I must admit that I was not a fan of the first Gears of War. It was an okay multi-player game with a story schlocked onto it to draw in the Halo fans. Although the first Gears is a beautiful game, it takes more than some fancy graphics and a BFG to impress me. And, that’s why I have been avoiding Gears of War II for so long.

In my Un-Humble Opinion© Gears of War II is about three steps above the first game in terms of play, graphics, and story. There are a lot of things that GoWII does well; it makes you feel like you’re the center of the story, great fight controls (although the AI doesn’t get smarter by difficulty rating, they need more ammo to be taken down), excellent voice acting, and good looking environments.

But.

And there’s a lot of but with this game. The characterization, the graphics, and board design get in the way of this game being great.

While the voice acting for the game was top notch, so much of the characterization and their dialogue was cliché. There’s the lead character Marcus, a white guy that can only express anger. His bestest pal Dom is hispanic and really worried about his family. Cole, the black man that relates everything to a football metaphor and Baird the other white cliché of the smartass punk everyone tolerates but doesn’t really like.

Oh, and the new guy “Rook” who gets predictably killed when things are at their most dangerous. He even says “Tell my mom I love her.”

Really? The writers tried to evoke some emotion with, “tell my mom I loved her.” It was bad enough when the new guy walked on stage he’s wearing a full facemask, but he’s got to be so lame as to say “I loved my mom!” Really? So, not only is he literally the faceless new guy that gets killed to prove how dangerous the situation really is, he also really loves his mom.

A serious verbal WTF!?! You can’t do any better than that?

I understand that cliché is a powerful way to start a story, it delivers a lot of information about a character very quickly to the audience, but you shouldn’t stay in cliché. The characters have to grow beyond that, otherwise the story lacks impact. It lacks surprise and fails to be what every story really is about- the conflict between people. Unfortunately, Gears never makes that leap out of the same old bullshit we have seen since the dawn of the action movie genre. The characters firmly stay in their starting spots and never make an attempt to become more than burley super soldiers lightly flavored by ethnic stereo-type. Marcus is always angry. Dom is always talking about his wife. Cole is always talking about football, and Baird is always an ass.

This failure to evolve is something similar with the graphics for Gears- they start out looking great. Often you are presented with expansive vistas of destroyed cities and such, but very quickly you will find you are denied moving around the board beyond the route the designers have carefully planned out for you. The game is full of invisible and chest high walls that hem you into a certain route. This game may as well have been a rail shooter like House of the Dead.

Actually, while I am on the subject of graphics- have you seen the biceps on these guys? They’re bigger than my head, and I have a very large head- even without the ego! I get that it’s a testosterone ripped male fantasy world, but dang. And, is the large codpiece on the main character all that necessary? I get he’s a mighty stud and all that, but, really? Did the character artist really have to project his own inadequacies by over-compensating for a digital character?

And, let’s face it, if you saw some dude wearing that in real life, you don’t immediately think, “That poor guy, he has to have clothing especially made to accommodate his anatomy.” No, you’d immediately yell across the street, “Yeah, right!  You wish wick-dick. ”

Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Rail shooter.

Locking the board down like that is handy for the designers. They can plot ambushes and set story triggers. It is actually easier that way. But it’s a real pain in the ass for a player who spots the ambush and wants to circle to the left to ambush the bushwhackers. Players like me.

Many of the scripted story events play out the same way regardless of what you do. Often you are called upon to provide covering fire for other troops and squads as you progress through the game. While this is a great way to provide a larger sense of interaction for the player, these events end the same way no matter what you do.

True Story: After going underground, you’re called on to supply covering fire for a squad as they try to advance against an enemy squad. I busted out my sniper rifle, and laid down some fire by busting open some heads. But, the squad still fell back. I thought I screwed up. So, I reloaded. Quickly, I realized that no matter what I did, whether or not I took down every single enemy troop, that other squad retreated. As a result of this, I took to doing nothing whenever the story required me to lay down covering fire for someone else.

And things were always the same. The story advanced with no input from me.

While these game events are a great way to make the player feel involved, doing more than a few really starts to make you feel extraneous to the story. If it’s not something that the story hinges on, why am I involved?

Imagine it like a book- if there were whole chapters where you could remove the book and the story would remain the same, why have the chapters there in the first place?

Which leads me to Gears’ story.

While Gears II is a cut above the first game in terms of story quality, it ain’t all that. Gears II does a good job in offering a level of involvement, however it still offers a muddled and confusing narrative. Especially in offering closure to its internal story, and, you know, at the very least foreshadowing the relationship between Marcus and Anya. That kind of came out of no-where. I get that this is the middle part of a three part story, but there should be some clarity and closure offered to its segment.

Like, why is the Locust so determined to destroy humanity? In the lab sequence the story hints that humanity created the Locust, but in the very next scene they make a point of saying how old the Locust civilization looks. So, which is it? Did we create our own worst enemies or were they always there waiting for us?

Or is Gears of War II a clumsy metaphor for US Foreign policy in regards to the Middle East and religious extremism? I mean, the humans are fighting the “aliens” for control over a liquid biofuel, and the “aliens” are apparently wrapped up in a religious civil war while battling humanity at the same time.

Anyway.

There are a lot of things about Gears of War II that keep it from being a great game: muddled story, characters that don’t grow beyond cliché, and maps so routed you may as well be on rails. As it stands, Gears of War II is a good game but not a great game. If for some reason you’re into the FPS genre, even if this technically OTS (over the shoulder), and you haven’t given this game a shot- pick it up, you’ll like it.