I'm not here to use flowery language and try to write a pulitzer prize winning piece of criticism, let me just say that straight out. I'm a gamer, and I'm going to write about this game from the perspective of whether or not it is worth playing.

First and foremost, let's discuss the gameplay. If you've played the first Gears of War game, then you know exactly what to expect here. The core gameplay is identical. You'll run from cover to cover, hide out and wait for your opportunity to poke up and take a shot. It's a more tactical approach to fast action, which requires some patience and discourages run-and-gunning.

You're given an arsenal of four weapons at a time. One slot is always taken up by a handgun, of which there are three varieties. There is your standard pistol, which allows you to carry lots of ammo and fire quick, weak shots. Then there's a magnum type, for which you cannot carry much ammo, it reloads slowly and fires a bit slower than the pistol, but packs a powerful punch. The third type of handgun is a Locust weapon, and it fires short bursts of very powerful rounds, but there is a rather lengthy pause between each shot.

Then there are multiple grenade types which occupy a second slot. There's your standard explosive, smoke grenades, and a Locust grenade which spews out some sort of poisonous ink. Grenades in this game are, for the most part, difficult to aim, requiring a rather lengthy period of alignment, and even considering that it is still difficult to read the arc line to determine where exactly you can expect it to land. Grenades are most effectively used as booby-traps (they can be tacked to walls, etc.) or as a sort of melee weapon where you run up close to your enemy and stick him with it.

The other two slots of your "weapon wheel" can be occupied by any other weapon in the game, including a couple varieties of machine gun (one including the game's trademark chainsaw bayonette), a standard sniper rifle, a flamethrower, an explosive-launching cross bow sort of weapon (called the torque bow), a grenade launcher, and others.

All in all, the game features a nice arsenal of weapons with a few other things making an appearance, such a morter launcher and a cover-mounted machine gun which you can carry with you temporarily without having to drop any of your other weapons. The game introduces a shield which you can carry around and place anywhere for some on-the-go cover, but it's really more of a feature to talk about on paper than it is useful during the actual gameplay. There's so much cover strewn about the game that you'll never find a good reason to pick up the shield. The same could also be said of the new ability to pick up a downed enemy and use him as a meathshield. It's occasionally useful, but not terribly necessary.

The gore is back in full force, with characters and camera alike getting absolutely drenched in blood throughout the experience. If you find testoserone-fueled gore-fests with tough-guy one-liners shouted frequently to be shallow, then you can think of this game as about the shallowest you'll ever find. It tries valiently the create an interesting plot, but it's really just not that fascinating. Some of the acting is good, but it's almost always bad in the scenes that try the hardest to get an emotional response from the player, so if you're looking for a well-told story, you won't find it here. Most of the talking could be skipped completely and you'd still be able to play through to the end without any trouble. You might even have a more enjoyable experience if you do so.

But this game isn't about telling a good story, even though it tries to do a better job of that than its predecessor. The game plays like a greatest hits of sorts, with entire gameplay segments ripped straight out of other games. The cover-shoot-cover mechanics start to wear thin after a while, and the boss battles are utterly underwhelming, but every time you feel like it's getting monotonous, it introduces something to break up that feeling. You'll fly, you'll drive, you'll have to make a quick escape. It's all very nicely done and fun to experience, but I couldn't help but shake the feeling I'd seen it all before.

Between the very close resemblence to the first Gears of War in the majority of the game's moments (firefights feel the same, the razor hale is very close to the kryll of the first, etc.) and the "homage" that it pays to other games (pieces of gameplay feel identical to classic scenarios from recent games like Halo 3, God of War 2, and Metal Gear Solid 4, as well some parts from older games like Crash Bandicoot, and the entire worm segment is, to my surprise, straight out of an old, obscure Ren & Stimpy game called Veediots!) there really isn't much original about Gears of War 2. It takes Gears of War 1 and a bunch of other classic gaming moments and archetypes and throws them all together to make a blast of a game that, quite frankly, doesn't offer anything new that most gamers won't have seen elsewhere before. And the game ends very abruptly, with perhaps the easiest final boss I've ever encountered.

About the graphics and sound: good and good. The art direction is sometimes great and sometimes boring, but everything is clean, crisp, and wonderfully rendered, even if the world is full of ugliness. I'd say it's got some of the best graphics I've ever seen, but it also happens to be one of the least pleasant games to behold, as well. There is a greater variety of location than you'd expect, with forests, snow-covered mountains, cities during the day and night, and underground caverns too. But in each of the specific areas, the rooms run together in a boring sea of sameness. There were some "wow" moments, but there were a lot of other moments where I felt myself getting sick of the scenery and desiring a change. The sound design is good, the enemies all sound alien and horrid, which is a plus. The music is often exhilerating or creepy, always in the right measure, and makes the pacing of the game feel spot-on.

The multiplayer in Gears of War 2 leaves me conflicted. On the one hand, the competitive multiplayer brings new modes to the table, which are welcome. Each mode is fun in its own way, including variations on capture the flag, zones, and death match (the standard variety these days). I enjoy playing multiplayer matches, but at the time of this writing, the matchmaking is slow and fails more frequently than it ought to. A large number of matches yield terrible lag and are basically unplayable. Until they get the network code worked out, I'm avoiding the multiplayer because it just is not worth the waits and poor quality of some of the matches.

Horde mode suffers from the same connection problems, too, but it also suffers a far worse problem: utter lack of fun. There is little to no incentive to invest a lot of time in Horde mode. Being devoid of an experience or leveling up system, with no new equipment to earn by playing, and having no class-based gameplay to make the different players able to support each other more effectively, it really just boils down to a whole lot of waiting and pointless killing. I found myself bored of it within three completed matches.

In conclusion, the multiplayer is a mixed bag, containing the welcome ability to play co-op through the campaign, a fun but flawed competitive component, and a boring secondary co-op mode (Horde), all marred by connection issues at the time of this writing. The campaign is a well-balanced shoot-a-thon with a tactical edge that offers a lot of variety, but nothing unique, and it is quite short. Most gamers will enjoy the spectacle of the brief campaign and play a few rounds of multiplayer or horde, then be ready to move on to other games. Like with any game, there will be those who get addicted to the various multiplayer modes and come back consistently, but the majority will be ready for something else before long.

Verdict: Play It.

* My final verdict is based on a three-tiered scale:

1/3 Forget It
2/3 Play It
3/3 Own It