In my first post in a long while, I'll be trolling GoW2 fans and exposing to them why their game is a steaming pile of afterburn in the shadow of Gears of War 1.

I now advise you all take a deep breath, as this is going to take a few minutes.

Let's start with the easiest to spot; carry-over problems from GoW1 that still haven't been addressed:

1) The host shotgun. Not only is it just as lethal is in GoW1, but it even seems to be boosted in accuracy since the original (IE headshots from 10m away).

2) The Lancer Rifle. It is, as it was in GoW1, STILL a shitty weapon. Keep in mind I'm referring to the gun, not its chainsaw bayonet. While the shitty Lancer balancing is a carry-over from GoW1, it seems to be an even WORSE gun in GoW2 (taking a whole magazine to down an opponent is not fun).

3) The Sniper Rifle. Like having your bullets caress the outside of someones helmet but never actually score a headshot? Then you'll love this carry-over problem from GoW1!

4) Assuming you don't have the above issues with the Sniper Rifle: Ever see someone at 3m scope in on you? Thought to yourself 'Hey, I can just shoot him with my shotgun at this range!"? Think again. This carry-over problem of not being able to unscope/pin down a sniper has been in this series since the start. I've fired off a magazine of Lancer ammo into a sniper at 5m away, and his cross hair wont move an centimeter off my head even with the horde of bullets penetrating his body. At least Halo 3 and other such games that know a thing or two about 'balance' (even UT3 if I recall) make it so if you get hit while scoped in, it messes up your aim/unscopes you from the weapon. Not GoW1/2, it likes giving shitty snipers the ability to aim like the rest of us; those of us good snipers who know the meaning of 'concealment'.

There are many other smaller issues with carry-over problems, but those are the most notable. Now, we'll take about NEW balancing problems, something Gears of War 2 has in spades:

1) The Chainsaw. In Gears of War 1, if someone was suicidally rushing you with a chainsaw, you could easily shoot them just a little wee bit in the face, and it would stun them and bring their chainsaw back down. In GoW2, this is nearly nonexistent. People will near-constantly rush with their chainsaws extended, and you'll be lucky to have time to barrel-roll backwards before they jump 3-4 feet to take you down. Not only is this an issue, but the draw-time for activating the chainsaw has also been (idiotically) reduced. When in GoW1, so long as you had someone in view, you could easily run up and shotgun them, in GoW2, running up and shotgun'ing is generally dis-advised on the grounds that people bring up the chainsaw in a literal half-a-second to cut you in half 90% of the time. Hence, making everything but the host's shotgun useless most of the time.

2) Grenades in general. Not only is the addition of a 'mine' feature in the grenades completely unwarranted on the grounds that GoW1 ALREADY had a 'camping' issue, but the addition of a 'concussion' effect on the smoke grenade (which everyone still starts with) completely fucked this game, especially in objective game modes where the goal is to stay within a certain 8-foot in diameter circle for a few minutes. This is possibly the BIGGEST screw-up in GoW2. It completely massacres the original formula and causes an untold number of campers to acquire 'balls of steel' because they can easily tag their flanks and rear with a couple smoke/frag/ink grenades and be set to camp out the rest of the match. The explosive radius of the Fragmentation Grenade is also beefed ridiculously. This, combined with the ease of mine-setting, makes camping a literal MUST in GoW2, practically killing the game. You thought frag-tagging was bad...

3) The Boomshot and the Torquebow. The Boomshot has been gratuitously beefed since GoW1, no longer requiring actual aiming from the user. Just fire within 3m of your opponent, and 99% of the time it'll score a kill (or two). The Torquebow has also been overpowered by the beef in explosive radius. No longer do you require a direct hit on your opponent to kill them. I've been killed an untold number of times, just by a glancing round stuck to a nearby wall.

4) My favorite weapon; the Hammerburst. As previously stated, the Lancer is an overall shitty weapon (when it turns of medium-far range combat), however the Hammerburst not only wipes the floor with it at med-far range, but also (assuming they don't use the overpowered 'WATCH ME JUMP 2 METERS' tactic with the chainsaw) at close range. Hell, I win 9/10 shotgun duels with my Hammerburst. I love it, but I'll be the first to say it's overpowered.

