“One of the problems with videogamers is that they don’t take the videogame worlds very seriously,” says design director Cliff Bleszinski. “It’s just like wink-wink, hey, it’s a videogame – whatever, right?”

We’ve obviously got confused: we thought this was exactly the right response to Gears Of War’s happily non-cerebral plot with its lunkheaded smack-talk, slavering monsters and supersized weaponry. And, unlike Bleszinski, we didn’t think this was a problem at all – we thought it was funny. Bleszinski has news for us. He pulls out a mock-up photograph that will apparently ship with the special edition of the game – a picture of secondary character Dominic Santiago and his wife, taken in happier times before the Locust ravaged the planet of Sera and the two were separated. “I keep it in my wallet,” says Bleszinski.

Epic Games wants you to care about its story. Gears 2 attempts to take a more sombre tone than the first game, inviting gamers to become emotionally involved with the walking boiled hams who make up the cast of space marines. This effort is certainly noticeable during our playthrough of the first act – the gunplay stopping and starting for expositionary cutscenes, prerendered and otherwise. This time around, however, such interruptions can be easily skipped – even the moments when you are reduced to a forced walk, a finger on your earpiece as you communicate with Control.

“If you really can’t deal with 30 seconds of dialogue,” says Bleszinski, “if it’s really that agonising for you, you can just hit the back button and Marcus will be like, ‘Enough!’ and you just keep going.”



And you really do keep going; if the game dares to pause to set the scene then it is a momentary stutter in an otherwise breakneck ride. It turns out that Bleszinski’s promise of Gears 2 being “bigger and more badass” is not just puff, the first act propelling the player through a series of gargantuan set-pieces to dwarf even the largest of those in the previous game. After reacquainting the player with the game’s stalwart cover-heavy gunplay, Gears 2 sees Marcus and Dom take the fight to the Locust – guarding a series of lumbering, caterpillar-tracked derricks as they make their way into the snow-bound countryside to where they hope to drill down into the enemy hive. As the Nemacyst spiral out of the sky to explode in the Alpine scenery, the caravan is assaulted by swarms of enemies, their variety much greater than that of the first game, giving a real sense of a vast marauding war machine.

Upstaging the first game’s grander moments a number of the towering beasts that were its major threats find themselves greasing the tracks of the giant derricks. But the Locust Horde has more Brumaks and Corpsers to spare, and soon the COG caravan’s numbers dwindle – a mighty attack force reduced to a few, increasingly beleaguered vehicles. One sequence sees a hijacked derrick swing up alongside your own, lurching back and forth as its gruesome, piratical crew exchange shots with your own.