GEARS OF WAR 2

[C-Kwik]

Horde is pretty fun in a large group as one can snipe, one can mortar, and others can just be frontline soldiers. I got the achievement for beating all 50 levels a couple of days ago on hardcore (Dont have insane unlocked yet :/ ) with a good strategy and alert teammates it's actually pretty easy. River is by far the best level to play horde on.

I figure as much. But we simply had a couple of hours and decided to try it out. It became pretty clear at the 10th round that this wasn't going to be easy with just 2 of us.

[packerjd04]

If anyone wants to play tonight add my tag- packerjd04. I'm down for some horde or whatever.

[OldmanPurdy]

Me and 2 friends did it on normal so if you lower the difficulty to casual I can see 2 people getting it done.

[packerjd04]

Ya me and my friend got to 40 last night on casual, will prolly try to get 50 today, its not bad on casual, pretty fun.

[snwbrdr435]

got to 49 today and then lost the connection and got booted out of the game

[marlin29311]

I got to 39 last night and some dbag wouldn't pick up me and my teammates when we were downed. A-hole...he just stood there at looked at us when we were standing next to him....

In other news the city level with the big sinkhole in the middle is awesome for horde.

[C-Kwik]

We did much better with a total of 5 in our group. unfortunately aroud the time we got to wave 20, two of the people we were paying with weren't paying much attention while playing due to a football game. By the time the football game ended, someone else had to leave. We got passed 20, and we were up to about 25 when the connection at my house went down. I'll try again next time we get some time. But it was a crapload of fun.

[packerjd04]

Me and my friend finally beat all 50 today on avalanche, just the 2 of us so it was pretty sweet. I'm not really a fan of the Day One map, Avalanche is definitely my favorite, or Blood Drive.

[Loki]

So many mixed reviews, i think ill rent it first!!

I tried last night...Blockbuster had 6 copies, all rented. Of course they have 20 copies of Fallout 3, all unrented.

[redtop91]

Finished the campaign Sunday. Lamest. Ending. Ever.

[krimsonviper]

Finished the campaign Sunday. Lamest. Ending. Ever.

i didnt think it was that bad, but if you dont like cliffhangers, then you'll be mad like Angry ^ over here.

dog gone you people are good at playing these games! i'm playing horde on normal and its hard for me to get passed level 20! farthest i've gone was 37.

i really like the story in both 1 and 2, but 2 is alot better as in game play and length. Definately a buy. just as soon as Christmas has passed

y0 ry ry, sorry i didnt play with you those couple of times. the 1st time, my nephews wanted to play games, and i'd been in the game room for hours already and the 2nd time Live wouldnt let me connect. damn dashboard update

[MinisterofDOOM]

I swear I friggin' posted in this thread already...

This game is great. I'm enjoying it. It's very well balanced, so you have a lot of fun and are challenged, but it very very rarely becomes frustrating. The weapons feel fantastic and the controls are sharp and as close to perfect as possible on a lamepad.

I ran into a fun (sarcasm!) glitch that caused me to spontaneously drop THROUGH the world in the Intestinal Fortitude level. I stopped falling after a few seconds and reappeared IN the ground, unable to move. I had to reload the last checkpoint, which fortunately was just one firefight back.

[C-Kwik]

I swear I friggin' posted in this thread already...

This game is great. I'm enjoying it. It's very well balanced, so you have a lot of fun and are challenged, but it very very rarely becomes frustrating. The weapons feel fantastic and the controls are sharp and as close to perfect as possible on a lamepad.

I ran into a fun (sarcasm!) glitch that caused me to spontaneously drop THROUGH the world in the Intestinal Fortitude level. I stopped falling after a few seconds and reappeared IN the ground, unable to move. I had to reload the last checkpoint, which fortunately was just one firefight back.

I've hit a number of bugs myself. One of the common ones seems to be the one with the big "fish". My character repeatedly ended up floating in the air when the "fish" tried to eat the boat. Another one was on a level where Marcus and Dom split up. One player goes street level while the other makes his way through the buildings. At the end where they rejoin, a parking structure collapses. In our case Dom got pinned by a car when the building collapsed. Turns out it wasn't a bad bug as hitting the next checkpoint which is right there pulls Dom forward, but we wasted a good 5 minutes trying to get Dom out.

The last I ran into was on the Hive level where the characters split up. One team takes the elevator and the other takes the stairs and flips switches that keep the elevator moving down. It seems that if a player jumps on the troika mounted to the elevator before the prompt to choose sides comes up, then 2 things happen. 1, the player that was on the troika appears in the cutscene both on the troika and walking onto the elevator. 2. That player gets stuck somewhere behind the troika and can't do much. The GF was playing Dom when we saw this happen and as I watched, it looked like Dom was behind cover, despite the fact he was standing in open ground. Luckily once he dies, the checkpoint alleviates the issue.

