The Lamer Gamer

Gears of War 2 is a solid improvement over the original GoW.  

Epic did a nice job adding new material, mechanics, weapons, and enemies to GoW2.  I love the fact that you can crawl around when knocked down instead of just sitting there waiting to die.  The ability to suicide with a nade is also perfect, as a I have a special place in my heart for corpse-humpers.

To be fair, some of the new material is “borrowed”.  ”Sires” are pretty much a rip-off (physically anyway) of the Flood in Halo 3, Christ, they even behave the same way.   The luggable weapons like the Mulcher seem drawn from Halo 3 too, but I can’t really fault them on something so generic.

Back to improvements though.  Not the least of said improvements is Horde.  It’s a great time sink and it’s nice too get randomly matched up with people to play coop.  I’ve probably gone through at least 1000 waves in Horde in the last month, so I’m going to need a break, but I’ll be back. But why in the hell don’t waves/round in Horde count towards the “Party Like It’s 1999″ achievement.  Really messing up my achievement whoring here.  No matter, I’ll just have to blow some time with the standard multiplayer.  For whatever reason, GoW’s multiplayer never seemed to measure up to CoD4 or Halo3, but GoW2′s is looking a little better, seems less laggy.