Gears of War 2 Review: Dizzying, Breathless, Relentless Easton PA

Join or leave as you like cooperative play with a friend online or off is back, and continues to work so well it makes you want to wag your finger at other games that "break" their campaigns or cripple their stories when folding partner players in. Yep, you can still convert a single player game into a coop one or vice versa, which makes you wonder why Epic even bothered splitting the two apart, since it would have been just as easy to add a "solo" option to coop mode's "private" or "public" Xbox Live invite settings.

Up Your Arsenal

Favorite new weapons? Nothing stands out. I'm a rifle and sniper guy most of the time, but occasionally tagged the new flamethrower to fend off a few sections where enemies crowd-rush you (and being able to fire farther each time you hit a perfect active reload is certainly a pleasurable experience). The ink grenades which kick up a poison cloud are helpful if you want to cast about imprecisely since the area effect seems broader than the blast radius on frags. A few spots let you wield a mortar cannon, which fires imprecisely, precisely as it should, and rewards firing off a few test shots by giving you a better sense for how your button timing relates to casting distance.

The most helpful new weapon, especially toward the end, is probably the boomshield, which you hold in your left hand while wielding a pistol in the other. Employing the shield acts like cover, but lets you advance slowly forward, allowing you to take some invaluable angles on entrenched enemies. It's also possible to plant the shield and hunker behind it, though that's a tactic I've yet to find useful.

"Die, Oo-mahn!"

Gears of War 2 isn't for the fainthearted or easily frustrated. It's also still more a divider than a uniter. It's not dramatically interesting enough to medicate anyone deathly allergic to shooters, and given its hardcore demographic, not really friendly enough online to appeal to the only casually competitive. But for a series that's already sold millions of copies, those were always the outliers anyway. If you're a Gears fan, Gears 2 is all steps forward, a game that played at the highest difficulty levels constantly teases "Bet you can't." To which the only proper response is "Just watch me."

PCW Score: 90%