I'm not gonna kill you, just humbly say that I think you're wrong. If you ask around you'll prolly be told - and rightfully so - that I'm one of Gears' biggest critics in terms of everything it does wrong. I hate the characters, I hate the world, I hate the story setup and I pretty much hate the way they use graphics in the game. The grayness bugs me, the sameyness of surroundings (even though they're vastly different when you start looking around - which you can't while playing the game proper) irritates me to no end, et cetera.

However, it really does deserve all the praise it got and is getting for its gameplay. Okay I'll admit that the difficulty levels are all too lame and it can't really support how good you'll eventually become at it, but that's really a compliment to itself. There IS that flexibility where you can get eerily good at directing your dashes and your diving in and out of cover, and while clunky at first it's incredible how insanely fluid the gameplay becomes when you get into it proper.

Like the game or not, but it's obvious how much influence it's had on action games since. Even the mighty GTA has OBVIOUS adaptations of the way you go about things in Gears of War, with Uncharted - one of the biggest titles on the rival platform - essentially uses Gears as base for its entire action component. People throw around the word "revolutionary" at a whim but I can count the times it's accurately applied on one hand. Gears however did revolutionize the third person action genre, and games that don't absorb what it did right just come across looking totally stupid for it.

I'm with you on the superficial aspects and they do put a damper on my enthusiasm for a sequel, but Gears importance and influence can't be overstated - thus I reckon it's impossible to "overhype" it.

How can anyone hate Cole?

I honestly don't get how someone can think that this game is going to represent any less of a change than Halo did between it and its sequel. We've already seen some pretty significant gameplay tweaks/additions and there's only going to be more to come. This is two minutes of footage, and somehow people are surprised that it, "plays the same?" Baffles the mind.

Do people think that other sequels actually play out in revolutionary new ways? So movement and cover hasn't changed. We get meat shields, a new lancer mechanic, and hints that different weapons will have their own unique effects on gameplay in the way that active reload had on the original game in general. Not to mention that anything else is pretty much up to complete speculation at this point--and the multi-player portion (more modes, more variety, more game) of the game hasn't even been revealed and you better believe it's going to be an important focus in the future of this franchise.

What do you want? Duel wielding and a new health bar? How is that all that much different? It's almost as ridiculous as expecting the graphics to have leaped to another generation or something. Let's consider the fact that the first can still go toe to toe with pretty much any other console exclusive and still look fairly good by comparison. The fact that it looks better at all is an achievement.

Gears is 10x the AAA title that several other new franchises have set out to be.

Duel wielding didn't change the fact that Halo is still all about 'nades and melee to this day.. and thank god for that, since it's what makes Halo unique among shooters. It seems like people are just completely overlooking the fact that we've seen gameplay changes already from two brief moments of video that are going to have an impact on the game across the board.

I don't invest as much in story as others. I've said it many times before, but I'm a big fan of Gears of War and I've never played the single-player game. That may seem a little odd at first, but the fundamental reason I like games aren't their ability to tell stories, since most games actually do a pretty piss poor job at that, it's gameplay, and Gears of War brings that to the table in spades. Many games with good plot elements don't even have a narrative. I appreciate good story telling, but it's far more rarer than great gameplay.

Character is often more important to the overall feel of a game than narrative, and Cole brought loads of character to the game, even in multi-player.

You're supposed to play it with your feet now.