Gears of War 2: Delayed But Played

Two months ago I pre-ordered Gears of War 2 from Play.com knowing full well that I wanted that game on release day and knew how many other people would too. The pre-order came a day late so there was really very little point because I could have just gone down to the shops and picked one up for the same price and had it on release day. So I am very unhappy with Play.com

Firstly I bought the limited edition because it gives you some extras not included in the standard game pack such as a code for a golden lancer (the standard machine gun) and the ‘flashback map pack’ which is 6 multiplayer maps from the original Gears of War.

Enough ranting, lets talk Locust killing!

Single player campaign is great and still has the ability to completed co-operatively. Graphics are improved as you would expect and the game plays very much the same as the original with much more visceral scenery and enemies. The battle sequences are larger by several orders of magnitude and the frame-rate is unaffected. I have yet to encounter an element of the game that the console struggles to handle.

Unfortunately the multiplayer aspect that made Gears one so entertaining has been ‘improved’ and while some of the features seem like a good idea on paper, in reality they are horrible. The most annoying of all is the TrueSkill matchmaking which analyses your skills based on certain criteria such as XP points, games played, achievements obtained etc. etc. but it takes such a long time to find anyone that starting a game is no longer a quick and easy affair.

To put this into perspective, while waiting for it to find players (just to be in my own team I might add) I had time to search the internet to try and find out why it was taking so long, join a forum, write a post, comment on another post, take pictures of the screen for this blog entry, write the magority of this blog entry and cook my self two bacon sandwiches for lunch. I think that takes too long. Even now I am waiting to join another game and using the time to write the rest of this post. I imagine there will be more than a few people who agree. It is very much like waiting for a game in Halo 3’s mutiplayer only worse.

The game is good. It is a fine successor to the original but I can’t help feeling “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” with regard to the multiplayer.

If you would like to play me my gamertag is ‘Dark Individual’.