Another issue is the matchmaking system. You'd think the dev's could've just kindly researched games like CoD4, or Halo 3, to discover the excellence in their matchmaking service. You WILL (and I stress WILL) have times where you'll be sitting in Matchmaking for up to a half hour, waiting for it to drop you into your match; and when it does, it still (even after apparent 'rigorous' searching for 'balanced' players) has lots of moments where lag ruins the entire match. You know that flaming overlay graphic in the background of GoW2? That's the server room.

The biggest problem, however, is the 10-person matches. 8-player matches were all fine and good, I didn't see a reason for change. My true anger with this 'upgrade', is that it not only adds lag to a large portion of the matches you can get into, but also makes it harder to find a party (hence why matchmaking takes so long). Ever have a player drop from your game? Leads me to believe the game can't hardly handle 10 players. It seems to happen 5/10 games that one of the teams will have their fifth player drop.

However the worst part about this 5-person team system, is the negated value in personal or team effort. The mass of people on screen at a time leads people to just shoot off into the distance wildly while neglecting everyone else or the underlying objective of the game. I'm one of the best players I know in GoW2, most of my k/d ratios are around 2.0... but looking at my win/lose ratio will tell another story. This from the increase in people, in that it increases the potential pool for players on your team by 1... that '1' generally leads to some horrible, arrogant, solo player who rushes power weapon spawns every game and dies every time, distracting your decent teammates and feeding the enemy kills. Teamwork has always been a problem in Gears of War, with something probably close to half the players being ignorant idiots who run around treating the game like Unreal Tournament when they'd be smart to treat it like something closer to Rainbow Six Vegas.

I wont even remark on the storyline. The voice acting is less than even pornographic-quality (a carry-over from Gears of War 1), and the singleplayer still feels tedious and boring and generally boils down to 'move here, kill, move here, kill, move here, kill, CUTSCENE, more here, kill, move here, kill, ACT COMPLETE', and leaves you wanting more out of the admittedly bad ending (without spoiling whatever vicious shit there is to spoil in the first place).

Speaking all-around, Gears of War 2 is but a simple graphics upgrade to Gears of War 1. What little HAS changed, has changed for the worse. Leaving this game broken, unbalanced, and nearly-nothing on the greatness of its predecessor.

ahh snake.. welcome back. where the hell ya been?

I never cared too much for the multiplayer in general in this particular title, however I noticed you didn't comment much about that horde mode which means either you didn't care much for it, or it didn't have much flaws..

That mode is tempting me to get the game as I suspected that the other multiplayer aspects would have such flaws like in the first one, "let's all race to the torque"..

(11-14-2008 01:33 AM)GaMeR Wrote:  I never cared too much for the multiplayer in general in this particular title, however I noticed you didn't comment much about that horde mode which means either you didn't care much for it, or it didn't have much flaws..

That mode is tempting me to get the game as I suspected that the other multiplayer aspects would have such flaws like in the first one, "let's all race to the torque"..

Horde is probably the only half-decent thing in the game. The point I was making in this post was the call out its flaws, Horde not being one of them.

However I, personally, don't care much for Horde as it's just too easy. I've gotten to level 50 (albeit I skipped 25-30) and was surprised when it stopped. It would've been far better if the enemy health/damage/accuracy modifiers would've increased upwards of 99x rather than stop at 2.5x.

Welcome back, Snake. Long time, no see. Missed ya.

Very in-depth stuff, and you pointed out some things that I wasn't sure had actually been fixed from the original GoW title. Apparently they haven't. And holy hell, I can only imagine what the sniping is like. Could you imagine 'perfect aim' no matter what in Halo? That shit would suck.

(11-14-2008 01:12 AM)SnakeTheFox Wrote:  At least Halo 3 and other such games that know a thing or two about 'balance' (even UT3 if I recall) make it so if you get hit while scoped in, it messes up your aim/unscopes you from the weapon.

I lol'ed a that, I wouldn't say Halo 3 is balanced in the slightest but man, at least it has sniper unscope from enemy fire. serously GoW doesn't have that(I've never played multi) i could understand if this was the PsOne days..but it isn't.

I thought Gears 1 was an Ok game, gears 2 I have no real hype for, so i can wait forever to play it. but I'm expecting the same faults that where in gears 1.

The only game I play is horde the rest are horrible.

A lot of times, sequels are done in a hurry without much testing due to demand and tight deadlines. It's more about cashing out these days for developers rather than producing quality. I'm not the least bit surprised the game has that many flaws, that's why I'm wary of new titles.

Nearly 13 month thread revival.... *frowns and closes*