Wow. To think that I hadn’t even planned on picking this game up this year. It wasn’t until a friend of mine (who happens to be a Microsoft employee) messaged me out of the blue offering to pick up a copy for me from the company store that I considered playing it. At half off regular MSRP, I figured it was a fairly safe bet. Still, I was thinking that I’d tuck it away at least until I finished Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge and Left 4 Dead and… well, it was gonna to be a while.
The way it actually turned out was that I was playing Fallout 3 this past Sunday morning, having a grand olde time, and then it crashed on me. Even though this only amounted to losing about five minutes of progress, it was enough to give me one of those “Yeah… this is why PC gaming is so great” moments. I got up, stretched myself out, and happened to glance over to where my shiny new copy of Gears of War 2 lay… which swiftly lead to me throwing it on my 360.
My history with this series is, as usual, purely single player. Having never tried to play with other folks, my experience was free from whatever negativity that experience brought to the table. As I had it, it was a total blast beginning to end. I remember being quite surprised that I felt this way; It was so clearly marketed as the Big Tough Manly Game of the Century, appealing to a demographic completely alien to me. I mean, I love a good shooter, but a game drenched in machismo isn’t likely to appeal to me.
What Epic delivered turned out to be so much more than that. Sure, all the testosterone and manliness one could ever want was there, but what I took away from it was a sense of some of the best moment-to-moment gameplay I’d ever seen. It was visceral, loud, and immensely satisfying. About the only thing that bothered me was how every so often, they presented a challenge so far above the events before it that it required numerous reloads to get through. The worst of these was an area filled with snipers who shot exploding arrows that would instantly kill you with a direct hit. It was the first time I’d felt distinctly held back by using a controller, but since I’d held off so long on playing it the PC version had already come out… so I got that and finished it there instead. Fast-forward to last Sunday, and as my friend hands me my copy, he’s telling me about how he had to repeat a particular section at the end of Act 1 nearly a dozen times. [Ed: He was playing on the hardest difficulty level initially available, I later discovered] This doesn’t look good.
Next thing I know, I’ve been playing Gears 2 for seven hours, my hands sweaty and crooked like a badly-crimped tree, and I’m on the third chapter of Act 5 (less than an hour from the end) and I couldn’t be happier. Every single problem I had with the first game is gone. It feels perfectly balanced, the story is much better (though still a simple summer blockbuster plot), and the variety of gameplay and environments truly brings the game to new heights. I desperately wanted to have the complete experience in one go, but with my body actively shutting down on me, I decided it was time to turn in.
I finished it the next afternoon and started to get a feel for how the community was receiving the game. To my surprise, much of the conversation is surrounding the game’s difficulty. Since my experience was of a perfectly tuned challenge that never frustrated, it was a little bewildering to see so many people saying things that I feel are only true of the first game. More specifically, I’ve read threads about a confusing boss encounter or endlessly repeating a section where you have to protect X thing, and each thing I remember having no trouble with at all. Across the entire campaign, I must’ve died less than ten times, and each time it happened it was clearly my fault. I never once felt punished by an unfair mechanic or screwed over by an unbalanced encounter, and it’s a shame to see a lot of people having that experience.
Thinking back, one of the most prevalent issues I feel many games have is being fundamentally unfair to the player. What constitutes “unfair” instead of merely “challenging” is different for everyone, but what it boils down to for me is when I screw up, do I feel like it’s my fault? It is a rare game indeed where I take every failure as a chance to do better rather than something I’m going to have to brute-force through. Now, I’m sure everyone feels like they’re screwed by crappy game mechanics every so often. For them, I would imagine playing a game whose interface and control scheme is so tightly integrated that both seem to disappear would be a dream come true. However, I tend to see something different happen.
The first game I remember consciously noticing how perfect the controls and gameplay were was Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. This is a game that, in hindsight, is seen by some as forgiving and to the less charitable folks as pathetically easy. Calling a game “easy” is an accepted form of derision, shorthand for a game whose goals are “possible” enough to actually be finished by most that start it. All I know is when I’m constantly having a good time and not having to re-do entire pieces of the game (which I consider to be far more detrimental to the experience than the alternative) I consider that to be a resounding success. And for me, Gears of War 2 is the most recent example of a game made in precisely this way, and yet still supports ramping up the challenge for players who want it.
All these things came together so well during the campaign that it’s no wonder I was kept in front of the TV for so long. I was never losing momentum, never repeating a section over and over, and never having a needlessly frustrating encounter. I was just having an amazing ride all the way through and I can’t wait to play more games like this. I hope more developers seriously look at what makes a game like this work, because this is a prime example of design done right.
