best part of this game is undoubtedly the new Horde mode, which takes you, a few of your buddies and an infinite supply of enemies and throws you in a level. It's a co-op gamer's dream come true, and it makes the perfect compliment to a night of beer, cheap pizza and death metal. It's playable online, too, but high-fives aren't nearly as visceral over the Internet, and as a college student it's unlikely you won't be able to find at least one buddy to take the copilot's seat on the couch.

And significantly, Horde mode has zero story, zero premise even, beyond "those guys are over there, and if you kill them, you go to the next level." It's fantastic, and by itself, it just about makes this game worth purchasing.

If "Gears of War 2" had spent less time flirting with pretensions of drama, it would have been a great game. As it stands, it's a fun way to spend an otherwise quiet Friday night, but honestly, there are plenty of other, cheaper ways to turn off your brain for a few hours.