Spring Break
All 'Geared' up and ready to go
'Gears of War 2' big on action, weak on plot
John Bailey
Issue date: 11/13/08 Section: Focus
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!)
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!)
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