The game is a bit buggy here and there, but most are not game ending bugs. Hopefully they fix the big ones. The thread for bugs in the game on the Epic Forum is huge. Some 51 pages last I saw.

[MinisterofDOOM]

Oh, I forgot to mention that Jack (the flying robot thingy) parked himself RIGHT in the path of the tutorial. He stopped at head level in an opening in a fence where I had to go. The NPCs (Dom and whatsisname the Rook) kept getting stuck on him, and actually made it past a few times only to confusedly walk BACK to the wrong side. Finally after SEVERAL minutes, Jack moved and I was able to progress.

[redtop91]

i didnt think it was that bad, but if you dont like cliffhangers, then you'll be mad like Angry ^ over here.

My problem really wasn't with the cliffhanger, rather the simplicity of the final boss and how thrown together it was! Garbage!

[krimsonviper]

I ran into a fun (sarcasm!) glitch that caused me to spontaneously drop THROUGH the world in the Intestinal Fortitude level. I stopped falling after a few seconds and reappeared IN the ground, unable to move. I had to reload the last checkpoint, which fortunately was just one firefight back.

I kinda had the same thing happen to me with that giant fish. When it was trying to bring down the boat with its tentacles, if I wasn't moving, I would be caught floating in mid-air and I wouldn't be able to move. Very frustrating.

[bmike818]

I still have to play through the game, I have been playing multiplayer primarily. If anybody is going to do the Insane campaign mode, please send me an invite...... and I also would like to finish the Horde and I hate getting stuck with a crappy team.

mYkILL818

[nametakennow]

The final boss really is bull****. Is it even possible to fail?

My roommate and I will be going through again on hardcore and/or insane next week (not that it takes a week, but we only get an hour here and there). Considering that we easily chomped through the first game on those difficulties, this shouldn't be too tough of a challenge.

Thankfully, there's no Kryll, and no section like driving the junker through the night. I hated that part. It was excessively tedious and not at all interesting. Certainly less interesting than riding Reavers and Brumaks, though I wasn't a huge fan of those sections either.

I'm happy that this game didn't include any situations where you could have a moment of minor stupidity and be screwed so that you'd have to go back to the last checkpoint.

Example - Going through that town at night and having to push cars through the light. If the idiot AI got stuck behind something, Kryll ate them. Sometimes they even just ran out in the darkness for seemingly no reason. Enemies did this too, so at least there was some balance in it. It reinforced the idea that the game was meant to be played in co-op mode. That could be just me, though.

In general the AI is much better in this one. Bots in multiplayer (the 360 in my room isn't connected to the intarweb) tend to get themselves in ridiculous predicaments, especially if they're Carmine, but, more often than not, if you're nearby they provide remotely decent cover fire. Conversely, enemy AI's actually work together fairly convincingly, albeit quite slowly and timidly. You rarely ever get one of them alone without having to kill a few more first, or at least getting shot at while you sprint between cover areas.

One other bug I've noticed is that cover seems to work too well for enemies (probably friendlies too) in some situations. In the first game, if you could see any portion of them over or around their cover, you could shoot it and do damage (sometimes even headshots were possible). In this one I've pumped an entire clips into an AI's foot and they've remained completely undamaged. Admittedly, that isn't the best use of ammo, but it was one way to push enemies back when you were outnumbered in the first game. There are limits to this. If you're above them or directly on the other side of cover, you can usually get enough of an angle to get a shot.

All in all, hugely entertaining. I'm looking forward to the finale.

[biggishjay]

loved it good times

[bmike818]

Just like Gears of War 1, people quit in the middle of multiplayer matches, it's infuriating. I wish they had a way of tracking and banning the quiters.

[MinisterofDOOM]

SPOILERS (Highlight the text to read it.)

I found the ending totally satisfying.

The days of the epic end boss battle are over. It was a theme of yesteryear and isn't necessary anymore. I much prefer endings like Gears of War 2 or Half Life 2 in which you get to enjoy something rare and interesting while feeling powerful rather than a cliché cookie-cutter boss fight. As the storytelling medium of even mainstream games grows more prominent, I think we'll see a lot less cookie-cutter "look, big monster, this must be the end" sameness and more diversity in what brings things to a close. I'm all for it. I'd rather ride a Brumak through Imulsion and watch it explode than fight some big monster any day. Boss fights are what you do when you can't think of anything genuinely interesting.

