MEAT SHIELD.

OH NO, I DROPPED MY MEAT SHIELD!

...ah, the calm, mostly peaceful nature of the Main Forum. How I love thee.

Well I'm fairly disappointed. I don't necessarily think the game is disappointing, but I wasn't really into the stylistic aspects of the first game and I was hoping for gameplay and structure alterations to help overcome my complete distaste for the superficial design decisions this time around aswell.

Turns out most of the things I'd hoped they improved on remain the same. Prettiness is still just prettiness. The way they can't integrate interesting geometry into the game creates the kind of jarring divide that games with pre-rendered backgrounds used to be guilty of.

prettiness || Here's where we walk around || prettiness

I never feeled like I was actually in the locations in Gears 1, I just felt like I was on a bus tour, contained to a small tourist bus peeking out the windows at the scenery when there were no enemies in the bus to shoot.

I can appreciate the arcade approach to it, and I can see how - if done wrong - it'd make the gameplay less defined in terms of what objects you can and can't stick to. Uncharted proved that you can easily make a more dynamic looking world and use the base principles of Gears though, so I hardly view it as a valid excuse anymore.

There's that, and then I was really looking forward to more dynamic gameplay overall too. Gears was FANTASTIC, don't get me wrong. It had gameplay that really did strip my reservations about the crap character/world design of any kind of relevance, but it was super one note. Whenever they did things to alter gameplay it was like.. changing to another song on a CD.. You could feel the last bits of gameplay end and the introduction of the new situation was ultra obvious. This is what I feel Halo haters don't get about Halo. It would seamlessly transistion between all of its different components, and it was utterly "analogue" in how you needed to approach different mixups of enemies.

Gears didn't have this at all. Boomer time, Krill time, and most of the time standard Locust soldier time.

If they had stuck a boomer in there with the normal soldiers.. or GOD FORBID a brumak or those spider thingies, the gameplay would've gone to hell. Gears in its current state *just can't mix up its encounters* because the different "modes" it has to be in don't mesh.

This means that we get these kinds of on rails things whenever we're shooting at something significantly different and I really hoped that they'd expand the gameplay to be able to offer more epic and surprising battles. Dropships releasing boomers while soldiers storm you and things like that.

So yeah, I am disappointed.. but not greatly so since it seemed a bit early to release a sequel that was going to take significant strides.

I will play it though, I just think it's a bit of a missed opportunity especially seeing as Halo is out of the equation now. This will never be able to fill its void.