Dream of Waking Ne Cede Malis

#13 – Gears of War 2 (X360)

This one took about 10 days which is about 50 times faster than the amount of time it took me to beat the first Gears of War. Stupid pumping station. Stupid RAAM. Thankfully, Gears of War 2 has nothing as frustrating as either of those, though it's not without it's glitches.

I loved Gears of War and Gears of War 2 is just like the original but better. Better graphics, better levels, better balance. I never felt like any of my deaths were the result of cheap tricks or bad level design. Like I said, no pumping station situations and no damned General RAAM. There's some difficult fights and a one on one boss that is less about putting him full of bullets and more about patterns and timing.

There were a couple parts where Dom (the AI buddy) would stop fighting. He'd take cover and just sit there. At first I thought it was story related, until I realized that Dom is only an AI buddy when there's no human behind the controller. There's no reason or solution that would cripple a coop partner by stopping them from fighting. I had to chalk it up to some kind of pathing or AI glitch. It wasn't a big deal until I got to a fight in the last act where I was vastly outgunned and outnumbered. I could almost beat it alone until the last pair of enemies where without an AI drawing their fire, I was just mowed down. I had to restart the chapter, which wasn't an enormous setback and fixed the problem. It was still a huge impediment to my progress though.

I haven't touched the multiplayer. I probably won't until I can afford to buy the All Fronts collection.

Overall, 100% awesome. I'm totally lame for waiting so long to get this.