Much Worse

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I finally got around to playing Gears of War 2. I enjoyed the first one a lot. Every firefight was enjoyable and satisfying. The same can not be said for the sequel.

The guns and the firefights were about the same. Good and visceral. Shooting at dudes was a good time but that went downhill during the many "boss" sequences where you had to perform some ridiculous action three times to progress to the next firefight. Sometimes it was shooting a giant alien in their shiny weak spots or it was cutting up another giant alien with your chainsaw.

Whenever these came up I always ended up cursing at the game for being so terrible. I can attribute some of it to the fact that I was playing it on "Hardcore", a notch up from Normal. Perhaps the boss encounters would've been easier on a lower difficulty but the firefights would've been laughably simple. I rarely had any trouble blowing through the standard stream of enemies and once I got my hands on a sniper rifle, there was barely any challenge at all.

I think I summed it up best when I told a friend of mine that the game was really great except for the parts where it was absolutely terrible.

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