
Gears 2 was released on Friday and my first impressions are pretty good but there are several problems too.
Co-Op
A friend and I played through the co-op campaign on normal yesterday and were pretty happy with the game. It’s basically the first Gears with some new locust types to kill and a more engaging story and characters. I actually remember the names of the characters this time around, it’s hard not to when you have a better storyline such as with Dom and better characterisation as with Carmine.
Bugs
Gears 2 is certainly “more” and “bigger” than the first, but unfortunately that includes bugs as well. However, considering I only bought the first Gears about 3 months ago by which time all the major issues were probably patched, I’m hopeful we’ll see a patch for Gears 2 that resolves most of the bugs.
One of the more annoying bugs I’ve encountered a few times is a weapon bug where by selecting a weapon causes it to vanish from the selection wheel, after selecting each weapon you’re stuck with the last selected weapon, unable to pick-up or drop or use any weapons at all. There was a similar bug in the first Gears but you could usually cycle out of it, this one needed a restart from the previous checkpoint to clear.
I’ve also encountered quite a few rendering bugs where the floor and walls vanish and my character just hovers in mid air, occasionally falling down through where the floor should be, then popping back up again. Another bug was where the host could see Locust, yet I could not. This happened in particular on the level where you’re defending the city from the incoming reavers and have to kill 3 or 4 of them. My friend could see and shtot the reaver in the courtyard, I could see nothing.
Fingers crossed those will be tracked down and fixed before too long.
To sum up the single player/co-op campaign, I loved it. Really enjoyed the levels, even though it’s more of the same from Gears, there was just enough variety to make it a joy to play through. I’m looking forward to playing through again on Hardcore and Insane.
Photo-Cam

The addition of a screen-shot facility is welcomed, especially with the integration with the Gears Official website where you photos can be included in a Gallery. Not as impressive as Bungies Theater mode though, but a feature I think more games should include.
Multi-Player
Now the multi-player side is a different matter entirely. Epic have gone with a Halo 3 style of matchmaking, which is a great idea. It means we get to “party” up with friends, then have the system locate similar skilled players to populate the free slots in our team and match us up against an opposing team of similar skill.
However, there appears to be something wrong with how everything is working, we spent several minutes sat watching the game try to find 3 players to fill out our team with, then after several more minutes of trying to find a team to play one of our teams players quit, causing the search to begin again. After about 10-15 minutes we finally got into a game.
The only play-list we were matched up straight away and into a game within under a minute was the wingman mode. All the other modes were the same story, wait 5+ minutes to find a match, or never find one at all in the case of territories. I tried several times on Saturday to play just one game, but didn’t get a single match.
Unlike with Halo, there’s no indication of how many people are playing in the selected playlist. So whether nobody was playing territories, or there was something wrong with the match making (bug/overloaded?), I’ve no idea. It’s certainly more frustrating trying to get into a game than Gears 1, though I’m hopeful the situation will be resolved in the coming weeks which makes this a minor complaint.
P.S I’m aware of the NAT issues that can slow down matchmaking, my router is configured correctly afaik and the 360 shows NAT as fully open. I had to sort this out a while back due to voice comm problems in Halo 3.
Playlists
Speaking of play-lists. I hate these. In Gears one, I enjoyed playing Execution, I disliked playing Warzone. This wasn’t a problem, just set the search filters, find a game with a low ping and off you go, took under a minute to find and get into a game. With Gears 2, I have to hope that the “team” I’m matched with, want to vote for Execution and not Warzone or Guardian. Otherwise I could be forced to play a mode I dislike, or worse, quit out and ruin the game for the rest of my team.
I have the same issue with Halo 3. I enjoy death match games, yet there is no ranked “Slayer” only mode in Halo 3, you have to instead just play Social Slayer (we don’t have that option in Gears 2). There is the option to veto a game mode, or map in Halo 3, but then you’re stuck with the next choice, which could (and often is) be an even crappier game mode.
This is one area where Gears 2 has improved on Halo 3’s system, although they have the same annoying use of play-lists, they do show BOTH game mode options and then maps at the same time. Allowing players to vote for one or the other rather than having to veto and hope the alternative is better.
Still, I dislike the idea of playlists. Map cycles I’m fine with, it’s not often I really dislike a map enough to not play it the odd time it comes around in a cycle, but for game modes, why should I have to play king of the hill or odd-ball when I just want to play slayer (in Halo3), or Guardian/Warzone when I want to play Execution in Gears 2?
