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ShareYou’ve read the reviews. Gears of War 2 has a marked lack of depth. It’s relentlessly immature. Its characters are a little corny.
As our own Ryan Smith puts it, “The rating on the game says it’s Mature, but half the time it feels like it was the brainchild of a 15-year-old boy.”
All of this is entirely true. I have no argument refuting any of it. What I will argue against, however, is the idea that somehow the story (or lack thereof) in Gears of War 2 makes it less of a game. On the contrary, I don’t know that I’ve found a game whose story complements the gameplay quite so well as that in Gears of War 2 in quite some time.
Perhaps it’s a matter of expectations. When you pick up a game that says Gears of War on it, to expect any sort of meaningful story is to be asking something of a game that it was never intended to provide. The entire point of the Gears of War series is to blow stuff up and, if possible, look good doing it. If you blast an enemy in the head enough times, that head explodes into a crimson gush of alien blood. If you’ve got the guts to run up to a baddie, you’re rewarded with the opportunity to take a chainsaw to said baddie. Your reward for doing all of this is to fight bigger bad guys and see the sights that new terrain has to offer.
The strength of the “story” in Gears 2 is that it is almost entirely motivated by moving the player from one dangerous situation to another. The game starts in a bombed-out gray ‘n brown environment that looks entirely familiar to just about anyone who played the first game, but then you’re given an excuse to shoot reavers (giant airborn squid things) in lush greenery. Then you end up inside(!) a giant worm. Then you end up dodging “razor rain” in an all-too open environment. Then you’re in a giant temple. Along the way you blast away some humongous beastly looking things, ride a reaver and a brumak, and confront the Locust Queen.
The longer cutscenes in the game do their part in heightening the player’s anticipation. A long sequence at the beginning features the gears’ commander giving a Big Important Military Speech. Yes, it’s a clichéd trope when it comes to this sort of movie or game, but while he’s doing all of that, you get these tremendous panoramic shots that convey the scale of the operation you’re embarking on. The scripting and the cinematography of the scene is perfect, and it’s a great way to get motivated for the operation ahead.
The intimate conversation with the Locust Queen does the same thing, but in a completely different sort of way. Her quiet confidence and the constant presence of the impossibly agile, impossibly strong Skorge by her side as she speaks heightens the dread you feel as you know you’re about to face off against the Predator-like beast that caused so much havok early in the game. She’s rambling on and on about infected locusts and lambent whatnots and maybe western philosophy and how to balance a checkbook, but it doesn’t really matter because, again, the game is not really about the narrative, the game is about look and feel.
Ah, but then there is Maria.
Maria, the captured love of Dom’s life, is where my argument is in danger of falling apart. Maria is the closest thing here to narrative for the sake of narrative, because nowhere is the search for Maria truly integral to the progression of the story. Still, in a land where the toughest guy wins, the search for Maria served to make Dom tougher, even as it gave him a gooey center. Maria is his motivation, before and after we learn her ultimate fate. His anger at losing her rubs off on the player, which actually makes chainsawing enemies into bloody giblets even more satisfying. Again, the story feeds the sense of scope, heightening the drama and determination of the player.
Of course this won’t be true for everyone; for every player that thinks the story works wonderfully with the game, there’s one that thinks it’s a distracting mess. I have a theory as to determining which side of the fence you’ll fall on: Did you like Independence Day? Did Armageddon make you tear up a little at the end? Did you think The Rock was a cinematic masterpiece? Aside from proving I’d never make it as a film critic, the fact that I can say yes to the aforementioned three questions (or anything similar that relates to big, stupid, Michael Bay-style action movies) has a lot to do with why I find the story elements of Gears of War 2 not only tolerable, but pretty fantastic. The story makes everything bigger, and it gives me even more reasons to enjoy blowing things up. What’s not to like?
