Gears of War 2 (XBOX 360) First impressions.

I have not been able to take much time lately to play many games, girlfriends will do that to a guy, but I have found one way to combat this. It turns out the girlfriend has a thing for multiplayer CO-OP games. She does not like it when we play against each other because I usually win most of the time. Then again since we have been playing a lot of CO-OP games she has gotten a lot better. It all started with Halo 3, we then moved on to Gears of War which has been our favorite of the two. Just recently though we also played Army of Two which I have to say in some ways even out shines Gears of War 2, but more on that later.

Ok first off I just got this game yesterday and we played it for roughly 3 hours last night in split screen CO-OP mode. I have to say any game that can do split screen CO-OP is almost a must purchase for me these days. So we put the game in the machine and we are greeted by this.



After seeing that we looked at each other and went that looked kind of familiar
Then we figured it out.



Ok now on to the actual game play. The CO-OP is just as good as it ever was from the original Gears, which was good news to me at least. The controls have not been messed with and it really looks just like more of the same. Run gun get cover, Shoot repeat. But that is all I was looking for so that works for me. There are some interesting tactical improvements such as using grenades as proximity mines and luring the enemies into them. The mortars are also and interesting weapon for taking out many enemies at once. Though the times you get ot use it there are usually hords of enemies that are far off and the only way to get rid of them is use the mortars, or the one turret. Just saying a nice sniper rifle would have been great at that point. difficulty on this game is very scalable from super easy, to dang near impossible, we are working on the easy level at the moment and found it to be a little too easy. But we are getting the lay of the land the first time around I have a feeling we will be revisiting this game over and over. As for the CO-OP experience that has not changed much since the last Gears which was good. However like I mentioned before, new games have been out lately that have blown the top off of the CO-OP game play such as Army of Two which I found to be an excellent experience. The CO-OP in that game requires you to work together not just tag along. The agro system of cover rather than just hieing behind something works better too. A big improvement for Gears is the fact that the computer controlled characters will actually come heal you if you get taken out. Instead of having to just rely on your one human teammate. They will brave bullets and even their own safety to come after you . This was a great addition and made me hate the CPU players much less, felt they where and actual part of the team rather than a pain in my butt.

Pros
-CO-OP game play is good not great (on Par with last Gears of War)
-Graphics have improved a bit (I think they added a few more colors anyway)
-THE GIRLFRIEND LOVE IT ( Which is really the most important thing)


Cons
-Story seems a bit weak (but its not what I joined the party for anyway)
-Can be kind of hard to find your way ( I got lost a few times, needs something like the Army of Two GPS)
-Some of the new weapons could have been better. (let me shoot a crowd with the mortar close up!)

Conclusion.
So if you have somebody that will sit down and play this game with you then its a blast and I highly recommend it.