Gearing Up
[Johnny Cusp] Here’s a comic featuring me and some other guy who’s just there to make me look funnier. And now back to me. Barny’s not the only one around here who can write long posts about things. Behold!
Ok, I’ve had an XBOX 360 for two weeks now and I knocked over Gears of War 2 in about 4 sessions with a total time of about 8-10 hours. It has been a long time since I had played a shooter on a console and I haven’t played one properly since Half-Life 2. I played Doom 3 which came out afterwards, I think, but I got a bit sick of Doom 3 and never finished it.
Anyway onto the Johnny Cusp review of Gears of War 2. A caution there could be spoilers in here but trust me, it won’t ruin the experience.
I started off by doing the training course to brush up on my console skills which was beneficial because I sucked fairly hard and had to let the rookie do most of the work. That would turn out to be a wasted investment. Now, the first problem I had was that I thought I was the rookie. Nope, I’m Felix which I probably would have known if I had played Gears 1, but I haven’t and shouldn’t need to. I did work it out eventually and pulled my poor guy from the corner he ended up in and chased after the plucky recruit.
Once the game got started I spent most of my time trying to second guess the storyline. I do this in movies to because I expect a cleverly built storyline with sub-plots, twists and depth. I was wrong here. I found the overall plot lacklustre and stereotypical. The biggest twist in the game is when the rookie dies and I was convinced he was a Locust spy. He should have been. I did end up feeling a little bad when he died because I never trusted his sorry arse.
Throughout the game your trusty sidekick Dom is searching for his beautiful Marie and this is where the storyline really let me down. The writers tried so hard to generate empathy for the characters and their experiences but it was overdone that it was obvious we were meant to feel this way and I couldn’t empathise. I cheered when Tai killed himself because that sub-plot was finally over and his excessive testosterone filled lines wouldn’t poison my ears anymore. It was obvious that Tai would be knocked off. It was meant to instil a growing fear that the Locust forces were strong, ruthless and would win. It was also meant to give you a sense of urgency and foreboding about Marie’s fate.
I knew that I had played a first person game before and that the Locust biggest weakness was their ability to succumb to the small crew of the plucky Delta Squad. The Locust are tough, they have vast forces that are well armed, trained and with tactical advantages. They also have zero culture outside of warfare which is just a little bit annoying. Their underground citadel is a spectacular series of levels that are visually excellent. Surely at some point in vast network of rooms there would be a recreational room where guards would go to relax; where are the rooms where the grunts lived. Maybe I just missed that part of the city.
The in-game cut-scenes while pretty have a few drawbacks. If you’re not facing the right direction when the cut-scene starts then you are not facing the right direction when it ends. This left me disoriented and often dead. If a cut-scene occurs I expect to be facing the direction my character is facing in the cut-scene afterwards. The cut-scenes are pretty frequent as well, every lift has a cut-scene and that can break any attempt at immersion because you relax and begin to focus on something other than the game. All this being said, abstracting Locust system interaction away into a cut-scene is a much better than building some fake UI that the protagonist can magically use and understand.
Jack the robot is used for interacting with most foreign systems and is used for general exposition. It’s reasonably well done and almost removes the feeling of the overt exposition that is going on. Jack the robot goes invisible and as Penny Arcade pointed out having invisibility would have made the game a lot easier and a lot more sense.
Back onto the environments. I found most of the levels were visually awesome. The scope and scale of some of the buildings is impressive. At times I wanted to stop fighting the Locusts just so I could look out upon their vast underground environments. I feel that first person shooters, excluding sandbox games, have always lacked scale in their games and hopefully this is a good sign of things to come.
The depth of field algorithm used produced great results and really helped add to the scale of the environment. If everything had been in focus, it would not have looked as good.
All of the levels are painfully linear and the designers tried to mix it up with take the left path vs. right path but that isn’t a substitute for non-linear game play and proved to more a distraction than anything. I’m not going to go back and play the other path. On the topic of the story line I felt too often that I wasn’t really needed while playing the game. The best way for me to summarise how I felt was if someone had given you a paragraph with ten words removed and separately was a list of words that can be placed into the blanks to complete the story. Except, the blank spaces are numbered and each of the words are correctly numbered as well. All of sudden it isn’t a challenge to work out how to complete an objective its the task of filling in the blanks, or in the case of Gears 2, pressing the B button at the right place after being told where that place was.
All of this isn’t helped by just how hard it is to get killed. Once I realised my health regenerated and that I could be blasé about the protagonist’s well being, I was. I still did the cover combat because that stuff is great fun but it was hard for me to take it seriously. I wanted to feel like that cover was important that my life was valuable. I wanted to care about the health of my character. I wanted to relieve the street scene from the movie Heat. I couldn’t. Oh and a side note, while the environments are excellent the need to contrive cover in places was a bit lame.
[Barny Cusp] Do not be dissin’ the giant, armoured caterpillars.
[Johnny Cusp] As if I would. The squad AI did a good job of polishing off the opponents as I wandered around not helping. During the final levels as I defended some military base I ended up in the wrong place because I stopped to get some ammo. By the time I found out where I was meant to be the day had been saved and I was meant to be somewhere else. Finding that somewhere else is hard if you don’t know where you are and where you should have been.
Finally some miscellaneous gripes: every game doesn’t require driving and tank sequences especially when you get a hold of the Locust weapons they become so much tougher than when the Locusts have them. My ability to regenerate seems to be transferrable by touch.
The only good driving sequence was the Reaver level underground where you had to shoot some crazy creatures following you. That was fun, but that level three times in a row got a little repetitious especially when the second level I passed while trying to take a photo of my big new TV and had that level on so the TV was showing something exciting. I don’t know how I managed it either.
Finally if the player needs a gun, don’t let them get rid of it. I tossed away my chainsaw gun thingy accidentally when I was trying out the gun candy that littered the floor. I couldn’t find my gun again. It would have been handy because the sniper rifle which I ended up was more hindrance than help. Later in the game that chainsaw gun is mandatory and you magically get it back at the start of that level. It would be magically better if I couldn’t drop it.
All in all Gears 2 is visually excellent but as a player you are more passenger than participant. I probably won’t play the single player storyline again but will probably tryout the various game modes available.