I did have one major gripe with the story, though:I felt that the resolution to the Dom's wife sub-plot was completely anticlimactic. I know it was supposed to be dramatic, and when he finally killed her it was. But the fact that they spent so much of the game building up that part of the plot only to have it abruptly dropped like that...there should have been more to it. I was hoping his wife would turn out to be the Queen or one of her servants. No such luck. Instead we get a 30 second cut-scene and we're on with life...dull, thin, and very much as though the writers got tired of that whole sub-plot and decided "screw it, let's kill her here and get on with the gore."

[redtop91]

In line with your logic, wouldn't you have rather just seen a cutscene then?

[MinisterofDOOM]

Hmmmmm...not really. I definitely want to DO the "something rare and interesting" and not just watch it.

[OldmanPurdy]

In line with your logic, wouldn't you have rather just seen a cutscene then?

I always consider the "ending" of a game to include the last boss and leadup to the boss and not just the final cutscene. For instance LOZ: OOT on the N64 would have a poor ending if you only judged it on the final cutscene but when you include the epic battle with Ganon and the escape from the collapsing tower it becomes in my opinion one of the best endings of that era.

[packerjd04]

I was alright with the gears2 ending because i figured its just a set up for gears 3. Though one of my favorite endings in a game is in CoD4 with the slow-mo, just the awesomeness of the scene is what gets me. Seeing your squadmates being gunned down, turning and having a pistol slid over to you, then pow pow pow. Sick.

[redtop91]

Indeed the COD4 ending, unique and different but still enjoyable. Not so much with Gears 2.

[nametakennow]

Pseudo-spoilers below, but I don't say anything outright.

I agree with the Dom subplot. It was obvious even before the Tai thing happened. As soon as they start even remotely mentioning that the Locust are "acting strangely," it becomes completely obvious what's going on.

That said, it only furthers the fact that I'm convinced that the Locust are the result of an experiment with people and imulsion, or simply miners who got "rust lung" and disappeared.

Even though it's predictable, I can't wait for 3, if only to see that I'm at least mostly right about what's going on.

[marlin29311]

Pseudo-spoilers below, but I don't say anything outright.

I agree with the Dom subplot. It was obvious even before the Tai thing happened. As soon as they start even remotely mentioning that the Locust are "acting strangely," it becomes completely obvious what's going on.

That said, it only furthers the fact that I'm convinced that the Locust are the result of an experiment with people and imulsion, or simply miners who got "rust lung" and disappeared.

Even though it's predictable, I can't wait for 3, if only to see that I'm at least mostly right about what's going on.

That would make the idea of the "queen of the horde" someone odd though - the caste system of drones, workers, fighters, etc has more of an animal colony style than of a human approach to it - there seems to be no intelligence or education system. I agree that the styles of civilization can be somewhat similar to our own, but I really don't think that they are "morphed" humans or what not. Plus, Corpsers, Brumaks, etc...they aren't exactly huminoids - lol.

Though this is sci-fi - I guess everything is possible.

[C-Kwik]

I always consider the "ending" of a game to include the last boss and leadup to the boss and not just the final cutscene. For instance LOZ: OOT on the N64 would have a poor ending if you only judged it on the final cutscene but when you include the epic battle with Ganon and the escape from the collapsing tower it becomes in my opinion one of the best endings of that era.

Goddammit...you just spoiled the ending for me. I have been looking for a piece of heart for the longest time so I can finish the damned game (I don't go into fight Ganon on any Zelda game until I have everything). I swear its a bug though and the piece of heart I need is completely missing as I've checked every spot using three different walk-through sources. I'd normally start it over but this is my 3rd time trying to play through the game already. A key went missing on me once before and another time, I broke the game cartridge when I stepped on it by accident. Perhaps I'll just finish it anyways, but it just won't feel like I "finished".

[nametakennow]

That would make the idea of the "queen of the horde" someone odd though - the caste system of drones, workers, fighters, etc has more of an animal colony style than of a human approach to it - there seems to be no intelligence or education system. I agree that the styles of civilization can be somewhat similar to our own, but I really don't think that they are "morphed" humans or what not. Plus, Corpsers, Brumaks, etc...they aren't exactly huminoids - lol.

Though this is sci-fi - I guess everything is possible.

The caste system would still work, it probably developed as a part of the experiments. There are some not-so-subtle hints towards that in the mountains in GOW2.

The other creatures could be other animals, dogs and apes and such.

There are also clearly some native lifeforms that probably morphed as part of exposure to imulsion like the worms. They could be tamed.