Ghost Cam
The Ghost Cam is a nice idea, when you’re dead you get to “spectate” the match. However, it does mean you get to tell your mate exactly where the enemy players are hiding. This will probably be even worse when the new 360 dash is released if it includes the option to private chat to more than one person at once!
I couldn’t see any way to join games that have Ghost Cam disabled. Wingman just doesn’t see like as good an idea, when you kill off one player only to have him watch his Wingmans back via the ghost cam, or go scout ahead for him. Why is this Cam available in Public games which are Ranked?
Ranked Games
Speaking of Ranked games, where is the option for _SOCIAL_ games? Gears 2 has two server types, Public and Private. If you join a Public play-list, you get placed in a team with other players and play a ranked game with most of the options locked so you cannot change round duration, map etc which makes sense, it is a ranked game after all and needs to be kept consistent and fair (see ghost-cam above).
Private, allows just you and your friends to join, again this is a good idea. Sometimes you just want to play with your mates in a relaxed game and perhaps have some bots to pad out the numbers (I like the fact bots have made an appearance btw
However, what is missing is a SOCIAL mode. Why can’t we host a server just like with Private, where you can select the map, round time, game mode and so forth but still allow ANYONE to join it. Then once you’re all in the game, the same players continue to play together map after map, game mode after game mode, with drop-in/out replacement of players mid game. Allowing you to play with and against friends, but having random people fill out the remaining spots rather than bots.
This is something I found useful in the first Gears when you’ve had enough of the Ranked games (especially when you’re sat watching players on your own team in death cam glitching, map exploiting and cheating in general), you could go online with a few mates and let other random players fill out the numbers. As it’s an unranked game, the number of glitchers was greatly reduced. Give the host the option to kick/ban players from the current game in social and it’s problem solved. This is missing from Gears 2 though
On the whole, I’m a very disappointed with the current way the multi-player side works. Not game play wise, I really haven’t played it enough to be able to form a good opinion of that (what little I have has been pretty good fun), but just in the way you have to find a game. It takes too long and you cannot simply play the game mode you want. Could Epic fix this, I’m sure they could and I’m hopeful they will.
Hoard

Get a few people together and see how many waves of Locust you can defend against. What more is there to say about this game mode than it rocks. This mode works well in both single player and on Live, the matchmaking works fine too because it’s the only “mode” in that play-list. So you get exactly what you want, with the exception of maps, but that adds a bit of variety and you can always host your own map and invite friends to join.
Achievements
Achievements are weird, they’re meaningless, yet you just have to try and get them
Gears 2’s achievements are better than the first in that they’ve removed the grind based ones, i.e “Kill X people with weapon Y” and most importantly they’ve made it so you can get these in non-ranked matched too. There was an irritating tendency for players to spoil ranked games because they’re trying to get the Chainsaw or some other kill achievement rather than playing the game. Sure, players can now “boost” by getting achievements in private games, but who really cares, if they want to, let them. For everyone else, you can finally enjoy getting the achievements without ruining other peoples matches.
On the flip side, the achievements look like they’re going to be way too easy to get this time around. The grind ones that have been removed wouldn’t have been so much a grind now you can do them in co-op.
One nice addition though is the ability to see how far you are from getting a given achievement and knowing how many collectables are in a specific part of the game. It’s more fun hunting when you know roughly where the item should be.
I just wish the achievements were not quite so easy to obtain. The only one that looks to be semi difficult is surviving the Hoard to level 50.
Map Code
One interesting extra item shipped with the game. A redeemable code allowing you to download several of the original games maps, redone for Gears 2. Why isn’t this just available as a free marketplace download? Is it just a ploy to to limit the purchase of pre-owned copies? Or an attempt to stick it to the pirates with the unfortunate side effect of also affecting those that are strapped for cash and buy the game pre-owned?
I’m hoping it’s aimed at pirates, but it still seems like a stab at those who buy pre-owned too.
Final Thoughs
I think the multi-player side is been spoiled by a few issues with the way you find games and the limitations of play-lists and lack of social host options. Other than that, the game is a worthy sequal to Gears and with the exception of the current bugs (which will hopefully be patched before too long) the singleplayer/co-op/hoard side of the game is incredibly good fun.
Don’t let my blog post convince you the game isn’t worth getting. Far from it, it’s certainly worth the money (£30 in Asda). I just felt like covering some of the parts of the game that don’t appeal to me, there’s plenty of good stuff in there that I’ve not mentioned. I just hope the matchmaking system isn’t the way all games are going in the future, at least not unless they include playlists that have only one game mode.